The 20th Anniversary– How we found the Place

This is the 20th anniversary of our finding of the farm.

I had been looking for hunting property since the early ’80s. Either I could not come up with the money or the property was too far out or it had something really wrong with it. Every winter, while I was married to Wife 1.0, we would make trips out of town looking for property.

KYHillChick came on the scene in 1996. She was from McCreary County, Kentucky. That’s down on the KY/TN border. For a few years, we looked for property down there. It was going to be too long a ride, and frankly, the hunting was not all that good. We kept looking.

Along about 2000, I started to get serious. By this time, I had pretty much ruled out SE Indiana and SW Ohio. I started concentrating in Northern Kentucky. I was trying to keep the land under $1,000 an acre. That limited me greatly. We looked at property out by Mount Olivet and Blue Licks. The former had an industrial junkyard on it. The latter had 1 acre on one side of a branch of the Licking River and 90 acres on the other and no bridge.

In July 2001, we devoted a weekend to looking for property again. We had a page of leads from a realtor. The first stop was supposed to be THE spot. We were impressed. It had everything we were looking for. A bunch of squatters had moved into the house and set up a dogfighting operation, but they were gone and the seller wanted out in a hurry. I was all ready to shake hands. One of the neighbors came down to introduce himself.

“Y’all gonna like it here,” he said. “Most days, you can’t tell you’re next to Griffin or Rumpke.” Griffin is the local rendering company. Rumpke is a private landfill.

“Wha?”

“See over yonder? That bulldozer is on Rumpke. The smokestack over to the left is Griffin. They ain’t processing today, otherwise, you’d be smellin’ it. Wind’s coming from the south.”

We’d almost put money down on property next to both a rendering plant and the largest garbage pile in 3 counties.

The next stop was clear over in southwest Bracken County. We had the choice of an 80-acre plot or a 120-acre plot, both owned by the same family. They were splitting up the family farm. The 80-acre plot had a house and several barns. It was exceedingly beautiful. I especially remember the view as we were walking out. I had my eyes set on the 120 acres; my plan was to build a camp on it and keep expanding until we had a 2-story hunting lodge built. It had a high spot out in the middle of the main pasture that would be ideal. After going out there, KYHillChick and I decided to keep hiking to the back corner to have a look around. The fields had just been hayed, so it was easy going.

It was muggy that day. There had been rain on and off– typical July afternoon. We got within a hundred yards or so of the property line and I stopped cold.

“We’ve got to buy this place!” I said.

“Why’s that?” asked the ‘HillChick.

“Think of it! We’ve been walking for a half-hour in the middle of July in Kentucky, and we’ve not cracked a sweat.” Indeed, we had been walking on roughly level ground the whole time. “I’ve never seen this much flat ground in Kentucky, ever.” The ‘HillChick had to concur. Even most of the hunting property I’d looked at in Ohio wasn’t this flat. “We’ll be able to hike out here in our Nineties!”

That’s how it went down. We had one other place to look at over by Augusta, but it was another 1 acre close to the road with 90 acres on the other side of a creek. It would have cost $10,000 just to build a ford.

I got my folks out the next weekend to have a look. I wanted my Dad’s input. The owner came out as well to answer questions. Dad walked off the owner for a while doing some talking when he came back, he announced he was buying the 80 acres next to us with the house. They had gotten to talking about mules. Dad had been a muleskinner in the pack artillery in WWII. O.R. , the owner, had wrangled mules all his life. The two muleskinners decided to make a deal.

Dad took off with O.R. in his truck shortly thereafter. Dad later recounted: “We drove out somewhere, and I asked O.R. exactly how much I owned. O.R. kept point to spots and told me I owned past that. Pretty much I was going to own everything for as far as I could see.” I still haven’t figured out where that spot is. Dad was too starstruck to notice.

To honor our 20th year on the place, I’ll keep filling y’all on how we got to where we are today. More to come.