Carroll County, Tenn.–Newly welcomed to the Tennessee Century Farms program is the Taylor Farm in Carroll County, which dates back to 1870, and has a very colorful history.
James Franklin Taylor founded the farm after he returned from fighting for the Union in the Civil War. While waiting to be mustered out in Nashville, Taylor swam across the Cumberland River with a minie ball in each hand to show how strong he was.
The family’s Century Farms application includes a fascinating chronicle of Taylor’s fearless, and often violent, confrontations with a variety of characters during and after the war, including Confederate guards, jailhouse mobs, sheriffs, homegrown enemies, and even a wildcat! (Despite this history, his daughter Era described him as “a very clever man and one of the kindest and gentlest men she ever knew.”)
Married to Amanda Caroline Cox Taylor, Jim Taylor raised cotton, tobacco, corn, pigs, and hay on 200-300 acres. The couple had nine children and oldest son Walter Taylor became the second owner of the farm in the early 1900s.
During the Depression, he and his wife, Hettie Barrow Taylor, had to sell a lot of the land to make ends meet. The 1940s brought a tornado that killed several mules and tore down a barn.
The farm’s next owner, son Ben Taylor, added beef cattle and Tennessee walking horses to the farm. He and his wife, Mildred Patty Elderly Taylor, had one son, John Taylor, who inherited the farm of 86 acres in 2011. With wife Christine Grogan Taylor, he manages the farm’s hemp operation while a local farmer rents 45 acres to grow corn, soybeans, and cotton. A farmhouse built in 1899 is still in use, as are several pre-1960 barns and outbuildings.