[255] Henry County Farm Joins Ranks of State's Century Farms Program

Jan. 5, 2010
CONTACT: Caneta Hankins, Center for Historic Preservation, 615-898-2947


HENRY COUNTY FARM JOINS RANKS OF STATE’S
CENTURY FARMS PROGRAM

(MURFREESBORO)—The Edgman Farm, located in Henry County, has been designated as a Tennessee Century Farm, reports Caneta S. Hankins, director of the Century Farms program at the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University.
The Century Farm Program recognizes the contributions of Tennessee residents who have owned and kept family land in production continuously for at least 100 years.
John Payton Kimbrough and his wife, Nancy Higginson, are the ancestors of the generations that continue to live on farm land purchased in 1850. According to family history, Nancy H. Kimbrough was a “small but spunky woman.”During the Civil War, she was warned that a group of Union soldiers were approaching the farm. She gathered an “apron full of fresh baked tea cakes and went out to meet them.”The soldiers accepted her offering and moved on down the road without taking any other food or livestock.
John Payton Kimbrough died in 1863, and Nancy had no one in the immediate family to help her on the farm. She told her grandson, John Boden, son of her daughter, Sarah and Jeremiah Boden, that if he would come and work the farm and take care of her until she died, he could have the farm and log house. John, who was fighting in the Civil War, accepted her offer, and when the war was over came to live on the family farm. He and his wife, Mary Cecilia Burnett, were the parents of 10 children. They took care of Nancy until her death in 1874 and inherited the farm as she had promised. The farm was known as “The Old Boden Place” for many years.
James was a constable and worked in timber, also raising cotton, cattle, poultry, and swine with his large working family. After his death from diphtheria in 1915, Mary, along with some of her children who lived nearby, kept the farm in operation. Even at that, Mary had a difficult time. Her daughter, Luna, had married J. T. McFall and moved to St. Louis. They were successful in business and more financially secure than other members of the family. Mary asked them to provide for her living expenses and medical needs, in exchange for the farm when she died. They agreed to the arrangement, which also allowed other members of the family to live and work on the farm. In 1933, Luna’s sister, Yuda Tennessee Boden, and her husband, Tobe Blackwood, purchased the farm for $800.
Yuda and Tobe Blackwood had four children—Quitman, Clifford, Leone, and Fay Nell. After Tobe’s death, Quitman and Leone continued to live and work on the farm with their mother until her death in 1961. Quitman lived there until his death in 1975. Leone, who was handicapped from birth, then went to live with her sister, Fay Nell, in Memphis. After Clifford passed away in 1966, his son, Prince Blackwood, continued to take care of the farm for his aunts until his own death in 1988.
Janice Blackwood Edgman, granddaughter of Clifford, and her husband, Gerald, purchased the farm from her Aunt Fay Nell and other heirs in 1990. They returned from Kentucky in 1991 and built a home behind a grove of cedar trees that were planted during or before the founders’ time in the 1860s. They have made many improvements on the farm and have built two barns and three ponds. Currently they raise beef cattle and hay. Janice and Gerald are the parents of Carrie and Rebecca, the latter of whom is married to Jason Alexander. Carrie and her husband, Mark Dicus, live on part of the original farm along with the ninth generation to occupy that land, Avery Nicole. Janice credits her aunt, Fay Nell Blackwood Moss, with keeping and sharing family stories and history, much of which she learned from her own mother, Yuda Tennessee Boden Blackwood. Because these women have passed along their knowledge, future generations of the family will know something of their history on the farm in Henry County.
Since 1984, the Center for Historic Preservation at MTSU has been a leader in the important work of documenting Tennessee’s agricultural heritage and history through the Tennessee Century Farm Program.
For more information about the Century Farms Program, please visit its website at www.tncenturyfarms.org. The Center for Historic Preservation also may be contacted at Box 80, MTSU, Murfreesboro, Tenn., 37132 or 615-898-2947.

• ATTENTION, MEDIA: To interview the farm’s owner or request jpegs of the farm for editorial use, please contact the CHP at 615-898-2947.




Founded in 1911, Middle Tennessee State University is a Tennessee Board of Regents institution located in Murfreesboro and is the state’s largest public undergraduate institution. MTSU now boasts one of the nation’s first master’s degree programs in horse science, and the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C., acclaims MTSU’s Master of Science in Professional Science degree—the only one in Tennessee—as a model program. Recently, MTSU unveiled three new doctoral degrees in the sciences.