My Dad, a WWII vet and a farmer, moved my family to Oldham County on Valentine’s Day in 1953 to manage Spring Hill Farm. He moved my Mom, older sister and brother to Ballardsville, and then I was born Aug. 1, 1953. Sharon and Rick, are my oldest sister and brother. I also have a younger sister and brother, Mercy and Jeff. My sister who is the oldest is nine years older than me, and my younger brother is nine years younger than me.
My mom, Mary Russell Greenwell, and dad, Richard, are both from Raywick, in Marion County, a Catholic community. We all went to Immaculate Conception Church where there were 60 families, which has now grown to over 500 families. It is a beautiful church. I also went to school there, grades 1-8. There were 10 kids in my first-grade class and by eighth grade there were only five kids. In ninth grade I went to Oldham County Junior High with around 500 kids. I was in culture shock.
Spring Hill Farm is on South Hwy. 53, two miles from Ballardsville. It is a 900-acre farm that was owned by the Veeneman family who lived in Louisville. When Dad began work there, it was a beef cattle, sheep and tobacco farm. Our house was built for a previous farm manager in 1948 so it was a fairly new house. There were four or five other people that worked on the farm. We had 180 beef cows, 125 ewes, a few meat hogs and 10 acres of tobacco. We sheared the sheep in the spring. We hired men from Ohio to shear them. We would stuff the wool in bags, eight or nine feet tall. We took the bags down to Louisville to sell. The men that sheared them were amazing to watch. They would set the sheep back on their tail and shear them in about three to five minutes. It was a back breaking job. I have done it and it is hard work. At the time, Oldham County was a big sheep county.
One time, our family went to New York to visit relatives. My brother Rick stayed home to watch over the farm and during the night two neighbor dogs killed 50 sheep! We confronted the neighbor who owned the dogs. He said he would take care of it, and he did.
There were also wild dogs back then that were extremely dangerous and ran in packs. They were dogs that people dropped and then had pups. That was a serious problem until coyotes came and cleaned that up. I went back on the farm one time to check a cow I heard bawling in distress because she got stuck in the mud. A pack of dogs were circling her, trying to get her. I had a rifle and went over the crest of the hill and they saw me and came after me. I shot one and the others ran off. Those packs were really dangerous.
I was on the volunteer fire department in Ballardsville. Dad was a member so I always went to the meetings and when I was old enough I became a volunteer. Ballardsville was a very small community of mainly farmers and people took care of each other. There were three country stores, one was also a garage. Ballardsville had an elementary school through the eighth grade.
We grew up with horses. Mr. Veeneman had racehorses and they would bring them out to the farm. We turned them into cattle horses. With 900 acres and over 100 cows, we would work cattle with the horses. They are hard to ride with cattle, they have a terrible gallop and you have to constantly post in the stirrups to keep your bottom from getting sore.
Spring Hill Farm is called that for a reason. There were springs and a few lakes. We did not have city water on the farm, so we had cisterns. We conserved our water and sometimes we had to order water. Ralph Waits and Joel Adams would deliver water when we needed it.
We started out with horned Herefords but later on when the Hamilton family bought the farm in 1971, we tried exotic breeds from France and Italy but then went back to Angus because of calving difficulties. The cattle had free range of the farm and we had a fence around the house to keep the cows out of the yard.
I wasn’t a good swimmer and in fact I almost drowned in Floyd’s Fork. We were irrigating tobacco and had an irrigation pump in the creek to pump water to tobacco. My brother and I were in Floyd’s Fork swimming around and I stepped off a drop off and went in over my head. This older guy who worked for us saw me, and then Rick saw me and here they came! Floyd’s Fork is a big creek and would flood almost every spring. People would fish it and catch some nice size fish. I made a raft from a barn door! I was Tom Sawyer. One of the guys on the farm hauled the door down there for me. There were large sand bars and islands in that creek, you couldn’t go more than a quarter of a mile.
In ninth grade I was able to take vocational ag classes. Osborne Byrd was my first ag teacher and Gary Roman was the FFA teacher. My dad was a farm manager and it seemed like a good life, so when I went to UK I majored in agriculture and animal science. Mr. Hamilton encouraged me to come back and work for him as assistant manager. He purchased 1,140 acres, which was Fox Den Farm, off Sligo Road and had been part of Ashbourne Farm. We grew a lot of crops over there. I graduated in 1976, which is the year Karen and I got married.
Karen and I had algebra class together in ninth grade. I remember her red hair and she remembered me because I had a “green” hand. When you got in the vocational ag program, as an initiation, they dyed your hand green which took a week to wear off! I played sports in high school. When I was a sophomore on the football team in 1968, that was the year they dedicated Bell Field. It was named for William Bell, a teacher and coach who died tragically in a train accident.
I started dating Karen when she was in the Oldham County Fair beauty pageant. Dennis Roberts, a friend of mine, asked me if I would be an escort for her in the pageant. She came in as first runner up. After that, we dated six years, got married and have been together ever since. Karen grew up in Crestwood. Her mom and dad, the Brockmans, were awesome people. Her mom was from England. Her dad was in WWII when they met in England, and they corresponded for several years after the war. Then, he went back to England, and they got married. Her mom was from Nottingham, England, where Robin Hood was from!
We got married on July 24, 1976 at Immaculate Conception and went to Jenny Wiley State Park for our honeymoon. After Karen and I got married, Mr. Hamilton built us a 2,000 square foot home where we lived with our boys for 27 years! I can’t say enough for how generous the Hamilton family were to us and the boys. Karen graduated from Georgetown College and majored in interior design and home economics, so Mr. Hamilton let her design our home.
At college I lived and worked on Coldstream Farm, which was owned by UK. I learned as much working on that farm as I did from the classes I took. I had to work at least eight hours a week for room and board. I had two fantastic bosses at Coldstream, one was head of the sheep program and the other head of the beef program. They also had a dairy, hog, horse and agronomy department. Coldstream is where Derby winner Aristides was from. Main Chance Farm and Spindletop are also part of the UK ag program. UK is a land grant college and the extension service was set up there. Spindletop Farm was donated to UK.
In 1985 we bought our first ATV, which replaced the horses. But cows don’t respect an ATV like a horse and they will jump right over them. Cows wouldn’t dare go up against a horse. I was heading this bull one time, and he went head-to-head with me for about 100 yards and he had enough and actually jumped over me, putting a dent in the gas tank. It was a close call.
Mr. Hamilton decided to get into the hog business for more income. Initially we built two hog houses and started with feeder pigs at 50 lbs. and sold them at 250 lbs. Then we added more houses with 400 hogs in each and ended up with eight hog houses holding 3,200 hogs total. We would turn them 2 ½ times a year and became one of the largest hog producers in the state. I became a member of OC Farm Bureau, Conservation District and Falls City Pork Producers Association. The Pork Producers Association’s purpose was to promote our product. We became famous for our pork chop sandwiches and dinners at the Ky. State Fair. We promoted pork and people loved it.
We tried to raise as many crops as we could to feed the pigs. We raised 600 acres of corn every year on the Fox Den farm. We contracted with a feed company that delivered 20 tons of feed every two weeks. We had to grind 64 tons of feed a week to feed the hogs. It took 3 ½ days to grind all that feed every week. We spread one million gallons a year of liquid manure that we had to pump out on the fields. It got to be such a big job we rented equipment. We fed our last hogs in 1996. We couldn’t find enough feeder pigs and we didn’t want to go into the breeding business.
We were raising Angus cattle at the same time so we were putting up a lot of hay. I loved it when we went to round bales instead of square bales- made life so much easier! We had 250 cows at Fox Den and 250 at Spring Hill. In the winter we had 500 calves that we fed silage. Our standard work week was 55 hours but sometimes during planting time you might work 18 hours a day putting up hay to beat the rain. Josh and Stephen, our sons, and their friends would often work in the summertime to help put up hay.
I ran for magistrate when my friend Hartley Winters decided not to run again. I ran and won and held the office from 2003 and served five terms, retiring in 2022. I was chairman of the road committee for 16 years. As subdivision numbers grew, roads and maintenance became a major issue. For instance, garbage trucks were really tearing up the roads because we had three different garbage companies picking up trash in a subdivision. Three large trucks a week tore up the roads so we went to one garbage company that drove through once a week.
In 2011 I became a school bus driver and did that for 12 years. I enjoyed the kids and had a Crestwood route. Once I was stopped at a stop sign on Hwy. 329 and a car slammed into my bus. I couldn’t do anything about it. Fortunately, everyone was fine, even the driver of the other car. People came from maintenance, bus driver friends, police, a lot of folks to check on me, and the students. They bought me a sub bus and I delivered them all to school. The buses kept getting bigger each year. The last bus I had held 78 kids. We had around 100 buses.
In 1991 Vernon Hodge bought the farm and sold it in 2019. Karen and I bought 15 acres from the Hodge family and built our home. For that opportunity we are very thankful. I bought some cows and now have 30 cows! I also work part time at a farm in Goshen.
We have two sons. Josh was born in 1977 and Stephen was born in 1980. Both went to Immaculate Conception and OCHS. Josh is a natural farmer, but Stephen’s talents lie elsewhere. Josh and his wife, Jenny, have two daughters and live in Bowling Green. Ali is 17 and Mia is 14. Stephen and his wife, Lindsay, live in Richmond, Ky. and they both work for EKU. Their son, Brock, who is 15, plays soccer. It’s great when we can all get together!
Oldham County has changed dramatically over my lifetime. This has always been my home and I love the community. Karen and I have had a wonderful life and church community here. I was born in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Louisville. When people ask where I was born, I say in Louisville, but I got here as fast as I could!