Semper Fi Farms LLC

03/10/2026

Spring is a few weeks early this year. I hope the frost this coming weekend doesn’t kill off all buds.

01/25/2026

Snowmagedden 2026

01/22/2026

I’ve shared these before, but I’m currently teaching my U.S. History class about WWI and the Depression. I explained the requirement to register for Selective Service, then I showed them my great grandpa’s registration card. I’m truly blessed to live on the place he called home. Thankfully, he didn’t have to go to WWI. Ft. Smith was the furthest he ever got from here. He was born, lived most of his life, and died within about a three mile radius of this mountain.

All history is local history.

12/06/2025

I’d give just about anything be able to ask my Great Grandpa Marvin for his advice. I don’t think he would be too thrilled with our modern world, but he was content to live within a mile of where he was born and didn’t let what other people were doing bother him much. We could all learn a few things from that. He had an 8th Grade education in a one room school house, yet he was one of the wisest men I’ve ever known.

11/07/2025

I don’t post many pictures of the place in the Fall. Spring is still my favorite time, but God shows off in the Fall, too. Not a bad view from the porch or the road.

10/18/2025

I sure miss these people. I mowed around their place today. No one has lived there in years, but I can still remember all the good times and great stories they told.

10/17/2025

Jim Meads was a photographer living in Hatfield, Hertfordshire near the Hatfield aerodrome in 1962. A pilot friend notified him on September 13th of that year that he would be test flying an English Electric Lightning F1 XG332 if he would like to come take some photos. Happy to get shots of the only British built fighter capable of Mach 2 speeds, he set out toward the airfield hoping to get photos of his children with the F1 landing in the background. The photo he ended up getting would become famous.
As he and his family walked up, a grounds keeper for the airfield approached them in a tractor to tell them to leave the area. That’s when the plane went out of control at a very low altitude with the pilot ejecting at the last possible moment, setting up an incredible, one of kind shot (especially for the time). As it turns out, the pilot was not Mead’s friend, but another test pilot named George Aird. He landed on a tomato greenhouse nearby, crashing through the roof and breaking both legs on the way down. The story is well documented by Aird, Meads, and Mike Sutterby, the tractor bound groundskeeper who was only 23 at the time.
Details from Just history Page

10/17/2025

Racism remains among the dumbest things humans have ever invented. I can’t image the crap they have endured. I hope God blesses them with many more years.

Mary’s dad said, “If you marry that black man, you will never set foot in this house again.” Life was hard at first, no one would talk to them, rent to them, or help them. But they stayed strong together.

Mary became a teacher, Jake worked at the Post Office, and slowly they made friends. Many people rejected them, but they never gave up. Last year, they celebrated 70 years of love, and never once regretted it.

10/17/2025

“Huck and Jim in Their Final Years”
In 1903, on his last visit to his in-laws at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, Mark Twain (1835-1910) posed for this photograph with his friend, John T. Lewis (1835-1906), who was born a free man in Maryland and who had migrated to upstate New York. They met in 1877 after Lewis saved the lives of Twain’s sister-in-law and her daughter by courageously stopping their runaway carriage at no small risk to his own safety. Lewis was an Elder in the Church of the Brethren (the Dunkers), and he and Twain often talked about religion and other such matters. Lewis loved to read, and Twain would send him every one of his books when they came out, with a loving inscription in each one. After Lewis retired from farming, Twain and his in-laws arranged to have him receive a pension. When Twain returned to writing Huckleberry Finn, in 1879 while at Elmira, Lewis was one of the real-life people upon whom he based the character of Jim, and it is even possible that his acquaintance with Lewis caused Twain to continue working on the novel after having earlier set it aside.
Twain’s friendship with Lewis was hardly atypical; of all the white authors in this period, he was the one most fully immersed in and appreciative of African American culture and the one most at home in the company of African Americans. Near the end of his life he recalled a time in New York City when he was walking with another black friend, George Griffin, and people stared at them: "a 'white man' & a negro walking together was a new spectacle to them. The glances embarrassed George, but not me, for the companionship was proper: in some ways he was my equal, in some others my superior.”
Published in 1884/1885, Huckleberry Finn is about a racist boy’s realization of the full humanity of a fugitive slave. Ten years later, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain would deconstruct the very idea of race itself as nothing more than "a fiction of law and custom" without any basis in biology. As Toni Morrison stated, "Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read."
Mark Twain and John T. Lewis are both buried with their families in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira.
Credit Goes To The Respective Owner

09/08/2025

107 years ago today, James Marvin Hollingsworth married Ruby Sanders. As the song goes, "I'm here all because two people fell in love". Great Grandpa always told me it was because he got tired of walking 20 miles, every time he wanted to see her. He was 20 and Granny was 16. They raised 10 kids on this rocky Ozark Mountain hillside, during the Depression. I have no idea how they did it. My only explanation is they were just tougher than we are. They refused to quit. Grandpa used his pocket knife to cut grass for his rabbits well into his 90’s. He worked at a sawmill until he was 75.
They were married 75 years. When asked the secret to a long marriage, Grandpa said they fought everyday.