SHEPHERDING OUTDOORS
PICKENS COUNTY FARM NO ELECTRICITY B Y WA LT M E R R E L L My wife, Hannah, grew up in Andalusia, Alabama. It is a small, quiet town that may be most well known for her mother, Brenda Gantt, the sweet little old lady who found internet fame by teaching the world how to make biscuits and for the fact that “we pass through it on the way to Destin.” Brenda spent her toddler years in Pickens County, but “grew up” in Northport, Alabama. Her father, Cecil Hicks, was born a sharecropper’s son and they made their livelihood in the sandy
loam fields and in the flood plain of Coal Fire Creek, a dozen or so miles outside of Carrolton, Alabama. Cecil and his wife, Flo, were married in 1944 in Lucedale, Mississippi by a justice of the peace. Cecil was 23 and Flo was 17. Cecil worked in the shipyards for a year or so while they lived in Fairhope in an apartment. Flo said, “We had the most beautiful views of the sunset that I ever did see.” The apartment overlooked Mobile Bay, from near the foot of Fairhope Avenue,
The First Hicks Family Farmhouse
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Cooperative Farming News
