The homestead that has endured the test of time

Story by Hudson Shelton

Photos by Liz Smith

Spend an afternoon perusing the museum-quality displays above Randy Humphries’ office, and you will discover a myriad of worlds colliding simultaneously. At one moment, it’s 1941 and you are on the USS Nevada reliving the horrors of Battleship Row during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The next, you are on a buggy with TM Corbin in 1915 riding through rural Alabama to provide veterinary care for somebody’s feeble livestock. If it were not for Randy leading the way, you might be overwhelmed by the rows of artifacts from extended branches of his family tree. Fear not, however, because Randy has a method to his madness and a reason and place for every piece in his sprawling collection. He points with a grin to a carefully placed quote on the ground attributed to General George Patton that reads, “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way!”

Randy, fourth-generation steward of the Corbin Homestead, and his wife Susie, live on and work the same land that Randy’s great grandparents, Thomas Monroe and Ella Corbin, settled on 1894 after moving their young family from the Albertville vicinity of Sand Mountain. With ambitions of becoming self-sufficient farmers and the confidence that Joppa’s sandy loam soil would make excellent farmland, T.M. went about the painstakingly arduous task of clearing the land. The family raised cotton, peanuts, peas, corn and sorghum cane while also maintaining a healthy number of yard chickens, hogs, milk cows and mules. T.M. and Ella surely had their hands full with daily tasks around the homestead, so following the birth of their first daughter, Myrtie, in 1891, they added nine more children over the next 25 years to help delegate the tasks.

Surveying the original pioneer architecture of the homestead from the porch of Randy’s office next door, it does not require much imagination to picture

Libby Mays, Agent 1162 N Brindlee Mtn. Pkwy, Arab, AL 35016 Bus: 256-586-6243 libby.mays.gscz@statefarm.com

Alan Murphy, Agent 227 Cullman Rd Arab, AL 35016 Bus: 256-586-2644 alan.murphy.lxmk@statefarm.com

Lesley Hyde, Agent 307 2nd Avenue NW Cullman, AL 35055 Bus: 256-734-8906 lesley.hyde.qui7@statefarm.com

Tonya Wilson, Agent 1624 1st Ave SW Cullman, AL 35055 Bus: 256-739-1360 tonya@tonyawilsoninsurance.com the bustling scenes of its early days. The homestead as it looks today is exactly as it was in 1925. Originally a three-bedroom, double-pen farmhouse with a rear ell and a barn on 80-acres of land, the homestead grew over time to 120 acres with the addition of a corncrib, smokehouse, buggy and cotton house that were built, for the most part, using rocks and materials sourced from the land.

Randy still farms the land three generations before him cultivated, and heads a successful tractor parts supply business located a baseball’s throw down the road. Susie was a longtime chemistry teacher at Snead State Community College, where she developed a love for teaching students about the natural world and nurtured an interest in the diverse geological, ecological, and botanical phenomena that can be found by simply stepping out her back door. It is because of their backgrounds in education and farming that the Humphries’ felt the need to preserve their homestead and declare, “the mission of the Humphries family is to care for, develop, preserve and maintain the homestead’s attractiveness, and to stimulate interest in its historical significance for future generations.”

An old piano sits in the corner of the room waiting for somebody to sit down and play it. The items above Randy Humphries’ office tell the story of his family, his homestead and history of Joppa and Cullman County.

The Corbin White Oak

Perhaps the perfect metaphor to help guide the aimless visitor through the history of the Corbin Homestead and its complicated family tree, is the one of the Corbin White Oak that towered above the rolling hills and ranging cattle below. Estimated to have grown out of the ground from a seedling in 1864 (based on the number of rings it had when it was cut down by Randy’s father in 1962), the white oak would have witnessed every generation of Corbins to have shared its land. It would have witnessed Randy’s great-great uncle, Clyde Edmond Corbin, hugging his family goodbye before being shipped overseas to fight in Europe during the first World War. It would have also seen him return home as a hero at the end of the war, only to be stricken with tuberculosis from his time in the trenches and pass away in 1921.

A couple decades later, the tree still stood to see another of Randy’s uncles, Leon John Corbin, leave to join the Navy during the buildup of Japanese forces in the Pacific in the late 1930’s. Only this time, it did not see this Corbin boy’s return. Leon died while defending the USS Nevada during the Japanese onslaught on Pearl Harbor and was awarded the Purple Heart, which is a centerpiece of Randy’s collection. In 1941, the giant tree would have witnessed the homestead illuminated by electricity for the first time following the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It would have seen the fortunes of tens of thousands in the area rise from nothing with the introduction of this new energy source.

When the white oak was chopped down into fire wood after succumbing to a lightning strike, Randy felt a void from the loss of the tree. He filled this void with a sugar maple he planted in 1985 that he hopes will be around for as long, and witness as much history, as the white oak that came before it.

Inside the Homestead

The homestead’s wooden porch creeks beneath your feet as you enter through the door. Bookshelves are filled with what would have been popular reads from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An old piano rests in the corner, and you can imagine a large family sitting beside the double-sided sandstone fireplace, listening to their favorite tunes and anxiously awaiting the feast being cooked up in the kitchen on the other side. T.M.’s veterinary saddlebag and tools still sit where they would have been dropped upon his return home from tending to an animal. An original Home Comfort oven sits in the kitchen, adorned with heavy pots and pans that would have been used at the time.

In another room, trench coats that would have been worn by Clyde in WWI and Leon in WWII hang almost perfectly intact to remind the everyday passerby of the ultimate sacrifice made by these two men. T.M. was a self-taught man in the veterinary field who took great care of the books he would use to teach himself. His veterinary licenses he earned through the years are still on display on the wall, a sign that he was proud of where he came from and proud of the family he was nurturing.

The second floor of the homestead would have been where the children slept. Several twin beds line the walls and an old Singer sewing machine has been placed in the middle of the room to show the process of making clothes on a rural farm. An original Teddy Bear that was given to Randy’s mother, Anne, in the 1930s is perched behind a display glass with a description of its story and how much his mother enjoyed the stuffed animal.

Randy and Susie’s time owning the homestead has been one of many changes. Not modern renovations, but rather changes to restore the past. Restorations and small exhibits that help the viewer go back in time. To help them understand why people lived the way they did and why our relatives had to do the things they did in order to survive a cold winter’s night, as well as a scorching summer heat herding cattle outside. Almost 130 years after T.M. and Ella made their home on this plot of land, Randy and Susie continue to do many of the same things they did to keep the place afloat. Without children to inherit it, Randy says his dream would be for the land to one day belong to Alabama Forever Wild Land Trust or the Alabama 4-H Club. Both are groups that would preserve the land and continue to use it as a teaching tool for future generations.

In the meantime, Randy will keep hopping on his tractor every day to make his daily loop to check on his herd of cows. When I asked him how he still keeps it all running and if he ever gets tired, he replied, “How does that Tom Petty song go again? Oh, yeah! If you never slow down, you’ll never grow old!” G