13 minute read
Built by Wootens
Canaan Creek Farms
Rudy and Margie Wooten’s home and farm have an extra personal touch — Rudy built it all
Margie and Rudy Wooten have an inviting entrance to their farm, and they enjoy its lifestyle and wide open spaces. Besides building all you see from the driveway with his hammer and lumber, Rudy also dug the pond shown on the previous page.
The Wootens enjoy Margie’s cookies and lemonade in the first of two pavilions Rudy built. They love to entertain their grandchildren at the farm: Isabella, Adalin, Grey and Ella. Nothing against Grey, but after raising four boys they were thrilled to have three granddaughters come along. Margie’s brother Stevie died in a 1967 car wreck. Her other brother is Billy Stricklend, who lives in the Hulaco area west of Arab. A former investigator, he manages the Morgan County Celebration Arena.
Story and photos By David Moore
Margie Wooten knows her man well.
“If he has a piece of wood, a nail and hammer, he’s going to build something,” she says of her husband, Rudy. “When you turn in the driveway, anything you see, he built with his hands.”
The Wootens live at Canaan Creek Farms, a 36-acre spread facing U.S. 231, a mile south of the Arab city limits. Their rambling house, the barns, various and sundry sheds, cattle chutes, fences, even the authentic log cabin with its stone chimney … Rudy built it all. Much of the timber he milled himself from logs.
Nearly everyone adds personal touches to their house or apartment. They decorate their space with colors, textures and, mostly, belongings that resonate with their lives, ultimately arriving at a comfortable sense of self. That’s true of the Wootens, too, but their home is all the more personalized in that Rudy hand-built it.
“It just boils down to Rudy having a vision,” Margie says. “And he just kept going.”
“There is a sense of satisfaction,” Rudy says of his 45 years of building on their farm. “It’s been a labor of love. I don’t hunt, fish or play golf. I just play around on the farm.”
Some of his construction was out of necessity – a feed barn and chutes for cattle, for instance.
At least one major house addition fits that category, too. When he and Margie married, they suddenly had four boys, and soon wanted a bedroom for each. Rudy made adjustments to that side of the house, creating a dorm hall with four bedrooms, and built a master suite for Margie and himself on the far side of the house.
“We had Hank Junior coming out of one room and Guns and Roses blaring out of another,” he laughs. “It was a hoot, I tell you.”
Interestingly, Rudy, who turned 69 on Nov. 18, envisioned building out that property as a kid.
His father left before Rudy was born. His mom, Willie C. Wooten, worked 35 years at Redstone Arsenal, raising Rudy his older brothers, Rex and Rod, in a house owned by her father, Leonard Campbell, a Baptist preacher.
The house sat on a 10-acre cotton field, now part of the Wootens’ farm.
“I grew up at the end of my driveway,” Rudy says. “I’ve been working this farm my whole life. Since I was 9 or 10, I had expectations of one day owning it.”
Daughter of Bill and Betty Stricklend, Margie was born in Gadsden. The family moved several times with Bill’s career in Continued on page 44
Though limited in the past by raising chickens, the Wootens love to travel in their RV, and the Smoky Mountain National Park has long been a favorite destination. On a side trip to Cades Cove some years ago, they were both impressed with John Oliver’s cabin there. Built sometime after 1820, it’s the oldest building in the park. Rudy was taken by the craftsmanship – for one thing, it was built without nails – and inspired on the spot to build a replica of it. So he took notes, which Margie says always means he’s about to build something else on the farm. Rudy finished the project in 1989. Margie decorated it accordingly and shot the snow photo above in 2014.
Though not strictly furnished with articles from the 1800s, Margie took pains to decorate the cabin accordingly – to the point of real candles on the Christmas tree. A second bed is tucked away in the loft of the cabin. A close look at the door reveals the wooden pegs Rudy used for nails and detail work he put into the latch. But what was really hard, he says, was laying all of the stone. Unlike the original cabin in Cades Cove, this one includes a storm shelter in the basement where they safely rode out the tornado that hit their farm in 2011.
Continued from page 41 the propane business, living in Boaz and Millbrook before moving to Arab where he operated the former Empire Gas.
Margie was in the ninth grade and went on to become head cheerleader for Arab High School. Rudy played tackle and defensive end … but this is no football romance.
“Head cheerleaders don’t date linemen,” he grins. Plus, “I couldn’t talk to her. I was too bashful to talk to a pretty girl.”
Margie graduated in 1970, going on to earn a nursing degree from Calhoun Community College. She worked 15 years at the old Arab Hospital in labor/delivery and the emergency room, then eight years more at Marshall Medical Center North ER.
Rudy may not have gotten the cheerleader, but when he graduated from Arab in ’71 he did get a scholarship from Bear Bryant to play football at Alabama.
“When he would come into a team meeting,” he remembers of Bear, “it was like John Wayne coming into a saloon with a shotgun. Everybody shut up.”
Rudy redshirted his sophomore year, dressed out as a junior but didn’t play.
“I majored in sweating profusely,” he says.
“You can look at our place now,” Margie laughs, “and know he was good at that.”
Rudy left college after three years, coming home to do construction and later cabinet shop work. Significantly, he never lost sight of his dream.
His grandfather’s house was gone, but around 1974, Rudy bought the 10-acre site from his uncle, Harthrow Campbell, plus an adjoining 15 acres that included a barn and rental house.
It was quite the outlay on his $3.10/hour salary, but Rudy paid $1,000 per acre and in 1975 built a three bedroom, two bath house with a carport for $15,000.
Rudy later worked as patrol officer for the Arab Police Department.
“It was more like Mayberry than anything else,” he says with a fondness of those early police days. “We had a lot of fun. Everybody knew everybody. We had old town drunks to pick up, and a few hostage situations. We also did ambulance and fire calls – it was one big family.
“I’d like to think of myself as a peace officer rather than a law officer,” Rudy adds. “Helping people instead of prosecuting them. We took a lot of kids home to their parents. You could do that back then.”
While he might have been too shy in high school to approach the head cheerleader, as a police officer – and soon a lieutenant – he had ample opportunities to drop by the ER to check on nurse Margie.
“You know what they say about nurses and cops,” Rudy says. Even in Mayberry, so to speak, they both dealt with trauma and worked similar shifts. And both liked pancakes.
“We were together a lot,” she says. “But – big spender – we had one date … to IHOP in Huntsville.
They married in 1981. For a sweet 40th anniversary this year, they returned to the International House of Pancakes.
Margie’s three boys – ages 10 to 3 when she married Rudy – are Steven Chad, Brady and Adam. Rudy’s son Chad, 8 at the time, added up to a house full of boys – not to mention the confusion of two Chads.
“Brady would say this is my brother Chad, and this is my other brother Chad,” Margie laughs.
Until Rudy built the master bedroom, the guys doubled up in the other two existing bedrooms. To handle the near-standingroom-only crowd, he first closed in the carport as a living room and built on a den.
“When they all played football, that was a hoot,” Rudy says. “We’d have five or six games a week plus all that practicing.”
Despite a little wrestling, the boys were locked in for life as brothers, their parents say. And locked into eating. To make ends meet, in 1983 Rudy built two chicken houses and began raising the birds for Wayne Farms.
In 1987 Margie quit the ER to teach health science at Arab High for students considering medical careers. Over the next 25 years, her reputation became iconic, especially as the sponsor of the school’s HOSA club (Health Occupations Students of America, now Future Health Professionals).
Margie would take 20-35 students to annual state and national competitions where they’d be tested in numerous areas, from medical terminology and reading, administration and healthcare issues, to biomedical debates and a medical version of scholars bowl.
“Every year we won state and were in the top 10 nationally. A lot of smart kids came out of that,” she says, “many of whom won individual national championships.”
Meanwhile, Rudy was building stuff on the farm.
School officials never could track down how many of Margie’s students become nurses, nurse practitioners, doctors, veterinarians, dentists and administrators.
“Margie loves to decorate, and it kind of turned into what it is,” Rudy says of the 3,800-squarefoot home he constructed, mostly since getting to know her when she worked at the old Arab Hospital, above. The house – with a living room, top, sitting room, den, and today four bedrooms – is filled with numerous antiques, including lots of clocks.
Without being too shy about it –-and perhaps with no exaggeration – Rudy declares his wife to be a world-class teacher.
“I have heard her students over the years talk about her,” he says. “They really admired her – they still do.”
“The benefit of having a program like HOSA,” Margie says, “is that many of the students come back to the community as healthcare providers. In 25 years, you cover a lot of kids. I absolutely loved it.”
A few years ago she found herself lying on an examination table in the emergency room at Marshall Medical Center North, and a former student walked in, Dr. J. Tyler Hughes.
“That was interesting,” Margie says. “I told him, ‘I kept saying all those years, one day I might be looking up at you.’”
Even after she retired from teaching in
From logs to lumber, at right is Rudy’s sawmill, which he’s modified to be a one-man operation. Most of the lumber has gone into to the 12 structures he’s built on his farm (he finally counted them at the magazine’s request). One of his structures is a garden shed, to which Margie has applied her flowering touch. Rudy got the stones from their pond and the property.
2004, she worked another nine years as the technical education coordinator.
For his part, Rudy retired from the APD after 20 years, going from “Mayberry” to growing a beard and working uncover with the Northeast Alabama Drug Task Force.
“It was the absolute opposite of my personality,” he says of working undercover.
It was hard on the nerves – and Margie – and neither liked him working nights. So after a year undercover, he worked another year as a deputy for the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.
“I got to view the ills of society,” he says. “That’s why I finally got out in 1992.”
After leaving law enforcement – peace encouragement, as the case might be – Rudy built two more chicken houses. And, until just this past May, he continued a part-time job he’d done for 29 years: driving a school bus.
“If you’re a farmer,” he says, “you can’t just do one thing and make a living.”
In the rash of tornados on April 27, 2011, the Wooten’s basically lost their four chicken houses. So after nearly 30 years of raising birds for Wayne Farms, Rudy tore down the chicken houses, rebuilt them as hay and cattle barns and concentrated on cattle farming.
More for himself than anything else, for the past 20 years or so, he’s owned a sawmill. When you build as much as he does, it’s well worth the investment.
He and Margie don’t even bother trying to count the number of structures he’s built on the farm, for it’s all part of that dream he’s wanted since he was a kid. And he’s still building.
Rudy’s latest project (as of this writing, that is) is a koi pond with a waterfall out by a second, smaller pavilion he built. Next on his agenda is a greenhouse.
“He says it will be his last one,” Margie laughs. “I’m going to hold him to it. But if I see him with a pad and pencil, we’re in trouble. He starts making plans.”
Can Rudy tear himself away from his hammer, nails and saw? From his dangerous pad and pencil?
Well … maybe, sorta?
“People retire and sit down and die,” he says, perhaps recalling Bear Bryant’s fate. “I may just go at a slower pace. I still like my sawmill. I can do that and work the cows. I look forward to doing what I want to do instead of what I need to do.”
A large shed for the camper, a barn for hay, bedrooms in the house? Sounds like needs. A koi pond and waterfall, a second pavilion, a Cades Cove cabin? Sounds like wants. Perhaps Margie knows her man sometimes confuses his wants and needs.
Rudy laughs. “She says I do.”
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