Living a dream

Youngbloods are living their dream on Georgia Mountain

Lisa and Jess stand behind all of their J’s, who from left are Jalyn 16, Julia 14, Jana 13, Jess Jr. 11, and Jordan 10. The family attends Boaz Church of God. Just to keep it all in the family, so to speak, Jess’ parents, Paula and John Howard Youngblood, moved from Mississippi to Guntersville a few years after Jess and Lisa. The sectional sofa and great room, opposite top, are both ample for the family. A formal dining room, located at the front of the house on the ground floor of one of the turrets, can be seen from the kitchen, opposite, right.

Story and photos By David Moore

It’s a big house. But it’s a big family that Dr. Jess and Lisa Youngblood are raising there on Georgia Mountain – a jumble of well-mannered J’s: Jalyn, Julia, Jana, Jess Jr. and Jordan.

The Youngbloods are living out their dream.

Big families run in the family, so to speak, at least in Lisa’s case. She’s second to the youngest of six children. Her mom is the oldest of eight.

Had the Youngblood kids been older, there’s enough of them for a construction crew that could have helped build the house. Reminiscent of an English castle, it has 10,000 square feet. Construction took 18 months, on top of 18 more in planning.

Jess and Lisa bought property – located at the far end of the gated, Savannah Place development on Georgia Mountain Road – about 2008. After nine months of planning and three more to get a bid, the project came in well over budget, and they gave up on the architect cutting the cost.

However, Adam Gregg, the builder from Guntersville, felt badly for them and offered to design the house.

“He started from scratch and drafted the entire house,” Jess says. “It took about six months to draft and get a bid together. He did a phenomenal job, stepping in at a point when we felt really defeated.”

With final plans and a bid in hand, the Youngbloods and Adam were only half way home. And they soon hit a hard problem – rock. The basement, which opens to ground level in the back, required digging 10 feet deep in the front, and the bones of the earth were just under the surface.

“Adam got the biggest machine available to break up the solid rock,” Jess says.

While digging out rock for the pool, a cave was unearthed.

“You could throw a rock in and hear it going and going,” Lisa says.

After consulting a geologist, they basically filled the cave with concrete. It was an unexpected – and major – expense.

“It was,” Lisa says, “literally money thrown away in the ground, never to be seen again.”

Exterior stonework took a year, partly because there’s so much of it, and partly because the stone masons from Oneonta did amazingly meticulous work, the Youngbloods say.

Approaching the house from a curve in the road, the copper roofs atop two stone

turrets first grab the eye. Their part in the design traces back to an amazing semester Jess took off from Mississippi College to study at Birkbeck, University of London.

“Adam asked what kind of theme he had in mind for the house, and I said English castle,” Jess explains. “This was his creation. I like the copper. It is different.”

Jess owns Premier Family Care, with a clinic and a health spa on South Main Street in Arab and a new clinic under construction on Blount Avenue in Guntersville – not the sort of guy Lisa envisioned marrying.

“She always thought she would marry a cowboy, which is funny,” Jess laughs. “I’m the furthest thing from a cowboy I know.”

Both have Mississippi ties.

A daughter of Belinda and Tom Lock, Lisa grew up on a farm in Poplarville, a burg of 2,900 about 45 minutes south of Hattiesburg. Living with five siblings may be why Lisa spent a lot of time outside and became fond of the farm animals. She loved bottle-feeding them, even though most were raised for the dinner table.

“My dad would never tell who I was eating,” Lisa laughs. “He knew if it was someone from the farm, I would never eat.”

After graduating high school in 1998, she pursued a business office degree from Pearl River Central Community College.

Jess, son of John Howard and Pamela Youngblood, spent his early years, along with his sister, Rachelle, in Chalmette, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. His dad was an investigator for the US Department of Labor; his mom a church secretary.

“I told Dad I wanted to be a garbage truck rider,” Jess recalls. “He said those guys work really hard. Not to be disparaging, but he wanted me to come up with something different. If I couldn’t be the guy on the back of the garbage truck, I wanted to be a doctor. I pretty much decided that as a kid of 5 or 6.”

At 13, Jess’ family moved from the NOLA suburbs to McNeil, Mississippi, a rural hamlet of 631 people in a county neighboring Poplarville.

“I was in cultural shock,” he says. “ I didn’t know anybody at all, and my accent was way different. I was struggling. I was so nerdy I immersed myself in academics. That’s pretty much what I did for the next …” he laughs, “well, almost 20 years.”

Lisa puts it differently: “He was always full of ambition, thinking of what he could do later.”

Being a nerdy academic had a financial upside. After high school in 1996, Jess attended Mississippi College where the “lots of” math and science scholarships he had earned covered all his undergrad expenses, including the semester in London.

“With what I earned in high school and applied for and won, I think I actually made a little money in college,” he says.

Further scholarships from UM completely covered medical school classes in 2000-2004 at the University of Mississippi Medical School, though he had to borrow for living expenses.

Anow humorous courtship started while Jess was visiting home in 2001. He met Lisa while attending church with his parents.

“I saw her and wanted to say hello,” he grins. “But I was in my second year of med school, and I couldn’t even talk to a girl. I stuttered the whole time.”

“He said, ‘I might come home next Friday,’” Lisa laughs. “’Do you want to do something if come in on Friday? Maybe go out Friday? Do something on Friday?’”

So they went out Friday – and a few days later Lisa ended up in the hospital. Then in and out for several months. Everyone gets along fine now, but her dad was so upset he actually asked Jess’ father if maybe his son had given Lisa some kind of drug.

A diagnosis was never given, but Lisa offers food poisoning or stress as possible suspects. Either way, she lost from 105 to 80 pounds.

For his part, Jess was a regular – and concerned – visitor. Beyond pushing her IV

pole when Lisa got out bed, he brazenly read her medical charts.

“I’m thinking, ‘My Lord! This is so embarrassing!’” Lisa laughs.

“Honey,” a nurse told her, “I guess you’re breaking him in to see if he really wants to do this medical stuff.”

Lisa and Jess married Oct. 11, 2003. He had jitters about being broke and supporting a wife. She’d need a job and had prepared a resume, but writing a cover letter got lost in wedding mayhem.

“I wanted to ensure that while we were on honeymoon, her resumé was percolating,” Jess laughs. “So while she was getting her wedding dress on, I was in another room typing her cover letter.”

He had his best man deliver Lisa a stack of letters to sign as she finished dressing for her wedding. When they returned from honeymooning in Gatlinburg, she had a job with a real estate lawyer.

Jess earned his MD in 2004 and completed a residency in family medicine in 2007 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Both desired a big family, but, ever the planner, Jess wanted to wait on babies until after his residency. Generally, it takes about six months to conceive after ceasing birth control pills, he’d learned, so they quit the pill six months before his residency ended.

Two weeks later Lisa was pregnant. From then on she was either pregnant or nursing for the next six years.

Meanwhile, Jess scoured the Southeast for a position with a doctor or medical group with an entrepreneurial mindset. He wanted to learn the business-side of medicine, which most med schools don’t teach. He found that in Albertville with Dr. Raymond Ufford, who owns Medical Asset Group.

Jalyn, the Youngbloods’ eldest, was born in Mississippi. The rest were born in Boaz, where the family moved.

“We really fell in love with this area,” Lisa says.

After three years learning from Ufford, Jess decided to start Premier Family Care in Guntersville. Others advised against it, saying he’d never do as well financially as he would being partners with Ufford. But he went ahead and opened Premier in early 2011, and his hopes soared after seeing 50 patients the first day.

Business continued to be brisk, and Jess was able to pay employees and bills. But after six months he had yet to take home a paycheck and tapped their savings to live.

“We hocked everything we had to open

Jess and Lisa’s master bedroom suite is located on the main floor and has access to an outdoor sitting area off the main deck, underneath a rear turret, surrounded by stone arches and looking out over the pool. All five children have upstairs bedrooms with the three girls sharing a bath and the two boys sharing another. The kids also have an upstairs laundry room for washing their own clothes … yes, there’s a learning curve involved. The unfinished attic over the garage is the off-season home to Christmas trees. Besides a safe room and den, the basement serves as a bathhouse for the pool. Under the turret is the grilling area and adjacent to it a covered dining table, above, that seats 10. The stone arches there offer a view of the pool and its large waterfall – all of which is perfect for entertaining company or simply accommodating the houseful of kids.

that practice,” Jess says. “I felt like a failure six months into it.”

Jess brought in an auditor who discovered that his business office was behind $1 million in billing. Changes were

quickly made. In the next six months his and Lisa’s take-home was higher than it had ever been – great news with baby four on the way.

“We were so grateful the Lord had come through for us on that,” he says. With the practice growing, he opened the Arab office in 2015, a third one in Blountsville in 2020 and, in 2021, Premier MediSpa in the old Otelco building next door to the Arab office.

“He is always thinking ahead. Even when he’s not at work that little hamster is still running on that wheel.” Lisa looks at him and adds, “You’re pretty great, babe.”

“You always encourage me,” he replies.

A fountain trickles away in the turnaround in the front of the house.

Prior to buying land for a home on Georgia Mountain, Jess bought 85 acres there to pursue his love of hunting. They were thrilled to later be able to buy the three lots at the end of Savannah Place abutting his hunting land. They see a lot of deer and wild turkey out there.

“It’s hard to find hunting land inside a gated community,” Jess laughs.

When they first opened Premier, he says, they did so with the philosophy that medicine could be a ministry to serve people.

“We are a Christian family and wanted to use that in our business,” he adds. “And we wanted our house to be a place where people are welcome.”

For her part, Lisa says she loves being a stayat-home mom.

“I always wanted Jess to live out his dream. I have never wanted to be that woman who held her husband back.

“If you fail,” she says to Jess, “we can go find a box to live in – a big box.”

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