Blood and Mud: How an Arkansas Farm Family Birthed America

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 15:17:47 GMT

Thomas Atwood dropped a hornet’s nest down his stepmother’s dress, ran for the fields, and never returned home. It was 1870 and he was 13.

Young Thomas built a raft, floated down the Cumberland River, and unleashed an epic farming tale: 7’ giants, snuff-chewing women, hymnal chunkers, beehive cash hordes, panther hunts, entrepreneurial geniuses, and consummate survivors.

It is the story of the Atwood clan, but also the chronicle of many a multi-generational farm family. Pathos, determination, faith, failure, grit, and triumph—the gauntlet of American experience.

Death and Dysentery
Across the big pond, the Atwood name is a British headliner dating back 1,000-plus years, connected to Richard the Lionheart and William the Conqueror. Mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday Book, the Atwood family thrived as landed gentry.

However, in 1650, the refined went redneck when a branch of the Atwood tree fell onto American shores. The family later settled in northern Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley as farmers and blacksmiths.

In the time-honored hunt for better land and bigger yields, the hot-tempered and high-intellect Atwoods migrated almost 500 miles to the wilderness of central Tennessee’s Smith County, led by the pluck of Moses Atwood—owner of 18 stout mules. By 1861 and the start of the Civil War, Moses and his mule team hauled freight for the Confederacy. In approximately 1863, in his early 30s, Moses was captured by Union soldiers, hauled to Johnson City, Tenn., and tossed on a train to Baltimore, Md., bound for incarceration at Fort McHenry, which served as a prison camp for Southern soldiers and sympathizers. Surrounded by the Patapsco River and Baltimore’s waterfront, Moses succumbed to disease, the No. 1 killer of the Civil War, inside the 35’-thick walls of Fort McHenry.

Back home in Tennessee, Moses’ firstborn son, 7-year-old Thomas Hooker Atwood, chafed under the thumb of a Native American stepmother. Mutual detestation. In his early teens on a spring day in 1870, Thomas crossed a line of no return. Sneaking behind his unsuspecting stepmother as she hung washing on a clothesline, Thomas slipped a hornet’s nest down the nape of her dress and hit the road.

Scraping a toehold as a farmhand, Thomas worked the fields of Smith County, and eventually bought ground, built an operation, started a family, and placed hopes for another generation on his goliath son, Joe Lee Atwood, a 7’1” gentle giant with a penchant for preaching the Word. Measuring 21” in combined handspan, Joe Lee frequently stunned farm visitors by lifting a 150 lb. anvil to shoulder level with a single hand.

In 1880, with soil wearing thin, Thomas and Joe Lee found opportunity to pull stakes. They constructed a massive raft beside the Cumberland River, loaded their belongings, and floated with the current to the Tennessee River, onto the Ohio River, spilled into the Mississippi River, and settled at Cayce in Fulton County in the extreme southeastern pocket of Kentucky. In Cayce, as always, Thomas and Joe Lee swung hammers over an anvil and worked the rows—always with eye on better ground.

From Scratch
In natural order, Thomas passed. The loss was bookended by blessing: a firstborn son and farming legend, John Henry Atwood—true maverick, eccentric, and pioneer.

Joe Lee and John Henry (a diminutive 6’1”) felt the same stir that pulled the family across centuries from Virginia to Tennessee to Kentucky. The past again spoke: “Go South.”

John Henry Atwood used bees as his banker, hiding jars filled with cash in the middle of hives.

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Atwood)

They sold their holdings, built a raft, loaded family and belongings, and bobbed along the banks of the Mississippi River, eventually crossing the big water at Charleston, in southeast Missouri. As their Atwood predecessors; as near-countless American farm families; they settled in virgin hardwoods inside the levee on ground replete with panthers and steady flood threats—raw acres that broke men.

Yet, piece by piece, they built a successful farm. Every fall at lay-by, the Atwood family would camp on the banks of the Mississippi for a week, setting trot lines and barrel nets. The men loosed hounds on panthers at night, gathered fish in the morning, and slept during the day. The women cleaned and processed fish, using pressure cookers and canning equipment.

“That’s what my family did—farming, fishing, blacksmithing,” says Stephen Atwood, great-grandson of John Henry. “That’s the sort of thing all farm families did—whatever it took to survive.”

Wash, rinse, repeat. In 1910, after battling floods from the mercurial Mississippi, Joe Lee and John Henry gathered the components of their multi-generational Missouri farming operation and moved 100 miles southeast, across the Bootheel and into Arkansas’ northeast corner outside Paragould, in Greene County, buying timberland on the extreme cheap. Once more, the Atwoods built an existence from scratch.

King Leo’s
By way of two-man crosscut saws, dynamite, and mule teams, hardwoods were replaced with cotton plants. Houses went up, dressed in brown-speckled clapboard and tar paper galore, buttressed by big front porches, cisterns, and outhouses.

At Joe Lee’s passing, John Henry took the wheel. Reign of the maverick patriarch.

With a madman’s cackle, soft heart, and keen business mind, John Henry was a walking contradiction, believing in a folk mix of natural order and modernization. He ran geese in the middles of cotton rows to control weeds, and never sprayed for boll weevils. “He refused,” explains great-grandson Stephen Atwood. “He always said, ‘God made the boll weevil, and he made him for something.’ That was just how he operated.”

At John Henry’s side stood his wife and equal in mettle, Lucinda Patrick Atwood. A Levi Garrett devotee, Lucinda packed her lip. She kept a spit cup at arm’s length and sported ever-present vertical streams of tobacco juice leaking from the corners of her mouth. Beloved by all in a family of sportsmen, Lucinda was the fisher queen, adept at pinching a piece of dough ball (flour, whole kernel corn, and chopped onions briefly boiled and rolled in corn meal) and dropping the mix on a hook, covered in a spit of snuff juice as the coup de grace. It was, by family lore, a catfish guarantee.

Joe Lee Atwood, second from left, and Myrtle Lucinda Atwood, far right.

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Atwood)

Lucinda bore John Henry a son, Moses Lee, and the overall Atwood business enterprise in northeast Arkansas grew to 1,000 acres, two cotton gins, and a fish market beside the St. Francis River. Yet, despite financial success, John Henry hated banks—but loved honey.

He maintained 100 hives and used bees as his banker. In a back yard apiary, in hexagon-shaped hives, he secreted mayonnaise jars filled with silver dollars and wads of cash—stuffed directly into the middle of the hives. Security by stinger.

Busier than a funeral home fan in July, John Henry carried no debt, tended the farm, taught Moses Lee the ropes, oversaw business interests, and provided a steady stream of assistance to local widows and orphans caught in the vise of the Great Depression.

Every night in the family den, seated beside an end table topped by a can of King Leo peppermint sticks and a leather Bible, John Henry read the Word, ate a single peppermint, and drank a cup of hot water. Simple pleasures.

However, John Henry’s contradictions surfaced in a particularly shiny indulgence: vehicles. Annually, without fail, he bought a new GMC pickup truck. Cash on the barrelhead.

During his silver years, when Social Security arrived, John Henry bucked, and began dropping government checks—one after another—into a drawer. A year later, a Social Security official knocked on John Henry’s door. “Mr. Atwood, have you been getting any checks? None of them have been cashed.’”

“Yessir, I got’em. They’re in a drawer. You want’em? I don’t want’em. Give them to someone else.”

Nutt’s Chapel
In 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, John Henry suffered a shattered leg while working at one of the family cotton gins during picking.

Confined to bed, he lacked the manpower numbers to complete harvest. By chance, a traveling band of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the farm door and made John Henry an offer he couldn’t refuse: Listen to our theology, accept our literature, and we’ll help pick your crop.

The Atwood clan: back row, L-R, Moses Lee Atwood, Earl Noah Atwood, Myrtle Lucinda Patrick Atwood, and Bessie Atwood. Front row, L-R, Cletus Atwood, Mary Jane Baker Atwood, three remaining children uncertain.

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Atwood)

Bingo. The Jehovah’s Witnesses kept their word and picked; John Henry provided an open ear and accepted a pile of tracts. Deal done, the Jehovah’s Witnesses left for parts unknown, and John Henry maintained his Baptist beliefs.

However, the Jehovah’s Witnesses episode proved more than a curiosity. The Atwoods were members of Nutt’s Chapel, where Moses Lee served as song leader and John Henry was a deacon. All deacons at Nutt’s Chapel were farmers. When John Henry broke his leg, the deacon brethren were all under the farm gun, smothered by harvest and unable to help him. Days after the Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared, the deacons gathered and visited John Henry, genuinely concerned about his welfare.

On entering the Atwood home, several deacons eyeballed Jehovah’s Witnesses publications stacked in plain view. Accusations of apostasy spread like wildfire: The deacons returned to Nutt’s Chapel and reported that John Henry had jumped the pew. With haste, the congregation churched John Henry and kicked him to the curb.

Moses Lee was incensed. Backing his father, Moses Lee left Nutt’s Chapel.

Emotionally scarred, John Henry never sought membership in another church for the rest of his life.

Flying Songbooks
The next to farm, Moses Lee, was also the last to farm in the Atwood line.

Moses Lee Atwood, pictured alongside his mother, Myrtle Lucinda Atwood.

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Atwood)

A stoutly built man with the thick legs of a pole tosser, Moses Lee operated with both commerce and community in mind. As area farmers plunged into economic freefall, Moses Lee stood on the steps of the Greene County courthouse and bought 110 farms at auction during the 1930s.

As described by Stephen Atwood: “Moses, my grandfather, went to those same farmers and told them not to leave their land; not to give up. He promised them, ‘We’ll farm together on portions. I’ll give you the seed and you make the crop and give me 50%. You save all you can and pay me what I paid for the land, and you can have it back.’ All but two of the 110 farms that Moses paid for at auction were bought back by the original farmers.”

Nutt’s Chapel made an inevitable return when Moses Lee’s son, Raymond, heard the Lord’s call to ministry and left the farm for the pulpit. Raymond was asked to preach a two-week revival at Nutt’s Chapel and accepted the invitation.

Raymond sought John Henry and extended the invite. John Henry declined. However, night after night, a two-tone, red-and-white GMC was parked under an oak outside the church, with John Henry behind the wheel, windows down, listening to his grandson’s sermons.

On a Thursday night of the second revival week, Moses Lee braved the doors of Nutt’s Chapel, alongside his wife, Vuler Jane, and sat on the second row, according to Stephen. “I was on the front row and my grandparents were behind me. The Nutt’s Chapel song leader, who was one of the same deacons that had churched them, walked up to my grandpa and asked, ‘Moses, why don’t you lead the songs tonight like times past?’”

Moses accepted and took his bass voice to the podium. Music and worship began; the sanctuary stirred; the Spirit moved. “All of a sudden, I felt a book fly past my head, followed by a whole lot of screaming and shouting,” Stephen says. “It was my grandma, hollering and throwing songbooks. Just then, my great-grandpa, John Henry, walked into the church. They all came back for the remaining three nights.”

A hymnal chunked and a hatchet buried.

Chain of Blood
Away from the farm, Raymond spent a career as a pastor. His son, Stephen, followed into ministry, eventually joining the Tennessee National Guard as a chaplain. He switched to active-duty status in 1982 and served in Desert Storm with the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.

Stephen Atwood, 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 2ND BDE, 82ND ABN DIV. Photographed in the bay of Camp Red, Saudi Arabia, Desert Shield/Storm.

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Atwood)

Now retired, Stephen, 72, still feels the pull of the farm. “Milking cows, pulling corn, cleaning lots, chopping weeds, and so much more was a part of my life as a boy,” Stephen says. “But it was growing fainter all the time. I rented my land out for a while and sold out completely in 2008.”

Multi-generational farm families store history in vignettes. The stage remains the same, but the actors change: Moses to Thomas to Joe Lee to John Henry to Moses Lee to Raymond to Stephen.

Respect to the Atwoods and their American tale.

For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man

Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam

Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam

The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland

Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History

The Story of the American Farmer: Celebrating 250 Years of U.S. Agriculture

Blood and Mud: How an Arkansas Farm Family Birthed America