Joe Horace McKinney and Billie McKinney McCauley lived the early part of their lives on the farm with their parents.

Joe and Billie were accompanied by Joe’s wife, Cathy McKinney, Joe and Cathy now reside in Watsonville, California. Billie now lives in Galveston. Present also were Mike and Sammie McKinney of Farmington, New Mexico. Mike is Joe’s youngest son and has his grandfather’s conservation notebook in which he detailed the methods used that were quite modern at that time, to bring the neglected farm back into production.

Joe, Billie, and Russell visited the remains of the rock well house. This small rock building stood beside the windmill which pulled water from the 120 feet deep well, now filled in. On a cement slab a rusted piece of the windmill is still imbedded.

Joe recalls assisting his father to build the well house with rocks cleared from the neglected fields.

Billie remembers her dad having her place her palm print in the cement foundations seventy years ago when it was poured.

There was a small window in the well house building. Joe told how one winter someone broke in the window and stole their meat. In those days before refrigeration, farm animals were slaughtered and butchered in the fall, then the meat was cured, smoked and hung in the coolest available place. Slaughtering animals is not done now by gentlemen farmers, but in the early 1920's, if you reared pork and beef, you did the whole processing yourself.

Joe recalled that the farm never had electricity, because at that time you had to pay to have the lines run to your farm, and the closest connection was over a mile away.

One huge oak tree remains of the pair that stood in the old farmyard. Joe was sorry to hear one vanished long ago, struck by lightning.

Both Joe and Billie used to play around the roots of the trees, making towns and villages with roads. They made cars and houses with the strata of Georgia clay that runs through the front of the farm.

Their grandfather, Wood Mize Goin bought the 50 acres as raw land more than a hundred years ago. He sold it to farmers who grew cotton till it didn’t produce anymore. This was customary before the utilization of present day methods. Then Wood Goin bought the land back.

He sold it to his daughter, Lillian Goin McKinney and her husband Horace D. McKinney when Joe McKinney was an infant. Billie was born on the farm in 1929. Prior to this time, the area was known as Copperhead Hill. Lillian hated snakes and refused to live anywhere with that name. So it became Merrylands Farm. The name Lillian put on her canning labels.

Joe and Billie both remembered the large vegetable garden and an acre of strawberries. Their mother canned and sold vegetables, as well as fruit and meat. Lillian Goin McKinney’s canning skills developed over several years and she became a canning demonstrator for the Ball Jar Company, traveling the state to give demonstrations.

She won prizes for her canning in the 1936 Texas Centennial Celebration at Dallas as well as at the New York Worlds Fair in 1939. As much as she hated snakes, she learned to can the meat and Billie believes that the absence of snakes on the present farm is due to the fact that her mother canned them all.

Russell recently found several old glass fruit jars buried on the farm while excavating for new construction. The lids had decayed, but all of the jars were intact. Joe and Billie speculated that the jars were probably containers for white lightning, a slightly different crop produced by a drinking uncle and hidden on the farm. Whatever their original use, Mike and Sammie took some jars to New Mexico as souvenirs of the grandfather’s farm. They have two lovely daughters and five lively grandchildren.

Joe McKinney and Russell Streng discovered they are both pilots. Joe is retired Air Force Major and Russell is an active commercial pilot for American Airlines.

Joe and Billie recalled fishing for crawdads using bent pins for hooks in the stock tank their father built.

Joe assisted his father and uncles with building the terraces in the fields to prevent soil erosion that are still in place. Soil erosion was so bad in some areas of the farm that an adult man could stand in the gullies. Filling these in and bringing the soil to produce cash crops was a long process.

Many members of the Goin and Harmon families assisted in the work of bringing this farm into production of crops able to sustain a family.

The road in front of the fam. is now blacktop. Billie remembered riding a flat bed wagon from Aubrey to Merrylands Farm with her uncle Arthur Harmon. The road was graded into what was called a washboard road, as it resembled the washboards used to wash clothes. "My teeth felt loose at the end of the trip, not to mention my bones," she said. "I never minded walking from the farm to town – I believe that trip was the reason."

Russell intended to raze the well house building, but after hearing its history, has decided to incorporate it into a new structure.

Both the Strengs are interested in the history of the area. They have many plans for Merrylands Farm and were glad to meet some of the early pioneers.

Bouncer Goin and Holly Hunnicutt arranged the meeting of the Strengs and McKinneys. Bounce is Joe and Billie’s cousin and was host to a family get together.

Russell Streng said that when he first stood on the property, he felt it was a beautiful place to live and rear his children. These sentiments echo those of Wood Mize Goin and Horace McKinney in earlier years.