Hall Family Farm

A Brief History of Hall Family Farm (told by 4th generation farmer Kevin Hall) My great-grandfather, John Kistler Hall, Sr., born September 25, 1878 in Indian Land, SC, began his married life on December 20, 1899 with a few household belongings, 2 hens and a rooster. Indian Land was typical of the post Civil War south, agrarian, poverty stricken, and devoid of opportunity. Despite the hardships, J.K accumulated a “vast fortune” of one thousand dollars and in the 1920’s purchased land on Providence Road West in southern Mecklenburg County, NC, to farm cotton. J.K. grew cotton primarily and was landlord to a small community of tenant farmers, or sharecroppers. He provided mules, equipment, housing, seed, and land, and the tenants provided the hard manual labor to grow cotton. There were no tractors, electricity, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, central heat, or any of the other modern conveniences that we enjoy today. The fields were plowed one row at a time with mule-drawn plows, cotton was hand picked, heat was provided by firewood cut with handsaws and split by hammer and wedge, and transportation consisted of buggies or mule-drawn wagons. The farm ultimately grew to about 600 acres in size, most of it on the north side of Providence Road West, where Ballantyne Country Club sits today. My grandfather, Leitner Shurley Hall, born September 7, 1914, was one of the youngest of eleven children raised on the farm. He has shared many memories of growing up on a southern cotton farm during the Great Depression. His experiences included driving a mule-drawn wagon loaded with cotton into Pineville to sell to the cotton mill, cutting and splitting pine into 4-foot “stove wood” to sell to the mill in the winter, walking behind a mule and plow all day long, hand loading natural pit gravel into a wagon to help maintain the gravel roads, hand applying arsenic-laced molasses onto cotton bolls to kill the destructive boll weevils, and watching a favorite mule drop dead in the field after having acquired tetanus from a splinter. After experiencing the grueling farm regime of the Great Depression, my grandfather joined the army, found himself a young bride in Portland, Oregon, returned home to the farm, and in 1941, just days before Pearl Harbor, was accepted into the Mecklenburg County Police force, with whom he enjoyed a 38 year long career. Leitner and his wife, Elizabeth, raised six children in a rented farmhouse just around the corner on Lancaster Highway, where Providence Point subdivision sits today. In 1955 J.K. gave him some cotton fields on the south side of Providence Road West on which they built a modern home with almost all the modern conveniences of today ( no air conditioning). While Leitner did not farm for a living, the itch to farm remained strong and he and his family tended an enormous garden each year, typically growing watermelons, cantaloupe, sweet corn, tomatoes, green beans, okra, squash, and peas. My grandmother canned hundreds of jars of vegetables and soups every summer to help support their eight person family. Today Leitner is 94 years old and still manages to set out a few tomato plants each year. One of his brothers, Harry, remained on the farm his entire life. He grew watermelons to sell in Pineville and kept hogs and milk cows until his decline in health in the early 1990s. The farm pond from which the current strawberry fields are irrigated was the favorite pasturing site for his milk cows for many years. I remember as a child in the 1970’s, walking barefoot behind my great-uncle Harry as he bottom-plowed his field for a new crop of watermelons. Of course, by this time, the farm had graduated to a diesel tractor rather than mules. My father, Thomas David Hall, was born May 23, 1939 and is the oldest of Leitner and Elizabeth’s six children. He grew up here in Lower Providence, working and playing on J.K.’s farm and the nearby farms of his aunts and uncles. Times were changing, though, and it was becomi