My 15 Minutes of Trailer Trash Fame.

A number of years ago, I took a wealthy farmer up on a proposal that I manage one of his farms and look after his cattle. I would have free housing on this 200 acre spread of rolling pasture land. It was one of the last remaining farms in the middle of a booming area south of Nashville called Brentwood. Brentwood is a very upscale community of posh McMansions, and gleaming corporate headquarters. The farmer himself, lived on another farm some 30 miles south. So, I was to live smack-dab in the middle of all ritzy Brentwood, in a vintage 50's house trailer in a pastoral setting. Wonderful!

Click on photos to enlarge, if you like.



It was a great gig for about two years. But, then the farmer sold the land to the City of Brentwood for a proposed new high school. So, my days were numbered. The house trailer was actually a very pleasant place to live. A front porch, and a deck on the back. And two bedrooms, one of which I used as a studio, of sorts. It seems I was one of the last trailers in Brentwood, perhaps even the very last.



Primarily my responsibility here was to herd the 50 or so head of cattle from one pasture to another, and in the winter throw them some hay. My dog, Life, had a knack for helping out in this herding process. Other than those chores, it was a pretty laid back life.



Each of the fenced off pastures had its own watering hole, and in the summer, the cows liked to wade out into these and chill out a bit.

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When surveyors eventually began coming out to survey the ground around this abandoned house located near my trailer, they decided they should call the state archeology people to poke around. Well, poke around they did. And they ultimately unearthed 12 unmarked graves presumed to hold the remains of some slaves of a by-gone era. This bought an additional month or two while they mapped out the grave locations. Although the new high school was eventually built on this farm, the grave site is now a fenced- in protected area with a historical marker.



Well, for awhile some reporters were coming out, including a local tv news channel. And then, this amusing article appeared in the Tennessean newspaper. I was briefly famous!! (If you double click on the article, you can probably read this account!)