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OCTOBER OCTOBER 2007 2007 NEWSLETTER
NEWSLETTER
NEWSLETTER
FARMER'S SON IS KEEPING UP THE PLACE
Posted on: Thursday, 7 Dec 2006, 12:00 CST By Lisa O'Donnell, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.
Dec. 7--LEWISVILLE -- Felix Huffman was a hard-working farmer who appreciated the beauty of the
countryside. For 70 years, Huffman managed Hilltop Farm, a nearly 500-acre estate on Conrad Road
that belonged to William Conrad, a vice president at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Huffman planted 130
sugar maples along both sides of Conrad Road. He made sure the lawns were mowed, the brush was
cleared and the equipment stayed out of view in barns and sheds. "He would do what was necessary to
keep it looking good," said his son, John. Huffman lived on a three-acre spread that the Conrad family
gave to him in 1976. It included a house, a barn and several outbuildings.
When Huffman died in January 2005 at 91, he left the property to his son John, who moved in
shortly after with his wife, Barbara. John Huffman, 62, promptly set about restoring the buildings and old
farm equipment and tidying the grounds. "I'm just trying to memorialize the old place so that people can
remember how it used to be," he said.
Frank Bailey Jr., grew up near the Huffmans and has fond memories of the place. Because Felix
Huffman had the only bull in the area, neighbors would walk their cows through the woods so the animals
could mate, Bailey said. Huffman also put on dances in one of his barns about once a year. "You could
hear his tractor running sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning," Bailey said. "He really worked at it." On a
recent Indian summer day, Huffman walked around the grounds, stopping at each building, tractor and
wagon to tell a story about the old days. Felix Huffman was hired when he was 19 to run Hilltop Farm.
He grew such grains as corn, wheat and rye, raised livestock to eat and sell at market and harvested
timber. About half of the farm was timberland, Huffman said. In the late 1940s, the farm switched from
raising beef cows and hogs to dairy cows. "The farm had to run in the black," Huffman said. "There were
two or three times when he had to revert to selling timber to make it pay." Many of the buildings,
including the home that Conrad had built for Huffman, date to either 1934 or 1935. John Huffman lived
and worked on the farm until he was 22. When he was 5, his father made him mow the yards at the
family's house and the Conrad place up the road. "When I was 6, I was expected not to leave streaks,"
he said. As an older boy, he was put in charge of watering the sugar maples along the road. He would
pull a water tank loaded onto a wagon with his tractor to a 12-acre lake off Grapevine Road. After filling
the tank -- and taking a swim -- he would spend the next two days watering the trees. The wagon and
tank are among the old farm equipment that Huffman pulled out of storage and restored. His father kept
a lot of the old equipment including a few steel-wheeled tractors, several horse plows and a whetstone
used to sharpen axes. Huffman restored two tractors -- a 1921 Fordson and a McCormick-Deering,
known as Big Red, from the early 1930s. Both are steel-wheeled tractors that were retired when rubberwheeled
tractors came on the scene in the 1940s.
One of his next projects will be restoring a rusted 1950 Farm-all Model A tractor. Huffman has
placed some of the equipment where it sat when his father ran the farm. Other pieces of equipment look
more like garden art. Several horse plows line the driveway. An antique washing machine is a flower
container filled with pansies. The wood-sided outbuildings include a horse barn, dairy barn,
smokehouse, chicken house and a power plant that was later converted to a wash house and then an
apartment for his grandfather. Most of the buildings have tin roofs and are painted white with crisp green
trim. Huffman also restored his mother's stove and laid yellow pine floors in the kitchen.
Like his father, Huffman works well with his hands. He taught woodworking in high schools for more than
20 years, restored cars and built several homes along Conrad Road. He said he learned many of his
carpentry skills from his father. He hopes to repave the driveway, re-roof a few of the buildings and add
a fence. Passers-by have taken notice of the changes at the Huffman place. Some people have even
stopped their cars and wandered around the property. "It's brought real satisfaction to know that people
enjoy this," Huffman said. "One guy stopped to look at the red tractor just to enjoy it."
To see more of the Winston-Salem Journal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.journalnow.com. Copyright (c) 2006, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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