Harford Legacy Farm Commemorative Book

Harford Legacy Farm | 32

Current Owners: James Arch Phillips Jr. and Mildred Phillips Original Purchaser: James R. and Dora F. Phillips Current Acreage: 120 Current Agricultural Products or Services: small grains Preserved, Century Farm (MDA) Phillips Family Farm est. 1898 - Street, MD

Local farmers, and the neighboring farmers all came together at harvest season and they moved, they worked together, from farm to farm to do the threshing and what have you in particular or the silo filling or whatever. But during, the late 1930s, my father had the vision to realize that when during the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration in the mid '30's when the Soil Conservation Service first came into play, that gave him the opportunity to apply to be a demonstration farm for soil conservation procedures. That gave us access to personnel who were housed at the CCC Camp at Black Horse to lay out the diversion terraces that are still here and very functional, as a matter of fact. There are three of them across these hills. James A. Phillips, Sr. was milking cows until sometime in the 1960s and he always said that he milked night and mornings for the last nine years. During WWII, we were at a point in time when, as everyone knows in Harford County, the agricultural Labor force was drying up, particularly for small farms, and at that point, he sold the cows. He went into beef farming and, ultimately, leased the land for crops in later years. My grandfather built the barn on the property after they came here. So that got built between about 1898 and 1900.

James R. Phillips 1868 -1929 Former County Commissioner

James A. Phillips, Sr. loading hay with great nephew driving tractor (1960)

They also laid out the contour strips for strip farming. I recall vividly I could not have been more than 7 or 8 years old at the time, they're up on the hill here above the house and I know, I remember distinctly there was a field of alfalfa and I was with my dad and there were two very distinguished looking souls there and surveying the land and looking to see what was going on. When we got back to the house after they left, I said, "Who were they?" Well, they happened to be Henry Wallace who was at that time Secretary of Agriculture in the Roosevelt administration and the other one was Louis Bromfield who had developed Malabar Farms in southeastern Ohio as a model of what can be done to reclaim land. (Excerpts taken from Harford Living Treasure transcripts - Dr. J. Arch Phillips, Jr.)