Buddy Neal

When Ralph “Buddy” Neal and his family abandoned their century-old farm due to the soon-to-be rising waters of the new J. Percy Priest Lake in 1964, they lost much that was dear.

Besides the fertile fields and green forest that were swamped by the backing up of Stones River, Neal saw the home where he was born and nurtured go crashing to the ground by the power of the big, yellow bulldozers.

While he holds no bitterness toward the Army Corps of Engineers for the job they had to do, he clings to the opinion that the loss of their farms – their heritage – hastened some of the agrarian patriarchs toward early graves.

“Several older men died instantly after the lake came in. My daddy, her daddy,” says Neal, 80, referring to his father and his wife’s father. “I think they grieved themselves to death.”

The 200-acre farm had been in the Neal family 10 or 20 years before the Civil War. Half of it was crop land and half woods, but that was half a century ago. Today, 80 percent of the property lies beneath Percy Priest Lake.

“All of the cropland is under the water. Some of the woods is in Long Hunter Park,” said Neal, who lives on Couchville Pike in the northwest corner of Rutherford County, about two miles as the crow flies from his birthplace.

“This is as about as close to back home as I’ll ever be able to get,” he says.

Neal had just remodeled his house and created a Grade-A dairy farm when the family had to move off their land in April 1964. He estimates that another 40 to 50 families were displaced from the Couchville community at the same time. This was less than a year after construction had begun on J. Percy Priest Dam.

The dam was completed in 1968. Today, the 42-mile long J. Percy Priest Lake covers portions of Davidson, Rutherford, and Wilson counties and boasts 213 miles of shoreline.

“The Corps started talking about this stuff several years before. They came around appraising property. They told you what they were gonna give you. If you took it, it was fine. If not, they would give you 90 percent and 10 percent went to the court. If you took it to arbitration, the jury was three federal judges. You knew how that was gonna come out,” Neal said

“We didn’t get much for our property, $600 an acre, but the farm we purchased really had better facilities. That had to be the providence of God.”

At that time, Neal farmed about 300 acres, some of it leased land, and had a 20-acre dairy farm and a new milking parlor for his herd of 40 to 50 Holstein and Ayrshires.

“But what can you do? Knowing you’re gonna have to move and not knowing where you’re gonna find another farm. That’s scary,” he recalled.

“I looked as far away as Lynnville [in Giles County]. This one just fell in our lap,” he said of the farm he eventually found in Smyrna.

But the move was stressful at best as Neal’s father had just had surgery for colon cancer and was in the hospital when the day of exodus arrived.

“I milked my herd of cows over on Stones River that morning and had trucks come in and move them to the other side of Smyrna and milked them there that night. Then, after I finished milking, I had to move furniture out the same day.

“I went from a parlor where I could milk four at one time and then had a barn with a stanchion where I could do six on one side. It was a brand new ball game for the gals and me,” he said.

Before relocating, Neal salvaged two of the log cabins on his father’s farm. One was the smokehouse, which he restored in his backyard, and the other was his grandfather’s “office,” which he gave to a friend. “I was gonna lose it. They were bulldozing and cutting ‘em down,” recalled Neal.

His reflections upon the first time he saw what was left of the home place after everything had been leveled? “It was sad. You couldn’t hardly recognize it after it went down. Every house and barn was a landmark, but they were gone.”

Lost family farm aside, Neal considers himself a blessed man. He and his wife, the former Mary Thadelle Alexander, have four children (sons Ralph and Randy and daughters Lisa Crowder and Vicki Evans) and seven grandchildren, who all live in Rutherford County.

“We grew up together, lived in the same community and went to church and school together. We dated four years and have been married 58 years,” Neal noted of his better half.

Thadelle’s family, like her husband’s, lost their fertile farmland to the lake. She grew up on Alexander Bend, aka Horseshoe Bend, on the Stones River. Her parents relocated to a house in Murfreesboro after giving up the farm, a place her father never got used to.

For the first eight grades Neal and his siblings attended Morrow-Headden school, a two-room, two-teacher school. The family farm originally sat in Rutherford County, but at some point before Neal was born the property had been transferred into Davidson County.

“Somehow Daddy got the county line moved so his children could go to a Davidson County high school,” said the 1952 graduate of Donelson High School.

Neal’s father, Charles Augustus Neal, kept dairy cows, raised hogs and grew crops of corn, hay and cotton.

“We milked cows and plowed with mules before we got a tractor. I plowed corn with a riding cultivator. My job as a kid was to drive the mule that pulled the hay fork as we put hay up in the loft. We used to grow sorghum and make molasses,” he recollected of his growing-up years.

“We always killed several hogs every year, four or five of ‘em. If a hog didn’t make lard, Daddy thought it was a crying shame.

“My mother cooked on a wood stove till we got electricity. She cooked biscuits every morning, and made a hot lunch. That was it. Then the stove went cold and supper was cold.

“We were the end of the line and about a mile from the closest house. Neal’s Ford Road went back to the farm. There was a place where you could ford Stones River but that’s all under water.”

Neal and his wife were baptized in Stones River at a site called Wallace Beach. That location also is permanently immersed by the waters of Priest.

(Neal’s grandfather, Ralph J. Neal, was born in 1841 and died in 1915. While serving in the Civil War he was wounded five times and fought in battles at Fishing Creek, Kennesaw Mountain, Franklin, Murfreesboro and Nashville. Neal’s great-grandfather, Theodore A. Honour, also served with the Confederate army, and Neal has copies of letters that his great-grandfather wrote to his wife during the Civil War.)

After graduating from high school, Neal worked at AVCO for four years and then served in the Navy as a storekeeper on the USS Barton (DD-722), a destroyer stationed in Norfolk, Va.

In the midst of his farming days, he attended the Murfreesboro School of Bible and Preaching and then taught there. He has been preaching for more than 50 years and has served as a minister at the Stewart’s Creek, Vesta, Walter Hill, Rock Hill and Corinth churches of Christ, and he continues to preach every fourth Sunday of the month at Corinth, where he also serves as an elder.

Neal gardens, enjoys picking guitar and woodworking and has made about 15 mountain dulcimers and has given them away except for the one he plays. He also loves fishing on Couchville Lake and hiking the trails of Long Hunter State Park.

“Buddy is invaluable,” says Thurman Mullins, the recently retired manager of Long Hunter State Park. “His recollection is just tremendous. He knew everybody here and grew up in a time when people knew their neighbors, helped their neighbors and cared about their neighbors. That background really provides anybody who visits with Buddy to know what times were like before J. Percy Priest Lake came into being.

“People show up at the park and get maps and want to see where their families used to live. Some were trashing the Corps. Buddy’s the only one when asked if he had a bitter experience, who said, `Naw, we actually got a lot better farm than we had.’

“I’d see Buddy several mornings a week, and he would be toting his rods and reels and buckets and stuff. He got around like a young man. He knows about Percy Priest and Couchville Lake better than anybody, I guess. To sum him up, he’s the kind of person that people need to be like. His main goal is to get to heaven,’’ said Mullins, who worked for 30 years with Tennessee State Parks.

Neal returns to Long Hunter, not far from his house, often to walk and remember things the way they were.

“I guess the thing is you realize that it is gone. I’d like to see Percy Priest drained. I’d just love to walk over it again. Too many people today don’t have any roots,” says the thoughtful man who clings to his own even though they lay buried deep beneath the waters of the lake.

Published in: Wilson Post