Eva Lee Smith Cooper and Wolf Pen Mill Farm
Wolf Pen Mill
The one hundredth anniversary of her purchase of the mill and a few adjoining acres is approaching this fall, and we are making plans to celebrate her accomplishment with the Cooper family, her descendants.
A recently widowed young woman with three small sons, she left Tennessee in the fall of 1925 to come to Kentucky, and—perhaps by happenstance, perhaps through advance planning—found that the old mill was on the market.
She bought it for an undisclosed sum without ever seeing the interior; the current inhabitants barred her because the mill smelled so strongly of the bootleg whiskey they had been making there during and after Prohibition.
They thought she would have been scared off, but I doubt it. She’d already been through her husband’s unsolved murder in Tennessee.
Not long after buying the mill, she moved her sons to the farm, building a substantial house connected to the rudimentary log cabin on the bluff over the mill. That’s where the former owner and millwright, Butterbean Miller, had lived with his family; he was called Butterbean because that’s what he raised in a patch of ground beside the mill.
The house Eva Lee built for herself and her sons is substantial still, with a country farmhouse beauty that has received the polish of time.
Little by little, she bought adjacent parcels of farmland as they came on the market, and by the end of her life, she left her sons around two hundred acres of forest and grassland surrounding her house and the mill. She is buried in the Cooper family graveyard, deep in the woods.
Myths accrued around her as they do around all exceptional women: that when she drove to town, the local telephone operator called her neighbors, warning, “Watch out! Mrs. Cooper is on the road!” because she drove down the middle line.
Or that she didn’t postpone a long planned trip to Europe although her barn caught fire just as she was leaving.
Or that she expected a handyman she’d hired to ride horseback with her from her gate to the house although he’d never been on a horse before.
She raised three solid sons who in turn have produced grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I hope they’ll all be with us in September to celebrate what she accomplished. Perhaps we’ll be able to run the waterwheel—if there’s enough water in Wolf Pen Creek—and grind bags of yellow cornmeal for the guests.
Eva Lee must have faced all kinds of problems but she persevered. Because of her, I was able to buy Wolf Pen Mill Farm and put it into conservation easements.
All hail Eva Lee Smith Cooper and all women who persevere.
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