The family farm is bigger than I thought!

Now for the mind-blowing information about the Barefoot Family Farm that I promised in the overnight hours today.

When I established the boundaries of the farm some time ago (it appears below as well as on page 65 of my book), I placed it at 45 acres.  This was because I figured it was as big that a farm could be if it did not have modern equipment and was for subsistence purposes.  Also, it reminded me of the "40 acres and a mule" that William Sherman, famous U.S. general of the American Civil War, promised to give African-Americans after the Union won the war and took over Southern lands.  Of course, that promise was famously broken (just ask Spike Lee).

That's how things stood, until I visited this online global information systems (GIS) site maintained by Johnston County, NC.  Originally, the purpose was to see the attendance boundaries for the middle schools there, including the Meadow School which has played a small role in my storylines before.  (This also checks which specific addresses are within those boundaries.)  Before long, I noticed that one of the tabs is labeled "Measure."  With that, you pick points and the GIS program calculates the acreage within those points.

So I drew a perimeter around the Barefoot Family Farm and got just a little under 65 acres - 20 acres, or about one-third, more than what I had published.   Probably not exactly the right size for a subsistence farm, but of course B.W. can always give away some of it to friends or neighbors who need it.  Or B.W. can just expand the property to include more hunting space and maybe a mud bog for Hambone and her friends.  That's the photo below this paragraph that I created this week, and the software came out with 596 acres. (Red is the real-life plot of land generated earlier at 2118 Barefoot Road [8 acres], blue is the current farm [45 acres], and yellow is the possible expansion.)

Meanwhile, I also measured Camp Paradise in Stricklands Crossroads, Hambone's second place of business, as seen in the next picture and also page 53 of the book. According to the GIS software, it is actually roughly 525 acres, not the 210 I published previously - well over twice the size!  Also notice that the water features, unlike the pond I made at the Barefoot Family Farm, are real - the Harold W. Lees Pond Dam and Stone Creek.