Peninsula In Passage

Copeland Farm The secret of Lucille Copeland’s legendary watermelon pickles? The melons grown by her family on land that is now Harbour View. They raised Queen Anne melons specifically for their thick, almost two inch, rinds that went into the 1000 pints she made each year. They had, according to Copeland, 92, the sweetest taste ever. Lucille and Thomas Jefferson Copeland met when he came to work at her father’s mill and store in Windsor, North Carolina. She was 17 when they married a year later. She remembers the Depression in North Carolina. When I was growing up I saw homeless people walking with all their belongings tied to a pole in a bandana or piled in a cart. My father took a part of the corn meal as payment for grinding corn and traded for hams, cottons, chickens. We had a constant line of people begging for food and shelter. In 1943 Lucille,Tom and three young daughters moved to Bennett’s Creek with little farm experience and scant money but plenty of drive and determination.They rented 64 acres from what was called “The Poor Board,”The Richard Bennett Trust, and grew their farming operation to 3000 acres on land owned by Chicago Bridge and Iron Company as well as land owned by Jodie Matthews in Respass Beach. Lucille Copeland, who started keeping a daily journal in 1979, says, we raised every vegetable and animal you could mention and ran a dairy . Folks from Huntersville worked on the farm – as many as 20 peanut choppers. Some years we didn’t make enough money to pay the bills so we’d have to go to the bank and borrow money. Farming is the biggest gamble in the world but I always enjoyed the work. We lived in an old house on the property, weather-boarded with three chimneys and hand-hewn lath. When we moved in

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Watermelon rind pickles