At 95, Coffee County Man Recalls a Lifetime Farming

Coffee County’s Frisco community.
At 95, Ray Sanders has a long memory. He spent decades farming peanuts, cotton, and corn and raising cattle. While he has turned much of the farming over to his sons, he still runs a tractor, bush hogs the fields, and drives his pickup truck.
He wakes up early even though he doesn’t farm like he used to. Sanders takes little medicine. He admits his weight is low because he just doesn’t have the appetite he once had — although he likes ice cream, and in the evenings he eats an egg sandwich with pepper.
There’s no big secret to his longevity. “I’d say that I’ve never been still,” Sanders says. “I don’t sit around a lot. I never have, except for a ballgame. I love a ballgame.”

People are surprised when they learn his age or hear his birth date, often asking him to repeat it. Sitting on the screened porch of the home he shares with his wife, Theda, Sanders can easily recount details others have long forgotten.
He was born in Goshen on Oct. 30, 1929, to Junius and Estelle Sanders. He was a twin and 1 of 9 children born to the couple. He and his identical twin, Roy, were in the first grade — 7 years old — when their family moved from Goshen to Andalusia in 1936.
“Bought 120 acres, Daddy did, for $3,600,” Sanders says. “Our biggest crop in Andalusia was cucumbers.”
Sanders remembers helping build a community church with timber provided by his father and others, and riding mules to a large tent revival when he and Roy were 12 years old.
He remembers how his family used oil lamps in their Covington County home. They couldn’t get electricity because a neighbor didn’t want poles on his land.
“He was a good man, very good, but he would not let the light company put poles across his land for a year after we moved down there,” Sanders says. “He said the poles would scare his mules.”

peanuts.
The family moved again when his mother inherited 185 acres in Coffee County’s Frisco community. It was 1944, and his father sold the family’s Covington County farm for $4,400.
Sanders finished school in 1948 and started farming. Along with 2 older brothers, he joined the National Guard during the Korean War, all 3 serving at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. When their father fell ill, Sanders’ brothers convinced him to take a hardship discharge and return home. He was eventually drafted back into the Army and reported to Fort Benning for 2 years while a younger brother managed the farm.
Once his military service was done, Sanders returned to farming.
In 1956, he married Theda, starting their life together with $900 in savings. They built their home in 1961 — the same year their daughter was born — and made a life on the farm.
They have 3 children: Tim, a member of the South Alabama Electric Cooperative Board of Trustees, daughter, Jan, and their younger son, Mark.
Back then, the average farm was 150 to 200 acres. Peanuts were stacked in the fields. Most farmers used two-row equipment. Sanders used mules — whose speed increased when they heard the dinner bell ringing back at the house — until he bought his first Ford tractor.
The price of farmland in Coffee County was reasonable by today’s standards when Sanders purchased land in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. At 1 point, Sanders had more than 600 acres. He even bought the original 185 acres his mother inherited, writing a check to each of his living siblings for their shares.
Farming wasn’t easy, by any means, even as he moved from two-row to four-row equipment. The 1980s brought the worst drought Sanders ever experienced in farming, but they hung on as the same decade brought some of their best profits and allowed Sanders to buy more land.
“We worked hard, but it really wasn’t that bad,” Sanders says. “The days were good, and it seemed like everything went smooth.”
Sanders’ father died in 1965, and his mother passed in 2002, 3 months shy of her 103rd birthday. Ray’s twin, Roy, died in 2012. All of his siblings are gone except his younger sister, Louise.
Ray and Theda say they feel blessed their children chose to remain in the area. Tim now lives on the land Ray’s mother inherited. Mark lives near his brother, and Jan lives about 1½ miles up the road. Most of the farmland is divided among the 3 children, although Sanders is hanging on to some of it.
“I’ve got 140 acres — I’m going to keep that,” he says.