Hinton Mills at 100 — Life in a Small Town

A Look Back at Hinton Mills and the Communities We Serve Through the Eyes of our Customers, Employees, Suppliers and Friends

Pictured from left, are: Ronald Lawrence, manager at Hinton Mills’ May’s Lick Mill, Buddy Cropper and Bud Hinton.

Buddy Cropper

“The early bird gets the worm,” might be Mr. Buddy Cropper’s favorite saying, and it would be tough to come up with a phrase that better fits the way he has run his farming operation over the past 60 years.

Born in 1935, Mr. Cropper grew up in May’s Lick, Kentucky, and after a two-year stint in the army, decided he wanted to return home to the farm.

“They were going to send me to OCS, and I said, I want to tell you something. I’ve had a boss for two years – I don’t want to be bossed the rest of my life. I’m going back to May’s Lick and farm.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

He’s had a lot of success, likely due in large part to the fact that he has never been afraid of hard work.

“When I was 75 years old,” he said, laughing, “I could hang the bottom rail of a tobacco barn and keep up with the best of them.”

It wasn’t long after he bought his first farm that he started looking to expand. “When I went to FHA to get an operating loan (for that first farm), the guy there told me ‘ain’t no way you can ever pay for that farm.’ Within three years, I’d bought two more.”

That means when May’s Lick Mill was built in 1968, Mr. Cropper was already running a large and successful operation. With the store being less than a half-mile from his house, it was natural that he became a customer.

“They were always accommodating,” he said. “It was awful handy for me.”

Hard work and innovation eventually led Mr. Cropper to become one of the largest producers of burley tobacco in the state. In 1980, he sold more than 50,000 pounds of tobacco through the Maysville, Kentucky market in one day, which at the time was the highest one-day total for any individual ever at that market.

“Mr. Cropper was always the earliest one to do everything,” said Ronald Lawrence, manager at May’s Lick Mill. “First one to put out his tobacco beds, first one to set, first one to cut – everything.”

Being first comes naturally to Mr. Cropper. Not only was he the first to get his crop started every year, but he was the first one in the area to sell float plants – which he purchased out of Florida, and he was the first farmer in Mason County to use Hispanic migrant labor.

Initially, Mr. Cropper used workers from Eastern Kentucky when he needed more help than he could source locally.

“They stayed in the basement, they took a shower in the milk house, and my wife cooked them three meals a day,” he said. “They were Brickles — Virgil, Vangil, Larry and Hank were the ones who helped me the most. They stayed up here all week, and I’d take them back home on Saturday night. They lived in Soldier, right above Morehead there.”

Mr. Cropper and his wife, Mary Catherine, also had four children. “My wife taught school for 27 years, and we had four kids who liked four days of being four years between them,” he said.

His daughters both married into farming — one son-in-law farms in May’s Lick, and the other farms in Robertson County. His sons went into transportation — one is a boat captain for Crounse, and one drives a truck.

Besides raising tobacco, Mr. Cropper has farmed thousands of acres in the area, owned multiple dairies, and at one time, ran a successful replacement dairy heifer business. He has had a major influence on agriculture across the area.

We asked Mr. Cropper for advice he might have for a young person who wanted to get into farming today. Do they have to start out with a larger farm? More capital?

“Not necessarily,” he said. “You’ve just got to be efficient at what you do.”

And, if we were going to learn from his example, be the hardest working early bird out there.