A Dream Come True for Trace Adkins

Ever since he left his family’s cattle farm, he had fantasized about the day that he would be able to afford to buy his own farm.

When Trace Adkins first took his wife, Rhonda, to see a 62-acre Tennessee farm he wanted to purchase in Rutherford County a few years ago, she took a long look and exclaimed, “It’s a dump!”

“There was trash everywhere,” says Adkins, agreeing with his wife’s assessment. “It was an old dairy farm, and it probably hadn’t been worked in 20 years. It was an overgrown mess. It had three old, dilapidated barns. An old house had burned down out front. It looked horrible.”

But for Adkins, 42, it was his dream come true. Ever since he left his family’s cattle farm in Sarepta, La., (pop. 925) in the early 1980s to pursue his dream of becoming a country singer, he had fantasized about the day that he would be able to afford to buy his own farm. And finally, thanks to hits such as The Rest of Mine and Every Light in the House, he was able to see his dream become a reality in 1999.

“The place where I grew up in Louisiana backed up to a wildlife reserve,” he says. “I had thousands of acres of pristine woodlands and bayous and I just spent so much of my time out there. I never really wanted to go anywhere else. I was, quite frankly, intimidated by the city; my old man too. He never had any need to go to town, he always said.”

His father, Aaron Adkins, worked in a mill and instilled a dedicated work ethic in his young son. “There was always work needing to be done,” he says. “My father was a quiet man and you did what was expected of you, and there was no questioning his orders or suggestions. That’s where I learned the rewards of honest, hard work. You could always see the results of your efforts.

“That is one of the things that has always worn me out about the music business. I can work all day and at the end of the day, you look back and there’s nothing that you can stand back and say, ‘Yeah, I did a good job today.’ Working on a farm gives me that. I don’t feel like I put in a good honest day’s work if at the end of the day I’m not exhausted or dirty.”

A hard years’ work

There was plenty of opportunity for Adkins to get both dirty and exhausted after he purchased the run-down property five years ago. “Despite its condition, when I walked in, I could see the possibilities,” he recalls. “It had a little creek going through a valley and a spring coming out of a hill. I could see the hill was big enough to have a great view when a home was built onto it. I knew it was what I was looking for.”

After several years of hard work and a couple of dangerous accidents, it has begun to look like the showcase property the singer imagined it to be. A five-acre pond that Adkins dug with a bulldozer sits just off the two-lane entrance road. A new barn with a long front porch and small living quarters sits about 40 yards from the pond. Adkins, who single-handedly hauled off a ton of trash and cut a road, will finish building a two-bedroom guest house this summer, then move on to a 5,000-square-foot family home at the top of the hill.

Unfortunately, he’s invested more than just money. A tractor and a mule have rolled over on him while he was working on the farm, and his injuries have included a separated sternum, a broken leg and crushed fingers. “I’ve hurt myself bad out here. But it’s because I work hard. I still work like I did when I was in the oil field in my 20s.”

A long journey

Roughing it also comes naturally to the former Louisiana Tech University football player. At 23, Adkins took a pipefitting job on an off-shore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He also sang in a gospel quartet that recorded two independent albums in the early 1980s.

While working at sea, he played his guitar and sang gospel and country songs. A fellow worker introduced him to a band in Lafayette, La., that hired Adkins as its singer. Against the wishes of his mother, Peggy Adkins, he quit the gospel group and joined the country band, which toured widely before breaking up.

Adkins returned to oil-rig work, but, as a final stab at country music stardom, he sold his house and moved to Nashville, Tenn., in 1992. He worked construction jobs during the day while singing at night. He was performing in a small, blue-collar honky tonk in 1995 when a Capitol Records executive discovered him.

“This (career) is a hobby that got horribly out of control,” he says. “It has made my life so much better and sweeter and I’ve experienced things that I never would have had a chance to experience. If it ended today, this has been the coolest thing. These last seven or eight years have been the highlight of my life.”

His goal now is to spend as much time on his farm as possible as he finishes it and begins adding horses and cattle. “That piece of ground is really therapy for me,” he says. “It allows me to put everything into perspective and just get back to nature and a good honest day’s work. It is just absolutely a necessity for me. I couldn’t imagine my life without that escape.”

He also sees the effect the farm has on his relationship with his father. “He’s still got a farm he works, and it would drive him crazy to come up here and be stuck in the house,” says Adkins, who lives in a Brentwood, Tenn., (pop. 23,445) house about 25 miles away. “Now when he comes to visit, he’s irritable until we can get out here to the farm. He just wants to be on the land with his muddy work boots riding on a tractor. He absolutely loves this place, and I’m just like him.”

His wife, Rhonda, and the couple’s two girls—6-year-old Mackenzie and 2-year-old Brianna—now love the place, as do his two teen-aged daughters, Tarah and Sarah, from a previous marriage. “We cook out and fish. The girls ride the four-wheeler and the mule. They love it out here. They’re always talking about getting the house built, so we can all move out here and make this our home. It’s where I plan to spend the rest of my life.”

Michael McCall is a freelance journalist in Nashville, Tenn.

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