Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 24, 2010
Johnson Family Farm shows visitors views of agricultural heritage
Erica Tuggle
The walls of the Cookie Jar Café in Dalton are lined with over 300 cookie jars that the family has collected over the years. Manager of the café, Sue Ann Lockhart, and her two sisters Peggy and Bonnie started the café and began the tours of the farm and functioning dairy farm on site in 2001, when the Johnson Family Farm was in danger of being sold.
- Erica Tuggle
For many years, farms that grew food, sold the products and handed down the land a family owned from generation to generation was how many in the country survived. These days, the families who make a living off farm life have dwindled so much that they have almost disappeared.
Yet one family has refused to let go of their farm and have adapted its functions as a link to our agricultural heritage and a great place to get away from the bustle of the city. The Johnson Family Farm in Dalton, Ga., is less than an hour’s drive from Chattanooga and features a petting zoo, a fully functioning dairy, breathtaking views and “The Cookie Jar Café.”
The mission to save the family farm from being sold began in 2001. Sue Ann Lockhart and her sisters, Peggy and Bonnie, weren’t ready to let the farm go, and made sacrifices to prove their dedication to the legacy about to be sold.
Lockhart was in college at Middle Tennessee State University at the time, her oldest sister Peggy was working at a bank, and her mother and middle sister, Bonnie, were both teaching school. Everyone quit their jobs, Lockhart quit school and they all came home to pull the effort together.
At first, they planned to do field trips of the farm for local schools and a simple snack shop. Yet the community came together and asked the sisters for something more because of Lockhart’s grandmother, Ruby Johnson, whom everyone called “Mamaw,” and her famous farm-made lunches.
“Everyday at 11 o’clock, everyone knew that lunch was at Mamaw’s house so all the people in the community and all the people working in the fields would come eat,” Lockhart says. “They all wanted us to steer off that and that’s what we did.”
Since Mamaw taught her granddaughters all she knew, most of the recipes used in the Cookie Jar Café are of her creation. Lockhart, as the owner of the café, and her staff shred their own cabbage for slaw, use fresh chicken tenders and fresh chicken livers, everything is battered in-house and the meatloaf, desserts, cornbread and rolls are homemade.
The name Cookie Jar Café comes from the many porcelain containers all along the upper shelf of the restaurant. A cookie jar shaped like a toaster, a watermelon, Mighty Mouse, Fred Flintstone, Little Red Riding Hood and the Rock City Birdhouse are just a few of the over 350 jars that have accumulated in this one café.
The middle Johnson sister, Bonnie, started the collection with 200 of the jars, and once the restaurant was built and everything was being moved around, everyone agreed they only wanted to move that many cookie jars one time, and so they remain here today. What’s more is that the collection keeps growing by three or four jars each month as customers bring in jars from relatives that have passed away and create a memorial of sorts to them along the top shelf of the café.
During the tour season, from Easter to Halloween, many schools and church groups from Chattanooga and surrounding areas come to see the offerings of the family farm. Lockhart says that 75 to 85 percent of her clientele is from out of town, and some drive a long way just to eat and take in the view. For the tours, a covered wagon takes groups on a hayride to the barn. There is the petting zoo where guests can feed and pet the baby animals. Then there is the operating dairy farm, one of two in the entire valley.
The cows at the Johnson’s dairy farm are milked twice a day, every day. Groups are taken down to the dairy after the milking is done and shown how the equipment works, the process of milking and where the milk is kept. With the milk truck running every other day, sometimes the groups can see the process full circle when the truck is onsite pumping the milk into the truck, where it is sold to Dairy Farmers of America, a distributing plant that sells the milk to whoever needs it that day.
One of the biggest things Lockhart says she thinks guests get out of their visit to the farm is the ability to get out of the city for awhile. The view is also a year round spectacle, with snow on the mountains now, all the bright colors in the fall, and in the spring, red buds blooming all the way down the mountain. The view itself allows a look all the way to Marion County. Looking out into the surrounding mountains, visitors once more connect with the agricultural ambiance that our country rose from and stands upon today.
For more information on the Johnson Family Farm, visit www.johnsonfamilyfarm.com.
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