“Dorothy sez she’s going to farm,” one of Dorothy Butts’ neighbors said with a snicker. That was in 1964 after her husband, Leroy Butts, died unexpectedly – three months after they moved to Eagle Lake.

Mrs. Butts didn’t know much about farming, but her husband had been one of the best. He was a “bale-an-acre man” when that was considered tops in cotton production, before pesticides and certain soil nutrients were available. When he died he had only a small field of cotton, for he had decided to go into raising cattle.

“I absolutely lost it” the year he died, Mrs. Butts said. And, though she was devastated, she struggled along, “trying to figure out how to survive. You would be surprised at the people who begin to bombard you as soon as there is a death in the family. So-called friends called me within a week wanting the land. People came trying to buy the equipment.”

Others tried to discourage her with advice and suggestions. But, to all, her answer was, “No.”

The property was more than the plantation on Muddy Bayou where she lived. There was also land at Floweree, and Mr. Butts had leased land on the Yazoo, some of the Blake property, and he had a 10-year lease on the land around the lake which he planned to stock with cows.

Mrs. Butts did pretty well with the cows until the flood of 1973. Her workers sandbagged the ditches, and engineers came and showed her how high the water was going to get, “and they were right. I got busy and hired somebody to put a levee around my house, including a tenant house and a cemetery. They didn’t shoot any elevations, and water got into my house, over the baseboards.”

But all was not lost: “My friend Melba Parker – there’s nobody else like her – called and said, ‘Water is fixing to get into your house.’ I had new carpets, and she said there was no point in letting them ruin.”

Mrs. Parker, who lives 5 miles beyond Mrs. Butts on Eagle Lake, arrived in a boat, rowed by one of Mrs. Butts’ workers, and together the two ladies rolled up the carpet, put it on an old iron bed above the expected water level, and, though the house was damaged, the carpet was saved.

There was also the equipment to worry about, housing the workers, and the cows.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I had cows that got trapped here and on the levee, which was dirt, not gravel, and it kept raining and raining. It wasn’t dry enough to even get to feed them, but Paul Barrett, bless he heart, got a barge and brought it to the levee, where the road crosses, and that’s where we fed them.”

Once it was dry enough, Mrs. Butts would load her truck in Vicksburg, drive up to Mayersville, which was the first place you could get on dry ground, then drive all the way around to feed the cows.

For a year, she lived in a mobile home on the place, and she decided, as to farming, “I’m just going to bring it back home and do it myself.”

“At that time, you used a lot of labor. It was not like you had big tractor that worked the whole place,” she said. Her workers had been wondering who would be the manager and, one morning, when they were all gathered at the gate, she walked out and told them, “I’m going to be the boss.”

“They all said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and it worked out pretty good,” she said. “I could speak their language and I guess I still do,” something she learned during the five years she ran a store at Valley Park and Leroy farmed – “the only time we ever lived outside Warren County.”

She learned farming the hard way, practically by a baptism of fire. Not long before her husband died, she told him, “You know, I don’t know what I would do if you died. And, he said, ‘You’ve got to learn to talk.’ You see, he was the talker, he talked all the time, and I didn’t talk, and he said, ‘If you don’t know something, you’ve got to ask.'”

“I remember that well,” she said. “I must have driven Hunter George (the county agent) crazy, asking him questions that he must have thought any stupid person would know.”

She also went to every meeting that might help her learn about farming. Her husband had belonged to a livestock association, so she decided to go to a meeting in Jackson. She wasn’t interested in their happy hours – she went to learn. There was only one other woman at the meeting, the wife of a farmer, and the presiding officer got up and urged the men to get their wives to attend a style show.

“I sat there and thought, ‘You nut. You might drop dead, and then what’s your wife going to know,'” she said.

The local farmers’ club always met at Redwood School where the cafeteria workers cooked supper for them. Mrs. Butts read that an attorney was going to discuss county zoning.

“Now, I know I’m old-fashioned, but I am against zoning. I don’t want anybody telling me what I should do with my property. I don’t tell them what to do with theirs. That’s my attitude,” she stated, all the more reason to go and hear what was to be said. She asked a farmer friend if it would be alright for her to attend.

“He turned red and said, ‘Yeah, Dorothy, come on, the ladies will be in the kitchen,'” she remembered, and when the speaker addressed the “gentlemen” in his audience, there was also one lady there: Mrs. Butts, who said she always had a knack for arriving on time, walked in just as the meeting began.

Something she helped change in the county was the farmers’ club meetings. Specialists came from Mississippi State to speak, but Mrs. Butts felt it wasn’t right, for black farmers couldn’t attend because of segregation, and women farmers weren’t welcome. She spoke out, saying it wasn’t right, and the meetings were moved to the court house.

She decided to get out of the cattle business and go back to planting cotton, adding a field at a time, when the federal government put regulations on farmers about what they could and couldn’t do.

“I always said if the government would leave me alone I could make a living,” she said. “But they won’t do it.”

Despite such regulations, she picked 1,512 pounds to the acre in one field and had a three-year average of 1,190 pounds, the highest in the county, for three years in a row.

During those years, she made history in another way. She was the first elected woman president of a Farm Bureau organization in Mississippi.

“Dorothy Butts has one of the longest records of service in the Farm Bureau,” said John Leigh Hyland, retired county agent, and she still has an intense interest in it. Hyland said he considers her to be at least 20 years ahead in her knowledge of the tax structure, something the state Legislature has never been able to understand.

“She’s a very independent person,” he said, adding that she has been a treasured friend both professionally and personally. “When Dorothy tells you something, you never have any reason to doubt it. You never have to worry about Dorothy being behind you, because she always led the charge. Her work with the Warren County Farm Bureau has given us a solid foundation. I feel so pleased to have had her on the board.”

She doesn’t farm anymore. At 89, she watches as Mitchell Willis farms her place on Muddy Bayou. She still laughs about the MSU specialist who advised another farmer, who said he wanted to grow cotton like she did, “Then do like Mrs. Butts. That’s all he said,” and another man who claimed her superior yield was because of her “ice cream dirt, but I had the same dirt he had.”

When others bought new equipment, she had hers repaired.

As a farmer, she said “I enjoyed the challenge and got to where I loved it.”

And to the man who scoffed at her decision to farm?

“I beat him by a mile,” she said.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.