Ethan received his father’s middle name.
Cedar was named after the trees near her parents’ first home.
Christiantha Rose became “Rose” after too many people misspelled Christiantha, an old family name.
Canyon was called “Baby” for the first few days of his life, until his nature-loving parents chose his name.
Isaac, the youngest, drew his name from his mother because she knew it was meant for him.
But the list of names started with Faith.
Faith Elaine Call was born 16 years ago, one year after Sherry and Brett were married.
“It took a lot of faith to have her, “ Sherry says. “We were just married and still in college.”
Now Brett manages Lake Cumberland for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Sherry works as a substitute teacher.
The couple pray with their six children every morning and before each dinner. They spend vacations from school working on their homestead, and they seem to always know what each other needs without having to ask. Each child — from Isaac, the family jester, to Faith, the family glue — fills a distinctive role within their home.
Since the day Sherry and Brett married, the conservation-minded Mormon couple knew that instilling teamwork, patience, positivity, resourcefulness and sustainability in their children would be their most important charge in life.
So, Sherry and Brett purchased a 27-acre farm in Somerset in late 2010, which they named Longwood Hollow. The couple wanted to give each child responsibility for something that would depend on the kids, so they bought 11 beef cows, two donkeys and a horse — even though the only scrap of farming experience the family could claim involved a beef cow Brett raised as a teenager. The family spent 2011 learning to run the farm by reading library books and talking to neighbors.
In a year of trials and errors, the goats tore down parts of the electric fence, the family’s first four pigs all died at once, coyotes attacked the new-born calves, and the hens pecked to death the farm’s only rooster.
But crisis offers opportunity.
“We’re not afraid to fail,” Sherry says. “We do it often. That’s how you learn.”
Longwood Hollow now entails 35 acres, 23 chickens, 17 beef cattle, eight goats, four pigs, three rabbits, two cats, a dog and one milk cow. But Sherry and Brett still dedicate most of their time to raising their children.
“Our family motto has always been ‘Save the world, raise good kids,’” Sherry says.
