For Angie Lenox Mallery: Home is where the farm is

Precious memories. Those power lines were ruining the bluff of her youth, but taking electricity to her family’s new home on an old and familiar piece of land on the farm. Soon to be her farm.

Change is constant on Lenox Farms, located between Salem and Rolla.

Angie grew up on the farm, loving the land and the life. She was her dad’s right-hand daughter, learning the cattle business and how to ride a horse at an early age. She heard daily of the historic Lenox legacy and was now, 25 years later, becoming a big part of it, making the move back home from the Dallas-Fort Worth area where she was raising a family.

Ken needed an heir to keep Lenox Farms going. All fingers pointed to Angie.

The Lenox line can be traced to a Scottish clan that settled in the Ozarks. About 700 acres are documented in the property abstract as being in the Lenox family since 1838.

Before that, in 1821, her great-great-great grandfather David Taylor Lenox bought land contracts for some of the land that makes up part of Lenox Farms. That was 40 years before the Civil War. There has been a Lenox on that ground ever since.

“Farming families know a unique definition of tradition,” Mallery wrote in one of her blogs around the time she moved back to Missouri. “I am amazed and often scared to death when I think about how I am one of the main people responsible for the future of the tradition and the history behind my family farm.”

Without a doubt the family farm is not the hard-scrabble acreage the early Lenox settlers started working over 200 years ago. Each heir made his – and now her – improvements. The Lenox name is synonymous with cattle ranching in this part of the Ozarks.

Lenox Farms is comprised of 1,650 acres and has over 100 miles of fence, 45 cleared fields and 40 ponds. They rent another 700 acres, and the cattle herd numbers about 300 cow-calf pairs. They cut hay, too, and decades ago had charcoal kilns and a hog operation to help pay the bills.

“When I was growing up, I never really thought I would do a return to the farm, succession plan – take it over – but never ruled it out,” says Mallery of becoming the sixth generation to see over Lenox Farms.

Angie Lenox Mallery

Thanksgiving at Lenox Farm. There might not be a better metaphor that demonstrates how much the homeplace means to Mallery and all of her family. Up to 100 Lenox descendants, their families and friends, from near and far, show up at the farm each year to celebrate family and offer thanksgiving.

“We have a tradition; running the bales,” Mallery said one day in August as she gave this visitor a tour of Lenox Farms. Then she explained. . . .

Five-foot high round bales are lined up in single file, about 12 deep. The kids, and likely some adults, too, have races on top of the bales. Minor injuries were many, but major injuries few. These days they call those sorts of activities bonding.

“I was born a Lenox,” Mallery wrote in a blog. “Daily we remember our ancestors and recall history when we identify areas of the farm like the Burkitt Place, the Via Hollow, the Old School House Pasture and the Tombstone Pasture. We have a few places where grave sites and broken stones mark an unrelated family cemetery plot. Many old foundations and filled-in cisterns mark homesteads, and several really rudimentary wells mark underground springs. Non-native, non-wild flowers that pop up in the middle of pastures mark an old flower garden.”

As Mallery drove the 2006 Dodge Dakota up and down the rocky, washed out, jaw-jarring trails around Lenox Farms, it was easy to see in her the love of the land and the pull of the Lenox legacy, which has been engrained in her since, well, the day she was born.

On her return to Lenox Farms, she wasted little time learning and getting involved in the community. First was the Dent-Phelps County Cattleman’s Association, of which Ken was a long-time member. Wurdack Farm. The Intercounty Electric Coop board of directors. As of this moment the chuck wagon that feeds the Rolla High School marching band is parked in husband Mike and Angie’s driveway. The Mallerys coordinate the huge undertaking of feeding the band when it’s on the road.

“It’s been a great way to really immerse myself in the community,” she says of her involvement in those organizations.

Angie, 55, has two sisters, Paige Lenox George of St. Charles and Karrie Lenox Brooks of Athens, Alabama, and a brother, Hamilton Lenox of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. All three were born and raised on Lenox Farms and graduated from Rolla High School.

“I was the oldest,” Angie says of her and her siblings. “It didn’t matter that I was a girl. I was put to work on the farm. When I was learning to walk, I was learning to ride a horse. At the age of 8, dad presented me with a beautiful chestnut mare. She was a halter-broke, two-year-old who was average-size for a fox trotter, and her name was Duchess.

“Her feisty spirit first became evident when I rode her on a longer ride into the middle of the farm. The three riders were my dad, my older cousin Kennard and myself. When we entered the first open pasture, there was no longer a confined environment. Duchess saw the open pasture in front of her as freedom. First, she danced me in a circle and then she took off at her top speed, which was crazy fast to me. I was able to stay on her but unable to slow her down. It took both Kennard and dad to cut her off, one rider on each side. Dad reached out with one arm, grabbed the halter reins near her head and brought her to a stop.”

Mallery didn’t shy away from horses or hard work on the farm then or thereafter. When Ken needed a hand, she was a farm hand, and it didn’t matter if they were hauling hay, checking on a new-born calf or cleaning a stall.

“My dad kind of treated me like a boy. I was just another farm hand a lot of times, and he'd wake me up on the weekends and say ‘let's go move this herd, get on horseback,’’’ Mallery recalls.

She says it comes as no surprise that at a young age she became “assertive, or ‘bossy,’ as my siblings would say. . . . Being assertive, outspoken and even intimidating will get you places, when done with the right amount of skill and professionalism.”

Mallery has apparently taken advantage of all of the above. After graduating Rolla High School in 1987, she went to college and pursued fashion merchandising and retail management. While working in St. Louis, she met and married Mike Mallery in 1997, and they remained in Ballwin for 10 years. Angie became a stay-at-home mom, “because the babysitter fell through,” she says, “and it just felt better to be at home.”

She didn’t stay home long, taking advantage of her leadership, bravado and hard work learned on the farm to have a successful career in the corporate world as a merchandise manager, then in human resources.

Mike’s career led them to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they stayed until 2014. That’s when they made the decision to move to Lenox Farms. Home.

“We are a tight family, very close to my parents,” Angie said. “And the five years that we lived in Texas, we would come here at least three times a year, and Mike started getting involved with the farm.”

The Mallerys invested in the herd in the 1990s, thinking, well, one of these days. . . And one of these days came in 2014. There is a world of difference between metro Dallas-Ft. Worth and the quiet hills of the Ozarks, but in Angie’s eyes, a good difference.

“There are little conveniences that, yeah, for sure, I miss,” she said. “But gosh, technology, ordering things online, and it's like a 12-minute drive to Rolla. It's just not ever been something that I worried about or missed much.”

Being back in a rural setting has its benefits.

“There's a lot to be grateful for, because you've seen the changes in our society. So honestly, sometimes it feels like safety, sometimes it feels like community that's more willing to support each other, a community that understands without judging as much and just a more vibrant people,” she says.

“People don't understand how small towns can be just as full of the arts and theater, and county fairs like we go to. I mean, honestly, that's one of my favorite days of the year, going to the livestock auction at the county fair.”

The Mallery family

Mike Mallery has had a career in finance, and thanks to remote work, is vice president in a loan department, specializing in loans for large construction equipment. He has an office in front of the home they built on Lenox Farm.

“He has the best of both worlds,” Angie says. “We needed that to happen in order for us to move back. And it did happen, and the transition couldn't have really gone more smoothly.”

And the girls?

Jessica is 25, RHS Class of 2017; Kate is 22, RHS Class of 2020; and Savannah is 17, three years a drum major for the band and soon to be RHS Class of 2025.

The girls went through a lot of change with the move, but no one was impacted more than Angie. She went right to work where she had left off 25 years before. In a year’s time her and her dad repaired 10 of the 100 miles of Lenox Farms fence, quite an accomplishment. “To say we completed over 10 percent of fencing goals sounds good. . . just 90 more miles to go,” Angie recalls with a big smile and a bit of a laugh.

Almost like part of the family is Kevin Shaw, who grew up on the farm as his dad, Bob, worked fulltime for Ken and his father, Hamilton Wilson Lenox. Kevin is Lenox Farms’ only full-time employee, but dozens of hired helpers are in and out of the farm during the year, cutting hay, feeding and herding cattle, all the things it takes to produce cattle.

When you talk to Angie Mallery about Lenox Farms, you can see the love and respect in her eyes. Her favorite time of year? “September, because on our farm the babies are being born, sometimes more than 10 a day.” The grueling hours? “Life on a farm means being on call all hours of the day and night,” she says. How did she catch up on 25 years’ worth of changes in agriculture? “I took (University) Extension classes,” she quipped.

The family history, her legacy, if you will, drive Angie.

Speaking of drives, Mallery loves to talk and write about how cattle drives evolved in the Ozarks. She remembers hearing about the kind of cattle drives you see in old westerns. As a youngster, her grandfather, Hamilton Wilson Lenox, would wait at the same spot every day watching for the return of his older brother, David Taylor Lenox, and other cowboys from their cattle drives that lasted weeks and covered multiple states. He wanted to be the first to see them return. That was over 100 years ago.

There was another cattle drive, 60 years later, when Lenox Farms was in a drought year. Her grandpa, now a man running Lenox Farms, was moving all his cattle off the farm. The horseback riders for this relatively short, five-mile cattle drive are three teenagers: Angie’s dad Ken, his older brother, Taylor and his older sister, Kristine. Ham Lenox helped from his truck as the 65 head of cattle maneuvered down county roads, meandered into private yards and crossed paved highways, Angie wrote in another of her blogs.

Another cattle drive, 35 years ago. A 13-year-old horseback rider who learned to ride on a chestnut mare named Duchess is the only help Ken Lenox has. The two riders cut across the farm on well-worn trails to reach a herd of 125 head of cattle.

Cattle drives have gotten a lot shorter, and most of the time now they use trucks or ATVs or just walk, but they are still cattle drives and a big part of raising cattle.

“Gone are all the horse trails and stuff you had to do,” Angie says. “It’s, I guess, easier. Like hayfields. We've got so much big equipment now, and instead of the square hay bales, we've got four-foot by five-foot round bales. I couldn’t tell you how many round bales that we do. You wonder how you did that many square bales years ago.”

It’s still hard work. And at times dangerous. In 2022, workers in the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting industry had one of the highest fatal injury rates (18.6 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalents), compared to 3.7 deaths per 100,000 FTE for all U.S. industries, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

In 2021, Angie’s mom Joyce, who still lives on the farm, posted on Facebook that “Angie got rolled and stomped on by a new heifer momma and is bruised up badly, but after an ER visit yesterday, no broken bones.”

While attempting to put an ear tag on a bawling calf that her dad, Ken, had caught, the momma got “unusually mad.

“As she lowered her head and pawed the ground, Kevin called out my name,” Angie relayed. “He stuck out his right arm to protect my head and the cow charged her head at my head. The blow knocked all three of us – me, Kevin and dad – off balance. Dad fell to the ground, out of the way thankfully. I fell backwards rolling up into a ball. The momma kicked me over and over like a soccer ball until Kevin was able to distract her again. Somehow, I managed to rise off the ground and move to his side. It all happened in about 15 seconds.”

Over the years Kevin and Angie have tagged hundreds of calves in the pasture, using caution, and without getting hurt.

“This was a situation that neither one of us would have put ourselves in. We would not have been there if not for one thing — my dad had a ‘foggy’ moment,” Angie remembers.

There were more foggy moments to come for Ken Lenox.

Ken Lenox

Winter of 1963. America’s president was assassinated. Civil rights violence. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ken Lenox was a Marine in Cuba. Actually, the Cuban Missile Crisis had been mostly settled, but tensions were still high and U.S. soldiers were on deployment at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

One dark night, Lenox was on patrol along the wire with 30 men. The wire was the outer fence where there was a road, Angie Lenox writes in one of her blogs. On patrol you didn’t get too close to the fence or the road, so as not to be seen. Lenox was a field radio operator and was carrying the radio backpack. After leaving the base, the patrol went up and down hills, across a stream or two and made a multitude of turns.

Someone eventually asked, “Where are we?”

Lenox, an old hand at finding his way through woods, across streams and often in the dark, went to his lieutenant and asked what was going on. He was told that none of the compasses were working. They were lost.

Everyone was lost, that is, except for Lenox. The lieutenant told Lenox to fall back in line. A few hills and creeks later, the captain rethought the situation and said, “Send Lenox up.”

Lenox led the way back to the base, remembering every turn, every creek, every hill just like they were making their way through Ozark hills and hollers. There was no official report on Lenox’s heroics, of course, but his reward was to get every request for leave he made the rest of his time in Cuba.

Ken Lenox, born April 24, 1943, took over the family farm from his father, Hamilton Wilson Lenox, in 1977.

Lenox Farms didn’t always look the way it did in 1977. Decades before, Missouri forests were decimated, streams were filled with gravel and deer and wild turkey were scarce. Missourians didn’t want it that way, especially those in the Ozarks, and the Missouri Department of Conservation was formed and with help from people like the Lenoxes, turned things around.

Before the rivers filled in, Dry Fork, which runs through Lenox Farms, once regularly flooded the much of the acreage that is now pasture and hay fields. Dry Fork Creek doesn’t flood much anymore, but those early floods left behind some of the most fertile soil in the Ozarks.

There is more to Lenox Farms. Five natural springs are located throughout the farm. The ecosystem is “amazing,” Angie said as she pointed out one of the springs.

All of this was home to Ken Lenox his entire life, except for his time with the Marines and a year as a charcoal consultant in South America. He spent many a day telling and showing Angie the history of the old home place. The old Walker home. The one-room schoolhouse that was a mile south through the woods.

“My father was a generous steward of his forefathers’ land,” Angie remembers. “One of his legacies is all the improvement he made. He transformed more than 1,000 acres of raw Ozark land filled with rock and trees to produce more than 650 head of cattle. His father only had a herd of 60. He transformed a few hayfields and rough forest into thriving, diversified grassland pastures that produce hay and sustain our herds.”

Ken graduated from Rolla High School in 1961. In September that year he left the ranch and headed for Santa Ana, California to begin his military service, including a trip to Vietnam. He received the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal.

Ken returned home to the farm in August of 1965 and settled into ranch life once again.

“He was a great ambassador for the beef industry,” his obituary reads, “serving as a longtime member of the Cattlemen's Association and the Beef Industry Council, speaking for a few years as a regular on the NPR Marketplace series, and even starring in two documentaries.”

Lenox served as Phelps County commissioner for 18 years. He was a member of St. Patrick's Catholic Church, a Rolla Lions Club member for over 57 years and served on the Phelps County Bank board of director for 30 years. Lenox was a board member of the Soil and Water Conservation Commission for 30 years and was a 4-H project leader for 15 years.

Angie had big shoes to fill, and that’s an understatement.

Who’s the boss?

“I’ll pick you up in five,” Ken Lenox would tell Angie when she moved back to Lenox Farms in 2014 and was re-learning her way around the property and the duties of a cattle rancher.

“When this started happening, it hit me that one day I will be the senior,” she recalls. “I'll be the one making all the calls.”

Angie became the boss gradually, as dementia, day by day, took a bigger toll on her dad. They went through the process of a succession plan, and over a 10-year stretch, she got ready to run the farm.

Taking the reins is never easy. When Ken was taking over the day-to-day operations of the farm from his father in the 1970s, there were many struggles between the two of them. Angie’s grandfather didn’t want to give up being in charge, she says. In 2022, Angie and her mother saw history repeating itself as they experienced those same difficulties with Ken. But there was another factor.

Ken was diagnosed with dementia, which led to delusions and a rapid decline in his physical abilities. But Angie had almost 10 years to learn from Ken the daily operation of the farm. As the succession plan played out, she was able to spend quality time with him, gaining much more than just a working knowledge of the farm.

One morning she asked Ken how many people he had mentored. With dementia a factor, he was slow to respond, so Angie started naming names. They talked the rest of the day about what Ken meant to people. They came up with 20 people in no time. Then 20 more. On the list were kids that Angie and her siblings brought to the farm, all the 4-H youth who had Ken around as project leader and peers in the business. Conservationists. Government officials. Economic developers. Civil engineers. Media organizations. Guest spots on National Public Radio. The list went on and on and on.

At age 78, Ken was still making the rounds with Angie almost every day, mentoring as they went. But as his dementia got worse, 79 and 80 were some tough times, though Angie promised herself and her dad she’d carry on.

Kennard "Ken" Robert Lenox passed away on Monday, Oct. 9, 2023 at the Missouri Veterans Home in St. James at the age of 80.

For Angie, there have indeed been some big shoes to fill, including being the first woman to run Lenox Farms.

According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, women accounted for 36% of the country’s 3.4 million producers. More than half of all farms, 56%, had a female producer, but only 9% of farms were run entirely by women.

“My dad was very patient and generous, and he knew that as a female there would be some challenges,” says Angie. “My aunt, (Kristine Craddock) who was his oldest sister, was one of his closest confidants at times, and he confided in her. She shared with me later that he was uncertain that I could do it. She told him ‘yes,’ I could do it.”

And she’s done it.

On a normal day she’s up and out with the sun “because you want to see the cattle before they get to the shade.” Likely that is a lesson learned from dad. Look at all the herds. Check the corrals. Need salt block, mineral fly dip? “Every day is different,” Angie says. “There is a lot that goes into cattle farming. Animal agriculture is so much more than feeding animals to feed people. At its core, it’s about loving working with animals in a way that is completely different from owning a pet.”

Not long ago, neighbor Greta Vogel worked cattle with Angie. Vogel, a member of 4-H and FFA, was 15 at the time. Maybe Angie saw a little of herself in Vogel.

“After we had finished moving the last of the calves through the head shoot and the other workers were putting the herd back out to pasture, she and I were cleaning up the supplies,” says Angie. “She asked me, ‘What do you like most about working cattle?’ My first reply was longish and boring. Then it hit me. I said to her, ‘It’s the end. I like the end when I can see the calves join their mommas and start nursing, when I know that no one got hurt and when I can finally relax my tense body.’”

The mentoring that day would have made Ken Lenox, his father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father and so on up the lineage, proud of Angie. She says it best. “When I held the property ledgers in my hands and looked at the history of my family, I realized my roots were too deep not to do this.”