Today we’d like to introduce you to Allison Milford.
Hi Allison, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
After graduating high school in 1998 from Forsyth Central High School in Cumming, GA. I went to the university of West Georgia with a small scholarship and hope and a prayer God had other plans for me, I didn’t stay long and was married at 19 years old and had my Baby Girl at 19 and turned 20 a couple of months later! I did end up going back to college and becoming a nurse. My husband Brantley and I have now been married almost 25 years! That was a whirlwind! We now have two children, Mallory 23 and Jackson 19. Throughout the years, I stayed busy working while raising my children and volunteering my time with them and their extracurricular activities for instance, my son played youth football and I was very involved and even started a competitive feeder youth football club thru my alma mater high school at Forsyth Central High School. I was the only female director in the North Metro Football league and had our coaches go thru Heads-up football training thru USA football and scheduling testing for all of our players at Georgia State College to have baseline testing as youth football players for concussion awareness and proactive treatment and evaluation. My daughter and son both completed many volunteering hours with me and both obtained their gold presidential service awards before they were 15 years old. As a nurse I have worked in many fields from pediatric nursing, home health, hospice, correctional nursing, and managed care with multiple large health insurance companies. We have lived on my husband’s family farm since we were married. We took the farm operation over in 2016. We began adding our own twist at the family farm in Cumming, GA.
During our time at our family farm, we continued to be a cattle farm and added photography for professional photographers to use our farm for their clients photos, and soon began doing weddings! At our old farm, we ended up with over 300 photographers annually coming thru out the year to use the farm. We have had several larger boutique companies use our farm for photography for their catalogs and social media with photographing their products there such as Matilda Jane clothing reps, Savannah Bee Honey Company, 2 Sony music recording artists, amateur movies filmed there and even Netflix location scouts looked at our property for multiple filming opportunities. As the last years went by, a very large county park was built behind us, hundreds of homes began to border our once beautiful, serene pastures, and more projects at the neighboring property were proposed and passed. At this point, we realized we needed to sell the farm and relocate it to a more rural and quieter area that would allow us to continue our agricultural and agrotourism business. I was able to hire a surveyor to subdivide our old property into six larger size estate lots and we sold the property independently. We have now for the last year been located in Talking Rock, GA (Ellijay, GA) line in Gilmer county. I have rebranded our new location and we are rebuilding our wedding venue here! We are The Heritage at Milford Family Farm and cater to events, weddings, and of course, the love we continue to have of photography and helping our community.
My kids, husband, and I jumped feet first, leaving everything we knew to be here. We joined the local chamber of commerce, and I was finally able to join a local nonprofit that had been a passion of mine for so long. I took the CASA training and was sworn in the Appalachian Juvenile court Circuit as a child advocate. I have also created a social media page for sharing any volunteer opportunities in my county and the two surrounding north Georgia counties around us. I’m continuing to build our business and volunteer in my community and support and network with other small businesses around us. Our new farm is a passion for me personally as I hope to grow it to share the love of agriculture, events, and family with others for not only my family and generations to come but for anyone we meet. I love inviting people to our farm and to meet our family as I love meeting others and learning all about their own life journey and story! I always tell everyone once we have met or spoken, “welcome to the family” and “Welcome to your farm”! I see everyone I meet on this life as a true friend and remind them, they always have a family to come to when they need! My passion and legacy in this life is not to be known by everyone, but to have hopefully, made a positive, impactful, difference in just one person’s life! I will always continue to spread the love of volunteering and my family to anyone I get the pleasure to meet!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, it has not been a smooth road always. As a teen mother, it was hard. I was married in April 1998 and sadly lost my best friend and Daddy in August 1998, just 4 months after my wedding! He was 46 years old and died five days unexpectedly after a surgical procedure from a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung). I was seven months pregnant with my daughter and my father did not get to meet his 3rd granddaughter. Now he would have had 12 grandchildren. After the birth of my daughter, my daughter needed specialized, very expensive formulas. No one guided us on assistance and we definitely were at the poverty level financially. We somehow made it thru, it was hard. I’m in a way thankful for the weeks of my husband and I surviving on beans and Ramen lol, because we knew we had to make it work,for her. We delivered newspapers, and took extra jobs where ever we could to always make a way to provide for our family. We had to pay the health insurance premiums and her expensive formula and again did not know we would have definitely qualified for assistance, but no one guided us thru any of that process. But it made us work harder and I worked thru college and worked weekend nights so we didn’t have to pay for daycare. I would meet my husband on Monday mornings on his way to work to get my daughter after I had been working the night shift in registration at the hospital so he could go to work during the week.
I would stay up until her nap time and then in the evenings would work on school or take her to my sister’s house or my mom’s for a day class! It definitely took a village but we got thru it! My husband’s family was small and his grandparents, my children’s great grandparents, were still alive at the time and they got to spend a lot of time with them growing up. My husband’s uncle who had been in an accident in the 1970s and was a quadriplegic due to his injuries, also lived with their great grand parents, the kids adored their great Uncle Rupert, as we did as well. Mallory my daughter and Jackson Grew up riding on the back of Uncle Rupert’s motorized wheelchair thru the old farmhouse! They learned to can vegetables and garden and make lots of birdhouses and woodworking things with their great grandpa Hulet Milford and Grandma Jessie Lee Milford! They learned to dry apples and hang them in pillowcases on grandma’s front porch, and learned how to make her fried apple pies! It wasn’t easy always but we learned a lot and thru it all, the lessons in life molded me and my children and husband into who we are today. The most difficult challenge in my journey happened in 2017, a few heartbreaking circumstances occurred in my marriage and our family. I had to learn forgiveness, endurance, strength, and humility very quickly. I had to fight my way back mentally and physically in the years to follow. I had to practice forgiveness in a way I never ever had to in my life. In 2019, my father n law unexpectedly passed away. We sold our family farm in 2021 and relocated it to where we are now, here in Talking Rock, GA! Life hasn’t always been easy, but when we focus on the positive on doing life the best we can and always striving to be the best we can for ourselves and for others we can get thru anything!
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are a family-owned business and an agricultural farm that also happens to host weddings and events on our farm as part of agrotourism. We are proud that we are 4th generation farmers and still keep the importance of agriculture within our family. We would like for you to know, we are so thankful we get to use the beauty of our property and the timeless traditions as well as new ones we have learned thru the years and share them with you and your family. We are thankful we get to help you create the most amazing memories for your most memorable wedding and events. We love providing our service of event styling and direction and offering that to you for each event we are allowed to be a part of.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
As a small business owner and someone who has always strived to network and encourage others to create and become what they dream of, I always search out for others networking and also who encourage and cheer others on. I’m always researching great self-help books and audiobooks or conferences and seminars and aligning myself with people who want to help me reach the goals I want to see myself obtain. Having an open mind, not competing but instead learning from others, is the biggest advice I can give others. When we stop trying to “out live” or “be better” than others, we truly win! When you truly have a heart of wanting to understand and listen to others in the like areas of your life, then you will succeed and be a better version of yourself always. Learning that we are never too old to learn and that others can always help us be a better version of ourselves will always help you become the best version of who you want to be.
Pricing:
- Our prices for events begin as low as $175
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theheritageatmilfordfamilyfarm.com
- Instagram: Theheritageatmilfordfamilyfarm
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theheritageatmilford
