Granddad Eller buys new land to farm west of Deerfield - now known as Parkland
Granddad Hoyt Eller with a fresh $,3000 in his pocket from selling the land that is now Quiet Water Park for $15 per acre was ready to farm on land that was not so rocky. So he looked west and found some cheap property which is now called the City of Parkland. The soil was friendlier there, so he was able to clear the land and plant his first crops of green beans and peppers. Labor was a problem, however, since the Butlers (Essay No. 2) and another new farm family, the Jones brothers, Alvin and Emery from Georgia, were soaking up all the laborers needed to work the farm.
Granddad was in a crisis. His crop was planted yet he didn’t have enough labor to harvest it. Desperate, he came up with an idea: he would offer 10 percent of his farm produce to be “shared” with laborers who would agree to pick the other 90 percent!
Suddenly the word got around and laborers came out of the woodwork. Silvia Poitier, our former mayor, former county commissioner, and current city commissioner, was a young teenager at the time. She has shared with me that once the word of my Granddad’s “deal” spread throughout the community, she and her friends jumped off the other farmers’ labor trucks and onto my Granddad’s trucks to go to his farm and be “partners” with Granddad. Thus Granddad Eller came up with one of the first business profit-sharing plans, and it worked.
Granddad prospered and soon built one of the largest homes in Deerfield. It was a five bedroom house on the west side of Dixie Highway about 100 yards south of the Hillsboro Bridge. It had a big white clapboard porch on the front with screened windows, and a huge living room with a fireplace located next to Granddad’s piano which, many years later, he played for all of us grandchildren. I remember as a child that on Sunday afternoons the family would gather around granddad’s piano and he would play gospel music and sing tenor. My grandmother Mattie would play the banjo and sing soprano, while my father, Marlin, played the guitar and sang bass. My mother, Lorena Horton Eller, had the best voice of all, in my opinion, and sang strong alto. This is how we spent many a Sunday afternoon in Deerfield in the old days.

David Eller