There are many places in the American Deep South that defy stereotypes. Randolph County, Alabama, is not one of them.

For example, Randolph County has the distinction of being the only county in the region in recent memory to have both a dog fighting bust and a cockfighting bust in the same calendar year. There’s still a Ku Klux Klan presence there. It’s the kind of locale where county commissioners, with no sense of irony, pose for official photographs wearing collared shirts and ties beneath denim overalls.

The population of Randolph County is about the same as it was a century ago: roughly 20,000 residents scattered across 600 square miles of remote East Central Alabama hill country, just short of the Georgia state line. Three-fourths of Randolph County inhabitants are white. Most of the rest are black and descended from slaves who labored on nearby cotton farms. The unwritten code in Randolph County remains that black folks and white folks don’t mingle. Among white adults, the two most distinct subpopulations are fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptists and moonshine-swilling hillbillies. Moonshine is popular in Randolph County not only because moonshine is cheap (about five bucks per mason jar), but also because the sale of alcohol is prohibited. The closest place to buy a six-pack of beer or a bottle of bourbon is two counties away in Georgia, 30 to 45 minutes by car. This particular drawback is a source of consternation for one of Randolph County’s latest and most unconventional (at least by local standards) residents, a transplanted Alaskan known thereabouts “the chicken lady,” or “the lady on the mountain.”

That would be longtime Anchorage-ite Jackie Carr, who until she moved to Alabama in early 2007 lived for more than a decade at Rancho Spenardo, the storied log compound just down the street from the Spenard headquarters of the Anchorage chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Since the late 1980s, Rancho Spenardo has been home to a revolving cast of well-known local artists, alternative rock promoters, underground ‘zine publishers (in the pre-Web era), body piercers, rockers and other neo-bohemians.

Carr ran the office at Surreal Studios, following jobs as Reservations Wizard (official title) for the now-defunct Fly By Night Club and night clerk at a porn store. Carr relocated to rural Alabama at the age of 38 to fulfill the same vision of life that once drew adventurous souls in droves to Alaska: homesteading.

She lives in a trailer with a million-dollar view atop the highest point in Randolph County: Pet Kittle Hill, elevation 1,400 feet, which was named after a prominent blacksmith who lived there in the late 1800s. Carr inherited the land in 2006. She’s dubbed it “Spenardo del Sur.”

“It’s not like I was itching to leave Anchorage. I love Alaska,” Carr says. “But no one was offering me free land there, much less 29 acres of it. I wanted the experience of working my own land and farming and living simply, and I had to come to Alabama to get it.”

Carr, who lives alone (or at least with no other people—her land is a bustling menagerie), documents her day-to-day experiences on her blog, Rancho Spenardo, which has developed a cult following in Anchorage and with a multi-state network of former Rancho Spenardo residents and left-leaning Southerners.

One of Carr’s favorite topics is her chickens. She keeps 20 to 25 of them at any given time. Daytime the chickens roam free; nights she pens them in a weatherworn, partially collapsed farmhouse aptly described on her blog as “Frankencoop.” Carr keeps a .22 rifle handy to defend her chickens from the occasional marauding raccoon, bobcat or fox.

The chickens are mostly escapees from the dozens of Randolph County chicken houses, independently owned sub-contractors who raise anywhere from a few hundred to as many as 10,000 or more birds per batch for industrial chicken processors like Tyson and Perdue.

Carr learned early on in her homesteading adventure that whenever a chicken house is preparing to transport a huge batch of chickens to a processing plant, a handful of the birds inevitably escape during the process of moving them from the breeding warehouse to semi-trailers.

“They flap away and get left behind, because it’s just not worth the time for commercial growers dealing with hundreds or thousands of chickens to chase two or three or four down, so they let me have them if I can catch them,” explains the chicken lady.

Typically the chicken house birds are ill-suited at first for barnyard living because they’re missing a lot of feathers (chicken house chickens tend to deplume themselves and one another). “I have to sneak up on them and spritz them with sunblock,” Carr says.

Her chicken rescue efforts should not be misconstrued as some form of animal rights undertaking. They’re a survival strategy. Carr gets by on a strict cash budget of 250 dollars per month, including utilities (Internet but no cable TV) and a maximum of 20 dollars per week for groceries, which mostly goes toward flour, sugar, baking powder and other staples.

“There’s not much worth spending money on around here, food-wise,” Carr says. “There’s no ordering Thai food out here. There’s no walking to the sushi place down the block. The closest restaurant where I’d even think about eating is a Subway about 15 miles away.”

Carr earns a little money here and there cleaning houses and providing home care for elderly neighbors. She also mines her land and its assorted buildings for artifacts she hawks on eBay. The old farmhouse has proved bountiful; she netted 50 bucks for a clay whiskey jug, 40 dollars for an outhouse seat. Her cash income, though, is less than half of the federal poverty guideline threshold.

Carr has dropped 50 pounds since leaving Alaska. Her slimming is partially a result of clearing land, repairing fences, hauling buckets of chicken feed from her trailer to Frankencoop and back, and tending her garden, where she grows tomatoes, corn, herbs and sweet potatoes. But the weight loss is also due to a sharp reduction in caloric intake. On such a limited budget, her chickens are a crucial source of food. She barters their eggs for apples and figs from nearby farms and consumes a diet heavy on eggs herself, following recipes from an 1886 issue of Progressive Farmer magazine for dishes such as Hardboiled Egg Pie.

Also, every couple of months she beheads a chicken with a hatchet given to her by a onetime Rancho Spenardo housemate, tosses the headless bird into a pot to scald its feathers off, and then butchers it and freezes the meat, which is ample. Carr’s free-range chickens are huge compared to grocery store birds. Last summer she harvested ten pounds of meat from a rooster that weighed 18 pounds when he got the chop.

“The first time I killed a chicken, I cried,” she says. “Now I’m calm, like ‘Okay, I’ve done this before.’”

Whenever Carr marches a chicken to the chopping block, a dozen or so of the semi-feral cats and kittens who live on her property come running, a bloodthirsty, mewling feline horde. After the deed is done they lap the spattered ground and stained log stump, then lounge in the sun, gorged and sleepy.

There exists among the cats and chickens on Carr’s land a sort of uneasy truce not unlike that between the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia in the California prison system. Though natural adversaries, both sides have sufficient numbers to make constant open warfare untenable for either. Yet every so often, a line is crossed, an insult delivered that demands blood atonement. Then Carr finds a torn-up chicken, or a cat with its throat gashed open by a rooster spur.

Animal corpses don’t go to waste on Pet Kittle Hill. Carr lets the elements, scavengers and maggots pick the bones clean, then bleaches them and mails them to her close friend, the Anchorage artist Angela Ramirez, who uses the bones in her artwork. (The maggots Carr gathers for chicken feed.) When a goat died on Carr’s property last fall, she entombed its corpse beneath a large wooden box for several months, then cleaned and shipped Ramirez the skull.

Carr and Ramirez lived together at Rancho Spenardo for ten years. A lot of their friends and acquaintances assumed they were a lesbian couple, which both clarify wasn’t true. “Our standard joke was that if she liked pussy more and I could tolerate Celtic folk music, we’d probably get married, but since she doesn’t and I can’t we’re just the best of friends,” says Ramirez.

Although Ramirez hasn’t visited Carr in Alabama, she’s a faithful Rancho Spenardo reader and stays in regular contact via email and phone calls.

“One of the biggest changes in her that I’ve noticed is that, obviously, she’s way more conscious of money. It’s not like back when she lived up here and I’d get on my bike and she’d toss me five or ten bucks to buy some beer or some take-out. Now five or ten bucks is a lot of money to her. Also, she’s learned a lot about growing food, which surprises me. Up here, her only part of gardening [at Rancho Spenardo] was digging. She was really into digging. The rest of it? Not so much.”

Ramirez describes her best friend’s lifestyle as “self-sufficiency to the max.”

“Sometimes I feel like Jackie is living the life we all should be living: Growing and killing what we eat. Not buying extraneous stuff. Not using a car much. Being super conscious about energy consumption and gasoline. I admire that.”

Although she respects Carr’s hardcore DIY ethos, Ramirez and others in Anchorage are trying to convince their friend to come home. “Every year when I get my [permanent fund] dividend check, I make her a standing offer to buy her a ticket and give her whatever is left over, with no expectation that it be paid back. So far she hasn’t take me up on it, but there are people who know and love her up here telling her, ‘Come on, you know you don’t belong in Alabama. Enough is enough.'”

Carr says that “about every other morning,” she wakes up with the same question on her mind: “What the fuck am I still doing here?” She misses her Anchorage social life. “I have no friends here. I’ve met no one likeminded, and there’s nowhere to go here but church. Once the sun goes down I’m stuck.”

But she’s not ready to leave just yet. At a minimum, she has to beat back the kudzu. An invasive, fast-growing vine native to Japan and Vietnam, kudzu has taken over virtually every swath of uninhabited land in the Deep South since government officials unwisely encouraged farmers to plant huge tracts of the stuff as a soil erosion control measure in the 1930s.

At present, the clearing at the crest of the hill where Carr’s trailer is located is a two-acre island in a green kudzu sea. She knows that if she abandons her post for even a year, she’d return to find the trailer consumed. (It’s hard to imagine how formidable kudzu is unless you’ve lived in the Southeastern U.S. It grows so fast you can practically hear it moving, like something out of a Stephen King short story).

Heavy machinery can get rid of kudzu in a hurry. But heavy machinery is expensive, so Carr doesn’t have any. Instead, she has goats. Six of them. Given enough time, goats are as effective as Agent Orange when it comes to defoliating. Carr’s goats have just about worked their way through the five acres in which they’re fenced. It took them about 18 months. At that rate, they’ll have Carr’s land cleared of Kudzu by late 2016.

“I need more goats,” Carr says.

The Pet Kittle Hill land has been in Carr’s family since the 1850s, but no one lived there from the early 1990s, when her grandmother moved into a nursing home, until Carr arrived more than a decade later. “I’ve worked too hard on this place to just take off and let it go to hell again,” she says.

Since moving to Alabama, Carr has alternated between working her land and researching her family’s genealogy, which fascinates her despite the fact that she was adopted. Carr first traced her family tree in Randolph County back to the mid-19th century and the purchase of the land she lives on now, then to North Carolina, where her ancestors owned land as far back as 1750, and then clear back to Wales in the 1550s.

Along the way Carr discovered that, like the punch line to a joke about inbred rednecks, she’s her own fourth cousin. “People in Randolph County didn’t get out of Randolph County much,” she says. “It was acceptable for cousins to marry and commonplace for second cousins to marry.”

Carr also found out that her grandfather was a bigamist, and she confirmed a long-held suspicion that her ancestors owned slaves. “I’m always happy finding skeletons in the closet,” she says. “Because I’m adopted, I think I can look at things like that more objectively that people whose slave-owning ancestors were actual flesh and blood.”

Two of the people that Carr’s family owned were George and Martha Smith, a married couple who were in their mid-teens at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. After the Civil War the Smiths rented land from Carr’s great-great-great-grandfather. Martha was famed for brewing choice apple cider. She and George are buried in a tiny black graveyard across a stark county road from a white graveyard. Every few weeks, Carr tends their graves.

“When I was a kid I wanted to be an archaeologist. I like unearthing things, whether they’re real, hard objects like arrowheads and rusted farm implements or family secrets,” Carr says. “Living here I’ve been able to do both.”

For at least the near future, periodic hardship is a price she’s willing to pay for the purity of homesteading.

“I’ve eaten nothing but fried bread and eggs for three to four days at a stretch, several times. One of those times I saw that a cat had caught a quail in the woods. I was looking at another dinner of fry bread that night, and I have to admit I considered stealing the quail from her. But it seemed too low to sink to steal food that she’d gone out and earned. Besides, quails are small. If it’d been a turkey I’d probably have taken it.”