THOMASVILLE — Emma Jean Williams Crocker, who will observe her centennial birthday on Monday, learned many years ago how to graft and bud her pecan trees. She was told that if the bud she prepared lived, she would live to see her tree bear nuts.

At 100, Crocker “keeps on budding,” children and grandchildren like to say about her.

Born Oct. 30, 1917, in Bradford, Pennsylvania, to Floyd Little Williams and Lucy Emmaline Rankin Williams, she grew up in Miami, Florida. Her childhood memories include sail boat races, camping on the beach, fishing in the Atlantic Ocean and adventures in the Everglades. Crocker recalls hurricanes from the 1920s and ’30s and recounts the storms in great detail.

On June 4, 1939, she became the bride of Jack Ivan Crocker at Allapatta Baptist Church in Miami. The couple moved to Thomas County in 1948.

To the union were born five children: Judith Crocker-Corbin, Thomasville; Eileen Crocker Hart, Odessa, Florida; the late Dr. Thomas Floyd Crocker, Tifton; Dr. Timothy Eugene Crocker, St. Augustine, Florida; and William Ivan Crocker, Albany.

Grandmother of 11 and with 15 great-grandchildren, Crocker has one great-great-granddaughter.

The eldest member of Thomasville First Baptist Church, she was a Sunday School and BTU teacher for 45 years, a member of the Young at Heart Choir, a 4-H leader and an adult literacy tutor. She has been a teacher and a farmer and volunteered at Archbold Memorial Hospital for 30 years and was a founding member of New Hope Community Center.

Widowed in 1972, Crocker continues to drive every day and checks on her 75 acres of pecan orchards, where her trees “keep on budding.”

Senior reporter Patti Dozier can be reached at (229) 226-2400, ext. 1820