U.S. President Donald Trump helped a farmer’s widow clear her debts to keep her farm in Georgia after her husband committed suicide to stop it being auctioned off.
In September 2026, a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. President Donald Trump helped a farmer’s widow clear her debts to keep her farm in Georgia after her husband died by suicide.
A long text about the alleged act of kindness circulated on Facebook. It began:
On a February morning in 1986, a Georgia farmer named Leonard Hill walked out of his house twenty minutes before the bank was set to auction off his land. He never came back inside.
He took his own life that morning, believing his life insurance policy would cover the debts that had buried his family. It did not come close.
Leonard left behind a widow.
Annabel Hill was 66 years old, and the farm her husband died trying to save had been in her family for five generations.
Years of drought had wiped out the crops and the income that came with them. By the time Leonard died, the family owed the bank more than $300,000. His death did nothing to change that number.
The auction was still coming, and Annabel was now facing it alone.
That fall, an Atlanta businessman named Frank Argenbright heard what had happened to the Hills. He did not know the family. He simply decided that a widow in her sixties should not lose five generations of land because it stopped raining. So he started making phone calls, looking for anyone with the money and the will to step in.
Those calls eventually reached a New York developer whose name the Hill family had never heard. Donald Trump was 40 years old and building his reputation in Manhattan real estate.
The same text and claim also circulated elsewhere on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and X (archived). Snopes readers contacted us asking whether Trump really saved a Georgia farm.
The claim was true. According to reports at the time in reputable news outlets such as The Associated Press, Trump helped fundraise for Annabell Hill, a farmer’s widow whose husband, Leonard Dozier Hill III, died by suicide in 1986 trying to save his fifth-generation farm through his life insurance payments.
Some details, like exactly how much money the Hill family owed, the exact size of the farm and how much money the fundraiser collected varied between reports, but what appeared consistent was that Trump and a Texas farmer named Tom McKamy contributed a vital final portion of the fundraiser, allowing most of the land to stay with Hill’s family.
None of the parties to the story have publicly refuted the reported account of Trump helping to save the Hill farm. Trump and Hill’s daughter, Betsy Sharp, shared the story during a campaign rally in 2016.
Snopes attempted to reach the McKamy family and Sharp to confirm the unclear details of the story and await replies to our queries.
Trump, Texas farmer provided vital funding
News outlets including The Associated Press and Time magazine reported in September 1986 that the Hill family farm was due to be sold at auction on Feb. 4, 1986. However, 20 minutes before the auction was scheduled to start, Leonard Hill fatally shot himself, hoping his life insurance payment would be enough to cover the farm’s $300,000 debt and keep it in the family’s ownership. The payments were not enough, and the bank collecting Hill’s debt scheduled another auction for Sept. 2.
However, the AP reported that Trump spokesperson Norma Foerderer told the outlet that Trump stopped that second auction by offering Hill $20,000 up front and pledged to help fundraise the remaining $173,000 needed for the family to keep the 705-acre farm.
By mid-September 1986, Time reported that Trump, working with Frank Argenbright Jr., a Georgia businessman who helped Hill bring her cause to the public, had raised about $77,000 and hoped to raise about $100,000 more.
The AP reported in December 1986, that the fundraiser ultimately reached $187,000. The news agency United Press International reported, citing a Trump spokesperson, that Trump had contributed $39,000, which was half of the $78,000 in missing funding after public donations, and McKamy had contributed the other half.
The New York Times reported a year later, citing Hill and Foerderer, that the auction had ultimately saved 715 acres of farmland. According to that article, the fundraiser reached $180,000 with an additional $5,000 raised in legal fees. Trump reportedly contributed $46,000.
Snopes contacted the White House Press Office and the Trump Organization to confirm the correct fundraising figures and await replies to our queries.
Trump’s own account
Trump included his account of helping save Hill’s farm in his memoir/business advice book “The Art of the Deal,” published in 1987. Trump wrote that he had seen Hill’s story on the news and “was moved.” He said he contacted the bank that held Hill’s mortgage which told him it was “too late” to save the farm. Trump wrote (pages 4-5):
That really got me going. I said to the guy, “You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.” All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me.
Sometimes it pays to be a little wild. An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Trump.” Mrs. Hill and Frank Argenbright told the media, and the next thing I knew, it was the lead story on the network news.
By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. [Radio personality Don] Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners. As a Christmas present to Mrs. Hill and her family, we’ve scheduled a mortgage-burning ceremony for Christmas Eve in the atrium of Trump Tower. By then, I’m confident, we’ll have raised all the money. I’ve promised Mrs. Hill that if we haven’t, I’ll make up any difference.
Trump made good on his promise to carry out a “mortgage-burning ceremony” by Christmas 1986. AP photographer Richard Drew captured Trump and Hill holding a burning piece of paper aloft in front of a Christmas tree on Dec. 23, 1986.
Trump showed another photo from the 1986 “mortgage-burning ceremony” to attendees at a campaign rally in Augusta, South Carolina, on Feb. 16, 2016, before bringing Hill’s daughter Betsy Sharp on stage. Sharp praised Trump’s generosity, who described (at 16:15) his fundraising as: “I paid off her mortgage, big deal, right.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s political columnist Jim Galloway wrote in 2015 that Hill’s son, Leonard Dozier Hill IV, “still lives on the farm that Donald Trump saved.” Snopes asked Sharp whether anyone from the family still lived on or worked the farm at the time of this writing and await a reply to our query.
For further reading, Snopes previously investigated a number of acts of kindness that Trump reportedly carried out.
