Wythe County: Reflections of Farm Life Traditions

By Linda H. Logan and Town of Wytheville Department of Museums

Though there are more automobiles than harvesters on the roads these days, folks in Wythe County, Virginia, keep their memories and traditions preserved in these conversations with the local twentieth-century farmers who spent their entire lives working this land. Visit with James Kegley, a fourth-generation
farmer discussing his family s cattle and poultry drives to the train in Wytheville, and Agnes Eades as she shares stories about the night before butchering day for the hogs; join Fred Etter as he remembers the first tractor he ever saw and June Huffard as she talks about her dairy farm. Picture the days when starting the plow meant cracking the whip and Wythe County was the
Cabbage Capital of the World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781625843432

Linda H. Logan

Linda Logan is the Coordinator of Education with the Town of Wytheville Historic Department of Museums. Over the past decade, she has taught English at Northern Virginia Community College, Lord Fairfax Community College, and Wytheville Community College. In 2004, she spearheaded the Wytheville Oral History Project, which led to a spinoff publication funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities on the county�s catastrophic polio epidemic of 1950 (now in its second printing). She is a resident of Wytheville, Virginia.

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INTRODUCTION

Wythe County, named for George Wythe, a distinguished Virginian and first signer of the Declaration of Independence, is located in the southwestern edge of Virginia and has long been home to many fine farms. The cool climate, high elevation and abundant rainfall create near ideal conditions for pastureland and raising livestock. Forested mountains rise above fertile valleys, well watered by abundant springs and the tributaries of the New River, Reed Creek and Cripple Creek. Today’s farmers are predominantly descendants of early settlers who realized the value of the natural bluegrass pastures and limestone-enriched cropland. In general, migrating German families from Pennsylvania settled the western part of the county, and the Scots-Irish families settled the eastern end of the county. There were a few English families scattered among them. By the mid-nineteenth century, Wythe County had become well known for its outstanding cattle, its beef for the markets in northeastern cities and England and its milk products for the eastern seaboard.

Today, farming is still a primary business in the county. This is evident when you drive on Interstate 81 through Wythe County and experience the pastoral beauty of the mountains and valleys of productive farmland. There are 946 farms in Wythe County, according to the latest agricultural census (2007). Approximately 45 percent of the land is used for pasture, 33 percent is in cropland and the remaining land is in woodland or other uses. But change is rapidly occurring due to the exorbitant costs of modern agricultural machinery, fertilizers and labor. Small farmers in particular are selling their farms and turning to other ways of making a living. At this same time, there is a growing movement toward local farmers’ markets offering fresh produce for sale. In the early twenty-first century, there is great concern about food safety and high transportation costs of delivering food to distant markets. Fortunately, niche markets are opening and doing well, and some farmers see this as the future of agriculture in Wythe County. Vineyards, sources of pasture-fed beef, apple orchards, pumpkin fields, Christmas tree farms and nurseries continue to gain popularity.

A typical scene in rural Wythe County: cattle grazing on the Ernest Groseclose farm. Courtesy of Ernest Groseclose.

A cornfield at harvest time on the Ernest Groseclose farm. Courtesy of Ernest Groseclose.

Roxanne and Harold Watson in a pumpkin patch on the Watson farm in Max Meadows. Courtesy of Clyde Watson Jr.

The farmers’ voices included in this book represent only a fraction of the farming population in Wythe County and offer only a brief overview of agriculture in the area since settlers’ days. Hopefully, this book will spark many more conversations on the significance of agriculture in our county, while at the same time celebrating the county’s rich agricultural legacy. In these conversations with a sampling of Wythe County farmers, whose genetic roots can often be traced back several generations, one soon feels their strong sense of place and a deep physical and emotional connection with the land. The farm means home in the broadest terms; an irreplaceable center, embodying traditional American ideals in the lives of individuals working in rhythm with the seasons. For many farm families here there is no other true home, especially if their ancestors lived on the land before them.

Generations farm together on the Groseclose farm. Ernest is second from the right. Courtesy of Ernest Groseclose.

In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, a local family’s survival depended on the quality of their stewardship of the land. It was well understood that the land must be carefully managed in order to sustain the productivity of the soil for the sake of future generations, and in general, it was assumed that the next generation of farmers would follow their parents’ example of good stewardship. This vital connection with the land often assumes a spiritual dimension, as Virginia Sharitz, a farm wife, notes:

In the long run we’re just the caretakers. But there’s nothing like getting up in the morning and hearing the birds sing and having your cup of coffee back there in the sunshine or looking out over the hill in the winter and seeing the snow come drifting down.

Taking care of the land requires constant attention to detail, beginning with the quality of the soil. Crockett Cove farmer Joseph Kelley was appointed by the governor to the Virginia Soil and Conservation Commission in 2000. He helped teach other local farmers how to conserve the topsoil. At first, he recalls, few were receptive, but with time they came around, having seen results on a neighbor’s farm. Kelley remembered the Dust Bowl era, when big clouds of dust were blown all the way to Virginia from the Midwest—images he never forgot and which motivated him to help raise awareness of soil conservation locally. A reference to the difficulties of the Great Depression period was also made by farmer James Kegley:

I might mention the drought of the early 1930s, the drought plus the depression. That was a very low point—I mean, cattle when they moved around, they just kicked up dust, any month in the growing season, where grass was supposed to be. So to feed them, Dad bought oat feed. It seems to have been the cheapest thing that was available. It was shipped in here from a growing country. I don’t know exactly where, but that’s what kept us going through the summer. We made a little hay but not much. I was only ten years old at the time but I remember it well.

Wythe County was classified among the agriculturally more prosperous counties of the state in the Economic Land Classification bulletin in 1949 from the Agricultural Experiment Station in Blacksburg. The agricultural soils in the county are almost all derived from, or influenced by, limestone and/or calcareous shale, and they range in quality from fair to excellent, with the average being good, particularly well suited to pasture grasses, food and feed crops. The Rural Retreat–Crockett section in the western end of the county is one of the best areas of soil, along with the soils between Wytheville and Max Meadows on the eastern end of the county.

According to Kelley, Wythe County’s soil appealed to the German settlers. He believed that the German immigrants knew it was more fertile than average and that they also recognized that walnut trees naturally grew well in places where limestone could be found in the soil. In the settlers’ subsistence culture, walnut trees not only indicated fertility but also produced an edible protein product—the walnut. The wood could be used to make durable household furniture, which was a craft mastered by many of the early German immigrants.

Joe Kelley farmed one of the oldest farms in the county, located where the Battle of the Cove occurred during the Civil War, and during his childhood, he found many relics of the war in the soil