Green Pastures, Virginia: Gone But Not Forgotten
PE Marshall is a part-time staff writer for the Virginian Review in Covington, Virginia. After a 32-year career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., she retired and returned to her hometown of Clifton Forge, where she serves in local government on Town Council.
Pam Marshall stands with walking companion Scruffy near the former site of Green Pastures.
After a career in federal service, I returned to my hometown of Clifton Forge, Virginia, and one of the first places I visited was a place I knew as Green Pastures—a cut-out in the landscape of Alleghany County, full of lushness, greenery, cool waters and white sand. Today, the park is overgrown with weeds, the cooling waters are stagnant and discolored by algae and pollen, and snakes burrow under the white sand beyond a locked gate.
Due to budgetary restraints, the United States Forest Service has closed and locked the gate on this place and some of my earliest childhood memories. Now, I park my car at the gate and walk my dog into the park. As we enter the front of the park, I remember standing up on the seat in the back of my father’s car and leaning into the sounds of squeals and giggles of children that greeted us as we entered the open field at the front of the park. Today, there is only an eerie silence and the rustle of leftover leaves.
As Scruffy and I walk further into the park, I’m saddened by the overgrowth, by the pungent smell of stagnant water that assaults my nostrils, and weeds growing through snake-infested white sand where I once buried my toes. This is a place where families from Clifton Forge and surrounding areas would spend joy-filled Sunday afternoons and holidays.
The moment my dad’s car stopped, I would pop that lock, open the door, and my feet would hit the ground running. Dashing toward the water, I’d stop and take my seat among groups of other children sitting in the sand as my mother secured a place for our supper in the handmade picnic shelter. I would sit with my toes in the cooling white sand and watch my father become a kid again as he dived off the hand-made dam and dropped into the deep end of the water from a rope.
When mom placed her blanket on the grassy area, among a sea of other moms, just above the sand, I knew it was then safe for me to wade into the shallow end of the lake’s cooling water. But first, the race with other children to the now locked, hand-made bathhouse, to shower and change into my swimsuit.
What I didn’t know in the mid-to-late ‘60s was that in the 1950s this place was the only public park in the state of Virginia where African American families could go for recreation. In the 1940s, at the request of the Clifton Forge NAACP, the all-black Camp Dolly Ann Company of the Civilian Conservation Corps was commissioned to construct this cut-out, and they built the picnic shelter, bathhouse and dam by hand.
I call for Scruffy so we can make our way back to the car on the other side of the locked gate. I stop at the gate and offer up a prayer. A prayer that fate will allow the gates on these memories to one day be re-opened, that future generations be given an opportunity to create and share their memories of this once-beautiful place, and that Green Pastures at Longdale be restored, maintained and given its well-deserved place in history.
The story above appears in our November/December 2019 issue. For more, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!