What, really, did a 10-year-old boy know about the world in telling his grandfather what he’d do when he grew up? Turns out, quite a bit.
In often reflect on the time spent with my Grandfather Willie, born in 1908 in a Franklin County, Virginia farmhouse. One of our most memorable experiences came in 1962 when I was 10, and we visited the old family home place and farmland the Ingrams used to own.
The house, like the family, never quite recovered from the Great Depression, as the farmhouse was long abandoned and partially caved in, and the land had been sold to pay off debts until only a few acres were left. That day, the once cherished farmland appeared well on its way to becoming just another subdivision.
After we left the farmhouse, Granddaddy brought me to the dwelling where he, my grandmother Margrette and father Roy lived during the Depression. More a hovel than a house, the building could be compared to the Joad Family’s shack in John Steinbeck’s epic Depression novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Grandpa Joad, Pa Joad and son Noah had stolen the abandoned abode and hauled it to their land via a team of horses. That a house so tiny and dilapidated could be dragged for several miles speaks volumes about the Joad family’s—and my family’s—poverty. I remember pondering how could three people have lived in a structure so small.
The worst memory from that day, though, came when my Grandfather broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably. He had just finished telling me how he had lost his Depression-era job making wooden spools at a small factory, which plunged his family deeper into despair. And then Granddaddy added that I would have been the heir to the Franklin County land—had we not lost it.
“The Ingrams used to be landed,” he cried. “But we ain’t no more. I’ve got no land to pass down to you.”
It is a gut-wrenching experience to see your role model sobbing uncontrollably and at that moment what my 10-year-old-self wanted more than anything was to comfort him.
“We’ll own land again one day, Granddaddy, I promise,” I said. “I’ll save up and buy it.”
I don’t recall how Granddaddy responded to my pledge, but I do know that that day strengthened the bond the two of us had—especially concerning anything that had to do with land and soil. From our conversations as the years went by, it became clear that he profoundly regretted not doing what he felt he had been destined to do… farm the red clay of the home place like our ancestors had done—“Franklin County Red” as it is called by those who do.
Indeed, Granddaddy never had the means or a place to even establish a garden until he and Grandmother moved to a Roanoke retirement home when he retired in the mid-1970s. Granddaddy obtained permission from the establishment to “work” a vacant lot there, and he most surely did. Every day except Sunday from mid-March when he planted onions through early November when he harvested the last of the broccoli, Granddaddy tended his crops. And whenever I visited him, we spent time there “checking on things” and admiring his handiwork.
But after a decade or so of blissful gardening, Granddaddy once again lost soil that was precious to him. The retirement home decided that it was time to expand, and soon afterwards a bulldozer came and crushed the dirt that Granddaddy had so lovingly tended. I thought that this latest affront regarding land would likewise crush him, but to my relief, he reacted philosophically. “It wasn’t my land, it wasn’t my dirt, not like the Franklin land was.”
And once again, I was reminded of how my Grandfather was like Grandpa Joad in their shared passion for land and soil—the joy, the sense of pride of owning and working your own place. As Grandpa Joad memorably said: “It’s my dirt! Eh-heh! No good, but it’s-it’s mine, all mine.”
By then, I had become an English teacher, married Elaine (a teacher as well), had two kids and we had established a home on a two-acre lot. But I felt fenced in on that lot and the long ago promise to Granddaddy about me making the family landed once more was often on my mind. And I knew on two teachers’ salaries that promise would never be fulfilled.
So one day I proposed to Elaine that I should try to become a writer, and that the money we saved from that second job would go to our one day purchasing rural land in this region’s mountains. Every morning, I would arise two hours early and type out stories and story proposals to magazines. At first they didn’t sell, but eventually they did and after a few years, we had saved and decided to try to purchase a 30-acre parcel in the Craig County, Virginia mountains for $800 an acre.
Both Elaine’s and my parents were against the idea, arguing that no rural land could ever be worth that much an acre. Among family members, only Granddaddy supported Elaine’s and my dream, and he urged us to buy the land—and so we did in 1985.
Granddaddy died in 1995, so, sadly, he never experienced the subsequent land purchases Elaine and I made. Our most satisfying one came in 2003 when we reassembled a 272-acre Craig County mountaintop farm that had been split into two parcels. We then placed the property under a conservation easement so that it never could be turned into a subdivision like the old Ingram homestead. We even placed a covenant on the land that the mountaintop could never be developed in any way, so as to preserve the viewshed.
Today, we own 640 acres in the Blue Ridge, and 412 of those acres are under conservation easements. I kept my promise to my Grandfather. The Ingrams are landed once more.
And now as a granddaddy myself I have land to pass on to my grandchildren.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2021 issue.
