Light Industrial Park Proposed for Yancey Mills - Crozet Gazette

Crozet gazette AUGUST 2008 s page 5
by Phil James
Farm auctions such as this one held near Mount Fair, too often denote the final passing of another honorable life spent
working the land.
The Disappearing Faces
of Farming
The gentle spirit of young Katie Maupin (1900–1998) was
evident as she milked her family’s cow near Doylesville,
Virginia. [Photo courtesy of Thelma Via Wyant.]
Did you ever want to be a farmer?
There’s nary a town nor village in
Albemarle County that was not built to
serve a surrounding community of farmers. The
scores of discontinued post offices attest to former
communities where farming families once
gathered to check the mail, share news, and purchase
or trade for provisions.
It’s easy today to ignore the reality that the
sprawling estates of old Albemarle, crowned with
their palatial homes, were established as working
farms. During the better years, the farms’ increases
empowered the owners while supplying jobs, sustenance
and housing to the laborers essential to
farm operations.
Colonial-era plantations that once supported a
tobacco-based economy were sub-divided as the
land yielded less of the prized product. Subsequent
generations of land entrepreneurs positioned
themselves for an ever-increasing population, paring
down the grand old plantations into numerous
smaller parcels. Land values were prudently
based on the attributes of the soil, and houses
were often relegated to a spot thought less convenient
or profitable for tillage.
One of the most obvious absences from the
local real estate scene today is affordable farm
acreage. The Southern Planter magazine in 1893
carried this print ad for Albemarle farm land:
“Albemarle County. The great fruit, grain and
stock section of Virginia. Climate healthful and
fine. Scenery beautiful. Near the great markets,
with good transportation facilities… Good soil at
low prices. Sheep protected in this county by a
good dog law.” Improved farmlands were
offered at $9–$10/acre.
An opportunity occasionally available
to the farmer unable to buy land of his
own was to sharecrop the lands of
another. A 1918 Albemarle County
sharecropper’s one-year lease agreement
revealed the following conditions of one
such enterprise: The farm owner received
“one third (1/3rd) of all grain, and crops,
and apples”; retained rights to harvest
firewood and pasture his stock; and had
no responsibility for damage his own
stock might do to any crops on the farm.
The leasing sharecropper furnished all
seed and kept the farm in cultivation “as
good husbandry requires”; furnished all
barrels (owner to pay for 1/3rd of the
barrels used) and spraying materials;
pruned, tended, and sprayed the
orchard in a proper manner; had the
privilege of cutting and selling chestnut
wood, paying 1/4th of those proceeds
to the owner; had the privilege of using
the horse called “Dan”, plus the use of
a 2-horse wagon, harness and farming
implements—and agreed to feed the horse.
Mount Fair was one of the several estates established
by members of the historic Brown family
in the Brown’s Cove section of western Albemarle
County in the 18th-century. James W. Early
became the owner of this farm estate before the
turn of the 20th-century. He employed many
local hands in the operations of his farm, grain
A significant shift in labor from agriculture to industry
occurred during the 1950s. Crozet’s business community,
however, was still being counted on to serve the farms and
orchards of western Albemarle County.
mill, and general store. One of those laborers
was Laurie Sandridge (1890–1951), whose son,
Homer, recalled some of his father’s experiences
continued on page 6