The Old German Baptist Brethren: Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge

6. Membership

6 Membership “We’re Franklin County people,” said Elsie Turner. “I’ve spent all my life right here, and I’m ninety-three years old.” She was a second grade schoolteacher for forty-five years and taught my mother, among thousands of other children raised in the county. Along with teaching, she continued to live and help out on the family dairy farm alongside her brother and his family. All around her home the community is changing and she knows it. I heard about her breadth of knowledge when I stopped at Boone’s Country Store, owned by a German Baptist family. Emily Boone was working the counter that day and sent me to Elsie. “She knows all the history of the county,” she told me, “and she knows a lot about farming, too.” I went to see her the next day. As we talked on a pleasant afternoon in June 2001, Elsie served me cake and iced tea. She lives on a farm in a rambling two-story white house. Her brother, William Turner, lives nearby on the same farm. He joined us and we talked mostly about the past, of farms and neighbors and old students, many of whom are now grandparents themselves. This conversation could have easily turned to pure nostalgia, a talk of the good old days, but we went beyond that. Instead, from our conversation emerged a basic definition of what rural life means to farmers and others, which turned into a political lesson for me. William said, “When the men got out of the farming business, it changed into just neighbors, you see?” I did not see what he meant by “just neighbors” at first. Then he added, “You don’t know who your neighbors are anymore because of the change. I used to bring you on this 143 04 thompson 143-173 2/27/06 8:35 AM Page 143 road and tell you every farm owner and everything, but now I wouldn’t be able to tell you one-tenth of it.” Then I started to comprehend what he was saying. Farmers are fully neighbors with one another in a way that involves commitment to a place, longevity, and, above all, everyone working toward common goals, helping each other, and knowing others in substantive ways. Following on this, Elsie began placing names on the geography of the place, as though earlier settlers were synonymous with a part of the landscape: “We didn’t have people just move in and move out the way they do today. They settled. You had the Ferguson family down here and the Joneses had a dairy. But they’re down now to one son. And then the Newels down here. All those boys, six of them . . . there’s only one of them on the farm. Thank goodness, one. And then come on up and find the Burroughs, but that family name has completely died out here. And then the Kinseys have a nursery out there. And when we go along that way, the Prices on the other side 144 wilderness no more Siblings Elsie and William Turner on the porch of Ms. Turner’s home on their farm near Rocky Mount, Virginia. Photograph by the author. 04 thompson 143-173 2/27/06 8:35 AM Page 144 where the old Taylor store was, well, that is a bed and breakfast place now. The Prices are all away from there. The next farm here turned into a nursery. Used to be a farm, what’s left of it.” Elsie and William remember that there were once people who were part of a membership.1 They were farmers, different from those who merely move in and build a house. While the newcomers bring wealth and their own interests and talents, they do not belong to a place and human communities, and the landscape lacks connections. Common work is lacking in such a scheme, and thus common knowledge. It is easy for such an emphasis on the local community and agriculture to stoke the fires of provincialism, and for any talk of settlement to revert to a harkening back to “good times” that really never were. William and Elsie, however, sought to identify a sense of commitment to people superseding mere reminiscence. They described, instead, a sense of community that causes people to reach out to others and even to embrace those considered different. This contrasts starkly...