By: Dominic Piacentini

Dispossession can be a creeping process. In addition to more flagrantly recognizable modes of dispossession (i.e. the forced and coerced removal of people from their land), the culmination of minor events can cause certain places and ways of being to become so unlivable that they are ultimately avoided.

Dispossession can be a creeping process. In addition to more flagrantly recognizable modes of dispossession (i.e. the forced and coerced removal of people from their land), the culmination of minor events can cause certain places and ways of being to become so unlivable that they are ultimately avoided. This occurs across the globe, including North America and in Central Appalachia, where many rural smallholders in the region have been dispossessed of their land by large, often extractive and absentee, corporations. For those who remain, the pressures of dispossession are folded into seemingly ordinary and sometimes cruddy everyday life. No doubt dispossession manifests as abrupt events — crises of removal and enclosure — but changes to the land and our capacity to live in it have a habit of creeping up on us. 

Stanley:

Years ago all of this area had beautiful, large trees — some of the largest trees on the East Coast — but they logged it and took everything. You’ll find a number of places in the county where lumber companies just bought the whole mountain. They just demolished them, and they’re gone. Now that wasn’t the case here. In our area, it was the National Forest and still is. The Forest Service is trying to keep the nature going by controlling the plants that they do have, by clearcutting patches just here and there, and reseeding the trees, and so on. They haven’t done it yet, but up here on Molly’s Hill, there’s supposed to be some more clear-cutting in a good many small places.

Folded into the Virginia–West Virginia border lies a valley farm enclosed on three sides by national forests — West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest and Virginia’s George Washington National Forest. Stanley, who is now 93 years old and hard of hearing grew up on this farm in the 1920s and 1930s. As a child, he would collect teaberries in the woods during recess; he is, in his own words, “one who believes in climate change and so on.” For many in North America, farms may conjure images of flatness, ecological simplicity, and large-scale agroindustrial production. Stanley’s farm, however, is a diversified, subsistence-oriented homestead — not unlike other “farms” scattered across Appalachia and the rural United States.  

While I stay at Stanley’s farm for a few days, his grandson, Garrett, takes me on an ATV tour of the land and surrounding hills. Garret shows me the farm’s “wolf tree” — “the largest tulip poplar you’ve ever seen” — a tree that instead of being logged, grew with the homestead. The farm has 200 maple trees tapped, an orchard, a field, a vegetable garden, grape vines, and berry bushes. Garrett is trying his hand at nurturing Pawpaw and American Persimmon trees — fruits native to these hills. A family cemetery also lies on the farm where Stanley’s parents are buried. Garrett says that he expects he’ll be buried there himself. Life on this farm has been and continues to be difficult. Adapting to changes in ecology, policy, and the market over the last century has required a great deal of effort and trial and error to make this farm work. 

Describing the persistence of homesteads and subsistence farming practices in “the age of capitalism,” Jason Strange (2020) argues that  while “there are neighborhoods in Oaxaca where you can’t light off a bottle rocket […] without hitting an anthropologist,” (xiii), homesteaders in the United States carry on without such attention. All the same, Strange says “pretty much everywhere that land is not insanely expensive or forbiddingly arid” (xiii), you will find people engaged in some degree of subsistence. Stanley has worked on this homestead since he was a small child, and he recalls how hard it could be growing up on a farm in the 1930s.

It was in the winter of 1933, when Stanley was 7 years old, that his father died of pneumonia.

    S:

After my father died, my mother was the commander. She saw that we worked. It was rough, but we made it.

Besides what they grew on the farm, Stanley, his mother, and his siblings gathered “wild things out in nature.”

S:

The most productive [wild] thing for us was black walnuts. We would gather the nuts in the fall, and then work ‘em up. I tell you, finding some way to make money in the winter for farm people back in the thirties… Walnuts were one thing, and there’s no telling how many we cracked. My mother would usually crack a big bucket of walnuts in the day, then the family was supposed to get together with them all piled up on the table. And that was before electricity. We had a lamp setting on ‘em. A crock or something in the center to illuminate it. And, it wasn’t very good light as you can imagine. But they would pick ‘em out. When I was a boy, I wasn’t big enough to pick ‘em out, so I laid down on the bed and slept while they worked, haha.My mother would ship as many as 30 pounds of walnut kernels to Baltimore, and they would buy ‘em there. It was pretty good income for us.

Dominic:

Your mother sounds tough!

S:

I tell you she worked.

D:

We saw some hickory nuts around. Did you collect any of them?

S:

We would get some. They were not for commercial things. Usually we would crack ‘em to eat. Maybe put them in confections of various kinds, and so on. But oh, we liked ‘em! We didn’t have really good hickory nuts here, but up Trout Run, there was one place where they had hickory trees that were really nice — very large kernels. Sometimes we would get hickory nuts from those people up there. They were a lot better. So many of the nuts down here were small, and they were not easy to get the kernels out of. 

D:

Hickory nuts are tough to open.

S:

No, they don’t open easy, haha! White walnuts — sometimes we would crack those too, but not often. 

When I asked Stanley how long he had been gathering wild foods out in the woods, he showed me two small scars on his index finger.

D:

How long have you been foraging? Is it something you did growing up? 

S:

Well, I guess from the time that I was a boy — wild berries, and so on. As a matter of fact, I still have a mark here. A copper snake got me while I was picking wild strawberries. I was probably between 10 and 12 years old. We always looked for wild strawberries in the spring if we could catch them. 

 

D:

What did you do after you got bit by the snake? Were you by yourself?

S:

Oh, haha, I was by myself.  I ran back to the house as fast as I could. First thing I did was put a tourniquet on my finger. Then I went to a doctor — of course it was a good while afterward before I could get in back at that time — but the doctor slashed two cuts on my finger and put potassium permanganate in. My arm swelled up; I looked like Popeye! It was an event to remember. You can see that my finger has been scarred ever since. 

Besides black walnuts and wild strawberries, as a boy, Stanley remembers collecting large quantities of huckleberries.

S:

I think the thing we got the most quantity from was huckleberries. When the season was right, we would get gallons of them. My mother was a good picker. She would get up to almost three gallons in a bucket.

D:

And were the huckleberries in the hills around here? 

S:

Yeah, they were in the wooded areas, in the hills and the National Forest and so on. There was no problem if we wanted to pick those. We didn’t have to have government permission. It was just open to everyone! 

D:

What did you do with all of the huckleberries once you collected them? 

S:

Most of them were canned. Whenever we had a quantity, they were preserved in cans. They made good pies and all sorts of things like that. I have to say, one time my brother and I got so tired of picking huckleberries that we put a bunch of leaves in the bottom of the bucket to make it look like there were more berries. Haha, when we got home, my mother was so mad. She said, “I’m gonna serve you leaves for lunch!” It’s been a long time since I’ve been picking. Times have changed, and I haven’t been in the woods as much. Recently, I just can’t get out. But the season has been changed