Author: brian-chidester

 The name Anthony Dale Crawford is one that many Central Virginians would like to think of as locked up with the key thrown away. Yet on May 17, the Virginia State Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal that could affect Crawford’s convictions and his sentence of more than two life terms. 

“The issue that’s before the court now,” says Steven Rosenfield, Crawford’s attorney, “has to do with whether or not Sarah Crawford’s recorded testimony should have been allowed when the witness was not available to be cross-examined.” 

A little background: Anthony Dale Crawford, 50, was convicted in 2007 of first-degree murder, rape and other charges in the killing of his estranged wife, 33-year-old Sarah Crawford, whose body was found naked, placed in a “frog-like” position (with his semen on the body) at the Quality Inn on Emmet Street in 2004. In what is surely one of the most gruesome cases in Charlottesville history, Crawford, who was previously acquitted in a sexual assault case involving his first wife, was sentenced to two life terms and 67 years in prison. 

Since that time, his appeals have twisted and turned. On December 23, 2008, a three-judge panel from the Virginia Court of Appeals reversed all of Crawford’s convictions, except that of grand larceny (for stealing the victim’s car). The court stated that Crawford’s convictions were based on insufficient evidence, and that the court’s previous admission of an affidavit from his wife violated Crawford’s rights under a portion of the Sixth Amendment known as the Confrontation Clause.  

In an affidavit for a restraining order, Sarah Crawford told police officers: “On October 30, 2004, [Anthony Dale Crawford] called me and told me that I must want to die. He also said he understands why husbands kill their wives.” 

Prior to his original trial, Anthony Dale Crawford motioned to have Sarah’s affidavit suppressed, arguing that her testimony was hearsay and inadmissible under Crawford v. Washington (541 U.S. 36), a Supreme Court decision based on appeals by a Michael Crawford (no relation) of Washington state. The decision in Michael Crawford’s case basically threw the Confrontation Clause on its head. 

The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of testimonial evidence could not be admissible in a case unless that person could be cross-examined, a decision that had a profound effect on prosecutors’ ability to prove their cases through previously admissible evidence. In other words, where once the deceased Sarah Crawford’s affidavit might have been upheld as testimony of Anthony Dale Crawford’s premeditative declaration of his intent to kill, her words are now in jeopardy of being excluded from the record.   

On December 29, 2009, the Virginia Court of Appeals then handed down a reversal of the three-judge opinion, upholding the original convictions and the admission of Sarah Crawford’s affidavit. However, the Virginia State Supreme Court has now agreed to hear arguments from Crawford’s lawyers, as well as the Commonwealth’s Attorney, in an appeal of the December 2009 decision.  

“This decision,” says Rosenfield, “will effect other courts around the Commonwealth in determining when testimony is admissible.” 

So what does this all mean for Crawford? The Virginia State Supreme Court can do one of three things: uphold the original convictions and sentencing, reverse the Court of Appeals’ decision with Crawford’s convictions still upheld, or remand the whole thing back to the trial courts, where Crawford would then be allowed a new trial with a new jury.

“It was a horrific crime,” says Joe Platania, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney, “but appeals are part of criminal prosecution. We’ve been in close contact with the Attorney General’s office and we are hopeful that Mr. Crawford’s convictions and sentences will be upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

On Thursday, April 29, Woolen Mills resident Louis Schultz was arrested and charged with attempted malicious wounding after rolling his car towards a group of city workers who were repairing a leaky sewage pipe on Steephill Street, near his home on E. Market Street. Schultz’s reasoning was simple: Steephill Street is private property, and the city has no right to be there.

“I can look out from my window at a sea of illegal and inept action on behalf of the city promoting its own agenda,” says Schultz, who was arrested previously for protesting maintenance on Steephill.

In August 2004, Schultz’s neighbors at 313 Steephill decided to pave the street from the corner of Market and Steephill near the entrance of the street. Schultz laid down in front of private workers from C&G Paving, and was ultimately hauled away by police.

Schultz and his wife bought their property in 2000. Despite putting enormous effort into clearing the yard and creating a massive garden, by 2004 they found the newly paved corner on Steephill diverted water in the direction of their yard. It caused flooding along the creek that runs past the garden. The same water flow also began to decay a bridge on Steephill. In 2006, the city stepped in to replace the deck on the old bridge.

“But the city did such a poor job on that bridge,” says Schultz, “that it’s falling apart at the corners, and there’s an open hole that directs water into the rock wall that upholds the bridge. That water could potentially bust the wall wide open and knock the bridge down. It’s ridiculous.”

In letters from 1987 and 2003, the city’s neighborhood planner informed Hal Bonney, the owner of 313 Steephill, that the road was a public right of way. The city denied any responsibility for its upkeep, making it clear that the adjoining property owners alone were responsible for both the street and the bridge. Schultz claims that the street is not a public through-street, nor are the owners of 313 Steephill adjacent to the area that they paved, and so had no right to do so.

In subdivisions created after 1946, there is no ambiguity. If a road was declared a through street in Charlottesville before that time, it became a city-owned and maintained road. However, if a road were declared private property in a deed prior to 1946, Virginia Code requires the city to honor the deed. In the case of Steephill Street, the 1887 deed (as well as a 1920 subdivision map) clearly shows the street as a private driveway, connecting two adjacent plats of land.

City Attorney Craig Brown says that the city “put up a sign declaring Steephill private property, at Mr. Schultz’s request.” If so, why does the city continue to do work on the street and the bridge?

“We have an immediate interest in that street and bridge,” says Brown. “We have a sewage line, a water line and a natural gas line running through that street.”

“We’ve had many conversations with Mr. Schultz regarding our plans for that street,” says Ric Barrick, the city’s director of communications. “In this most recent incident, there was raw sewage going into a creek and we needed to correct that.”
Brown says the city needs a “long-term solution.”

“The ideal situation would be for the adjoining property owners to grant the city an easement so that we could access those three lines and maintain them,” says Brown. “But at every turn, Mr. Schultz puts up road blocks.”

“This is the land of Thomas Jefferson, the very symbol of American free speech and private property rights,” says Schultz. “It is unbelievable that the city, by repeating and enforcing, has done what it cannot do by law—take over private property without due process.” Schultz goes before a judge in the matter of his criminal charge on June 10.

Five years after it was designated a historic site, the Jefferson School finally has a starting date for a long-planned redevelopment to preserve its character.

“The plan is to break ground on August 20,” says Martin Burks III, a member of the Jefferson School Community Partnership. “Thirteen months later, the tenants will go into the building and [it will] be fully operational.”

On April 29, residents from the Starr Hill neighborhood and interested parties met at the school on Fourth Street NW, as members of the partnership offered an overview of site plans for a mixed-use development of the historic structure. “This is a $17.3 million renovation project,” notes Burks, whose mother taught at the Jefferson School. 

Plans for the building include an African-American cultural center, an exhibition and genealogy space, a day care and a local food café. “The anchor tenant in this project is the Heritage Culture Center, who will bring the synergy needed to do right by the Jefferson School,” says Burks.

Since the structure was awarded national historic designation in 2005, renovations have been slow going, to put it mildly. Excavation work completed last year dates the Jefferson in Vinegar Hill to 1894, where it served as a black school until Charlottesville officially integrated in 1964 (a long and arduous process that began a full decade prior). Mixing Classical Revivalist styles with later Modernist materials, the Jefferson School’s only use today is the Carver Recreation Center on the eastern annex, as well as office space for Charlottesville’s public works department.

“The Jefferson School represents a past that holds less pain than it does promise, in my opinion,” says Patricia Bowler-Edwards, a former student at Jefferson who lives just down the street with her husband. 

“I think of people like Rebecca McGinnis, who taught there for many years and lived here in Starr Hill until she was 107 years old. She taught me that I was able to excel regardless of any obstacles,” says Bowler-Edwards. “It was a cohesive community who believed in us.”

Thus far, the city has devoted $5.8 million in capital improvement funds to the Jefferson School project, with additional funding made up of federal and state tax credits, as well as loans and donations made through fundraising efforts by the partnership. 

“Some might ask how wise it is to spend this amount of money at this time,” suggests Bowler-Edwards. “I say we have to go on hope in what we want things to be like. The Jefferson School was and hopefully will continue to be a very special place.” 

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

 When the first issue of Scottsville Weekly landed on April 16, it caused an immediate stir. Seven candidates for town council were asked where they stood on a number of issues, including whether they support legalizing marijuana. As one might imagine, the remainder of the questionnaire fell on deaf ears when five out of seven answered “yes” to legalization. (One candidate and supporter of legalization, five-time councilor Jeanette Kerlin, has since dropped from the race.)

“It wasn’t my intention to have this be an issue of the campaign,” says publisher Bebe Williams, a one-term town councilor who ran for re-election on May 4. “But if nothing else, the people of Scottsville are reading about it and talking about it, and they’re learning a lot about their friends.”

While Williams was not the only council candidate to support the legalization of marijuana, he may have been the only candidtae adversely affected by his advocacy. Williams pulled in 47 votes—not enough to reclaim his council seat.

A new nationwide CBS News poll conducted in March found that the percentage who support legalization has jumped to 44 percent of Americans from 27 percent over the last 30 years. The poll also found that geography plays a significant role. Support for legalization is greatest in the West (55 percent), where Californians will get to vote on a November ballot initiative that would make it the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana. 

However, the poll shows that Americans in the Midwest and South are the least likely groups to favor legalization.

“Charlottesville and Albemarle County are more progressive than most parts of Virginia,” counters Williams. “I can’t speak for everyone in the county, but I know here in Scottsville about half are for legalizing marijuana.”

Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Williams spent most of his life in the Washington, D.C., beltway, where he was a XERIC Award-winning comic artist, commissioned by the likes of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Playboy magazine, Intensity Skateboards and the American Baseball Association. He moved to Scottsville five years ago and has been a town councilor for two years.

Williams contends that the real reason he ran for town council was because of his support for issues of sustainability. As a member of the town’s Enhancement Oversight Committee, Williams has worked with the United States Department of Agriculture to help install a farmers’ market in Scottsville and is now in the second phase of a streetscape improvement that he hopes will result in turning all of the town’s street lamps into solar-powered fixtures. 

As for Virginia changing the books on marijuana, in January the General Assembly’s House Criminal Subcommittee tabled House Bills 1134 and 1136—two bills which sought to expand Virginia’s medical marijuana law and decriminalize simple possession, making it an infraction punishable by fine. “There was no real debate on the issue,” says Williams. “It was treated by the assembly as a joke.

“In Virginia, it’s a tremendous uphill battle,” continues Williams. “Until the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] removes marijuana from the list of Schedule One narcotics, we’ll have trouble doing anything more than decriminalizing.”

Yet in a town like Scottsville, where just 378 are registered to vote, what difference can a politician like Bebe Williams hope to make?

“I’m just one person,” Williams concludes. “Bebe Williams can not make marijuana legal, no. What I can do is show other councilors that we can be in good standing with our citizens while also supporting legalization. If enough politicians in this country are in unison on this issue, then we can make some real changes.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

There is a point where you are so deep in the woods, with trees looming large and their leaves stitched across the skyline, that you feel the vastness of the landscape and can’t shake the sense that you are out of your element. Tree frogs yammer back and forth while birds chirp wildly. Something scurries past the dry leaves under your feet. You suddenly realize that you are four or five miles from the nearest road and you’ve forgotten which direction you came from.

A new corridor of trail up ahead looks like a long dried-up river bend, now just jagged rocks on an uphill slope. You amble softy through the rough terrain, trying not to slip and crack your head wide open, and then, around the bend, a lone figure appears. He’s holding two titanium walking sticks and shouldering a large backpack. He sports a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a full blonde beard, stopping to introduce himself by his trail name: Frijole.

Why is he called Frijole? “It kind of evolved,” he says. “You don’t give yourself a trail name, someone gives it to you.” In this case, the etymology comes from the fact that he hails from Boston, which is famous for its beans. “Frijole” is Spanish for “bean,” so there you have it.

Frijole looks like a cross between an American nomad who travels west by foot and by freight train, and a modern hippie, whose earthen zeal is only outweighed by Burning Man desires for bonding and revelry. He’s already walked five miles on the Appalachian Trail (or simply “The AT”) today, and he plans to walk 10 more before reaching the shelter where he’ll camp tonight.

Yet, according to a new assessment released at the end of March by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), the AT is in trouble. Challenges such as adjacent development on privately owned land, air pollution and funding shortfalls continue to affect the ability of trail managers to preserve the trail’s natural beauty. “The goal of protecting those lands,” said David Startzell, ATC’s executive director, “and the adjacent landscapes surrounding them remains a never-ending challenge—one that requires ongoing public and private support.” 

The AT extends from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the majority of the trail being in vast wilderness (although some portions traverse towns and roads). It has emerged as something of a modern rite of passage for oblivion-chasers, loners, hiking mavens and even average souls who are disoriented by the rhythm of asphalt and looking to make sense of their North American narrative.

Frijole continues. His sojourn into the hills alone has become somewhat compulsory: He hiked the AT for three months last year and he’s doing a month this year. Of all the places that people like Frijole could go, the AT seems as good a place as any to reconnect with our own sense of wonder.

Virginia hosts 550 miles of the AT, more than any of the other 14 states along the trail. Some consider this state to be the most challenging section of the AT for northbound hikers because of its wet spring thaw, where on average it rains 20 out of 30 days during the vernal equinox. Substantial portions of the trail closely parallel Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Shenandoah National Park. Virginia’s southern end of the AT travels westerly through the George Washington and Jefferson National forests from Roanoke County to Giles County. According to the ATC, this portion of the trail is the most remote and least traveled. 

For a day hike here in Central Virginia, the Greenstone Trail, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, offers one of the best ways to experience the AT. This is where my girlfriend and I set off with our black Labrador mix for what we assumed would be a walk in the park, as the saying goes. We entered the forest from the Greenstone Trail parking lot at Humpback Rocks, three miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Route 250. From the parking lot we hike a mile into the forest before picking up the AT heading north. After walking five additional miles in, and exhausting all of our food and all but a drop of water, we encounter a man named Dave Marshall. His trail name is “Red,” because he sports short red hair underneath his ski cap.

“I haven’t seen another person on the trail for two days now,” says Red. “Most days you only see maybe one person every 24 hours.” Red is a retired schoolteacher from Iowa. He had planned to hike the AT for years, but never found the time to get away from his responsibilities until last year, when he planned to hike the entire trail. Two months in, Red tripped and sprained his ankle. He left the trail a few days later. This year he’ll hike for about six weeks. Red is what’s known as a “section-hiker.” He says it’s a bit early to be seeing “thru-hikers,” yet he’s seen a few who have gotten an early start this year. “A fella named ‘Nature Boy’ is on the trail just north of here,” says Red. “This is his third thru-hike of the AT.”

When serious section-hikers speak of thru-hikers, there is always a hint of reverence for someone who attempts to hike the entire 2,178 mile trail in a single season. The AT is more frequently hiked south to north. Thru-hikers typically begin in March and finish sometime around September or October. 

“Most of the thru-hikers you meet out here are either college age or retired like me,” says Red. “Those in-between years, most people have a family to raise, a mortgage and a full-time job, so it’s hard to pull off a long-term hike.” Just another 2.5 miles ahead is a lake with a shelter, where Red plans to set down for the night. The trail has more than 250 of these shelters (sometimes called lean-tos or huts), which are generally three-walled structures with a wooden floor, usually spaced a day’s hike or less apart, most often near a water source. Local volunteers maintain the shelters, which, during the summer months, can be crammed with hikers who sleep like a pack of canned sardines.

The AT was conceived in 1921 by a forester named Benton MacKaye, whose idea was to establish a grand trail connecting a series of farms and wilderness work/study camps for city-dwellers. It wasn’t without its share of early controversy. With MacKaye publicly describing the trail with phrases like “self-owning,” “cooperative” and “a retreat from profit,” some saw the concept, as one biographer wrote, as “smacking of Bolshevism.” 

In the fall of 1923, the first section of the trail opened near Bear Mountain in Rockland, New York. Two years later, MacKaye established the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in Washington, D.C. By the early 1930s, a lawyer named Myron Avery took up the cause, quickly abandoning MacKaye’s idea of the AT as a series of connected work/study camps, adopting instead a more practical goal of building a simple hiking trail. Avery soon found himself clashing with MacKaye over many issues regarding the AT, and while MacKaye remains the figurehead most recognized with creating the trail, he in fact left the organization in 1932, while Avery continued as Chairman of the ATC until his death in 1952.

Earl Shaffer of York, Pennsylvania, wrote the first real memoir  about the AT in 1948. He also became the first documented thru-hiker to complete the entire trail. Shaffer’s account was followed by AT books too numerous to mention here, each bringing their own unique sensibility to time spent on the trail. What binds these tales of American odyssey is the innate sense that both scientist and thrill-seeker alike walked into the woods as one kind of person and exited radically changed by the experience. 

No book on the AT has sold as well as Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which gives a humorous view of the trail from a less-than-fit person’s perspective. Through a bizarre collection of characters and anecdotes, Bryson managed to put the AT back on the map for many Americans. Seeing the trail through his dandified writing style, it became all the more compelling when the AT’s fragile beauty crept into Bryson’s rather neatnik soul. Published in 1998, A Walk in the Woods also offered high-minded consciousness to the many social issues surrounding the AT. 

Running primarily along the Appalachian highlands, trail lands protect headwater streams for major East Coast watersheds. Thirty-two areas of significance to the AT and its corridor have been identified as high-priority sites for protection, largely under threat from encroaching development. Additionally, in all 14 states along the trail, increasing development of lands that buffer the AT are being converted from pastoral, agricultural and forested uses to residential or commercial uses at an alarming pace. With rising land prices, it is becoming harder to protect these remaining landscapes.

As for problems of pollution, 40 years ago one could still see the Washington Monument some 75 miles away on a clear day. These days, pollution is so pervasive that in the summer months visibility through the dirty haze caused by vehicles along Skyline Drive is reduced to an average of five miles or less. The park’s conservation association is advocating for stronger regulations on nearby coal-fired power plants and other sources of pollution, in an effort to protect the thousands of species of plants and animals that call the Appalachian Trail home. But in far too many instances, it is too late. 

The AT serves as a living laboratory that could help warn 120 million people along the Eastern Seaboard of looming environmental problems. The most distressing feature of the trail’s vegetation is the number of fallen trees that line its slopes and peaks in every direction. The immediate cause of this is the Balsam Woolly Adelgid, an insect that relies on acid rain to weaken the conifers’ immune system, whereby it can swoop in and imbue the trees with an untreatable fungal disease. Ninety percent of the park’s trees have been damaged, with indigenous American icons like the dogwood threatened with extinction.

What’s more, stories abound of the American black bear aggressively chasing hikers who have encountered this mammoth omnivore off the trail. In truth, bear sightings on the AT are uncommon, and confrontations rarer still, as black bears typically avoid humans and are usually frightened away by loud noises. 

Violent crime, however, has occurred on the trail in a few instances. Since 1974, nine homicides have been documented on the AT, including four in Central Virginia. Randall Lee Smith, who murdered two social workers visiting from Maine in 1981, re-appeared on the trail in 2008, where he shot two fishermen near Giles County. The fishermen survived, but Smith died in jail four days later from injuries sustained after crashing his getaway pickup truck.

Yet despite these rare, tragic occurrences, everyday life on the trail seems peaceful and unthreatening. “The people out here are harmless,” suggests Frijole. “Sure, there are some eccentric people, especially the thru-hikers. But by and large, everyone out here has a good heart.” 

Another popular Virginia hike near Roanoke is the Big Rocky Row loop at Fuller Rocks. Just off of Route 81, this portion of the AT heading north goes through a series of ascending switchbacks and ends with a peak view of the James River, before descending back down to the valley below. 

Bethany and Doug are firefighters from Washington D.C., who travel Central Virginia for long weekends, hiking the trails around Lynchburg and Staunton as well as off Skyline Drive. Today they are crossing Mill’s Creek, which, along the AT sees a slow moving creek bed burst into a beautiful series of river pools, ending in a majestic waterfall about two miles south of where we encountered Red. Like a lot of day-hikers, Bethany and Doug had no idea what to expect along this portion of the AT. “We try to get out here as much as we can,” says Bethany. “It’s hard to explain, but when we get back to the city all we can think about is where we’re going to go next on the trail. It gets in your blood.”

Throughout the next several weeks, the bulk of the south-to-north thru-hikers will be coming through the Central Virginia portion of the AT. By the middle of the month, they will congregate at the Trail Days Festival in Damascus, Virginia. Known as “Trail Town U.S.A.,” Damascus (population 981) is a convergence of four scenic trails, including the U.S. Bicycle Route 76, the Virginia Creeper Trail, the Iron Mountain Trail, and the AT. Each year, the Trail Days Festival draws in excess of 20,000 tourists, making it the largest single gathering of Appalachian Trail hikers anywhere.

“Trail Days is wild,” says Red. “Too wild for someone my age. But it’s a good place for some hikers to stop and go home, and others just to blow off steam.”

Dusk is creeping in, as my girlfriend and I emerge from the forest after our second long day on the AT. Our feet ache. We load the dog into the car, take off a few layers of smelly, sweaty clothes and chug a big bottle of water from the back seat. As we drive away from the trail, we talk a lot about the conveniences that we can’t wait to get back to. Yet as we get closer to town, a sudden feeling comes over us. Bombarded with neon words bursting from commercial business signs inviting us to chow down on double cheeseburgers for $1.99, or buy a new car at no money down, things seem unbearably constricted by comparison. I fall silent in that moment, breathing in deeply and exhaling a great sigh. She turns to me and says the only thing that seems logical in that moment: “We should go again next week.” 

 I have a theory about Charlottesville. I say it is a mirage. If you are not convinced, let me tell you about the time I watched a gal named Angel wearing knitted, arm-length gloves with the fingers cut off as she talked organic gardening with a woman decked out in a business suit. Or when a young man wearing black horn-rimmed glasses stood in front of a crowd of kids and put on a show with homemade puppets made of organic vegetables duking it out with Tony the Tiger for “Little Billy’s” taste buds.

Do you believe this? Not me.

I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go in my life, but I can’t remember a time when gardening seemed the hip thing to do. Regardless of whether a fashion statement is being made here, more importantly, these folks are making an effort to think globally by acting locally. When I met with Wendy Roberman, who acts as public relations and mother-like figure to the budding backyard garden company known as C’Ville Foodscapes, she said, “You can’t get much more local than your own backyard.”

It’s a Sunday afternoon and C’Ville Foodscapes is holding its launch party at Random Row Books on Main Street. A loose quartet of musicians sits out front on metal folding chairs, playing bluegrass music on stringed instruments, while folks gather around bins of dirt, dry clay and seeds to watch a young woman named Kassia roll mud balls ready for planting. Inside, these modern hippies—young enough that their parents may have been born after Woodstock—sit cross-legged on a stage area and excitedly trade packs of organic seeds. 

Angel Shockley describes herself as “an aspiring mistress of curiosity and a woman committed to making her wildest dreams come true.” After living and working on farms in California, Hawaii and Montana, Shockley came to Charlottesville in December 2008. Now she wants to offer her knowledge of gardening to anyone willing to hire her. She started C’Ville Foodscapes with her neighbor Patrick Costello, a printmaker by trade, as well as Roberman and three other horticulture enthusiasts.

C’Ville Foodscapes is but one of several recent groups to emerge that offers backyard vegetable gardening services. Another, Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest, is committed to growing fresh food without the use of synthetic or chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides.

If you count yourself among those feeling the financial pinch, but don’t know where to start in thinking about a garden, these groups offer their services and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Two of the owners of C’Ville Foodscapes come directly from Twin Oaks in Louisa, one of the longest-running and most successful communes in North America. Kassia Arbabi and Sky Blue each attribute much of their knowledge of hands-on gardening to their time spent there. Reason for leaving? “I really want to bring the system and structure for resource-sharing into an urban environment,” says Arbabi. Call them naïve idealists or utopian star-gazers, but don’t let their leather sandals and hemp knitted sweaters throw you off. These two are skilled at what they do.

“When gas prices went through the roof a couple years ago,” says Sky Blue, “that’s when I felt there was a renewed interest for locally produced food. People become aware of things when it hits their pocketbook. It happened during World War II, it happened in the late ’70s and now it’s more pressing than ever.”

Yet before these two businesses burst onto the scene, local songwriter Adrienne Young’s nonprofit SurLie Foundation started a program, in 2008, called Backyard Revolution. That group is planning its first festival in Nelson County in May, and Young can be heard extolling the virtues of backyard vegetable gardens every Friday night on 106.1 The Corner.

Then there are Rivanna natives Cabell Cox and Hunter McPadden, whose Grow Co. pre-dates both Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest and C’Ville Foodscapes as a locally based vegetable garden design group. “It’s not surprising that two other companies have started up with similar missions,” says Cox. “Charlottesville is a trendsetting area, in many aspects, so the formation of these businesses point to something bigger and substantial in the food industry.” 

“Historically speaking, UVA has always brought a lot to the area,” says Mike Parisi of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest. “The legacy of Thomas Jefferson and his experimentation with the garden at Monticello is felt all over the campus and especially with the architecture department and landscape planning classes.”

By the mid-1970s, Michael Clark’s Planet Earth Diversified became a pioneer in local organic farming for the Charlottesville area. These days, Clark is the host of the delightful “Meet the Farmer” TV program that examines the social relationships among growers, chefs and consumers in our area, while his company still stands as a successful business model and organic source  of produce.  

“The evolution of the locally grown foods movement here in Charlottesville has touched so many parts of the area,” says Guinevere Higgins of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest. “But taking that one step further, the freshest food you can eat doesn’t have to be bought at a market, but can come from your own sweat and toil in the backyard, and that’s often the most rewarding too.”

Higgins is a lifelong gardener, passionate about helping people grow their own food. She is the founder of the Charlottesville League of Urban Chicken Keepers (CLUCK), and lives with five chickens, three mushroom logs and a strawberry patch in her own downtown backyard. Higgins started Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest in 2009 by partnering with Matt Bierce, who previously worked at Monticello’s gardens and Blenheim Vineyards, and Parisi, a third-generation Italian-American who claims he is “as obsessed with growing the perfect tomato as he is with finding the perfect tomato sauce recipe.”

“There was a time when having a vegetable garden in your backyard was a common thing,” says Higgins. “There is this sort of lost generation that has seen things fall off over the last 20 to 30 years.”

Yet, unlike the Victory Gardens campaign that the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged during World Wars I and II (periods during which the term “rationing” meant something tangible), this latest garden movement is more a reaction to the increased industrialization of food production over the last few decades. 

“Backyard vegetable gardening is definitely counter to the mainstream,” argues Higgins, “because we’ve gotten used to jumping in our car and going to the grocery store to buy produce. But a lot of people are starting to question how things got to be that way. And in questioning it, people from all walks are saying, ‘Hmm, why don’t I have a garden in my own backyard?’”

“The whole way in which food is bought and sold today is so terrible,” says Costello of C’ville Foodscapes. “I grew up in the DIY, punk movement, and beyond just making art, I wanted to make a difference, and so I became interested in the ecology, sustainability and environmental justice.”

“People are making food choices and logical choices about pollution,” says Bierce. “That’s made us into activists in that we think it’s just logical to leave as little of a carbon imprint as we can on the planet.”

“It’s political,” Parisi agrees. “Not Democrat or Republican, but by growing your own food, you’re making a statement about your values.”

So what does it cost for one of these companies to install a food-producing garden in your backyard? 

First off, all three companies offer free consultations. Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest’s charges depend on whatever agreement you come to with them, while C’Ville Foodscapes’ services start at $100 for a 4’X 8′ lawn transformation that includes grass and weed removal, soil tilling and mulching.

On the night I meet up with them—following the launch party for C’Ville Foodscapes—the Backyard Harvest crew has gathered to discuss several consultations from earlier in the day. They go over Google Earth photos, sundial diagrams and digital snapshots in an effort to give their clients the most effective and best-priced garden.

“An investment in a garden is like money in the bank,” says Parisi. “The initial investment will pay for itself in savings on eating out and buying organic produce in the grocery store or at the farmer’s market.”

“With busy schedules and heavy priorities,” says Bierce, “a thriving vegetable garden in your own backyard can seem like an uphill battle. The most important thing to keep in mind is that it’s O.K. to go through that trial and error process. We’re discovering a lot of apple varieties, for instance, and seeing what works best with the soil here and whatnot. We can get a little nerdy about it, but it’s also practical.”

Elsewhere, Cox and McPadden of Grow Co. are preparing for several landscaping jobs coming up a few days hence. “We are finding that there is a range in the types of clients we are getting,” says Cox. “Some simply want an affirmation about ideas they want to implement themselves, others want a full-on edible garden with chickens, complemented by a comprehensive landscape design.”

Meanwhile at Random Row Books, the bluegrass quartet is down to a trio and the crowd is beginning to thin out. But before everyone leaves, the C’Ville Foodscapers pull out the winner of the raffle for a free backyard landscape job, with all the bells and whistles. They say that gardening requires a lot of water… most of it in the form of perspiration. Well, it’s spring time now—and it’s been a long, hard winter in more ways than one. Don’t we all deserve a new beginning?

Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest

Matt Bierce, Guinevere Higgins, Mike Parisi

806-6157

info@blueridgebackyard.com

Free initial site assessment and esti-mate. Installation, design, maintenance and consultation fees vary depending on project type and scale. 

C’Ville Foodscapes

Angel Shockley, Kassia Arbabi, Patrick Costello, Sam Pierceall, Sky Blue and Wendy Roberman

806-6255

info@cvillefoodscapes.com

Simple lawn transformation (sod re-moval, tilling and soil building) for a 6’x8′ garden costs $100. Raised bed (wooden frame, with soil/compost infill) for a “standard” 4’x8′ costs $225. Garden planting design (custom-de-signed blueprint for plant varieties, placement and planting schedule) runs $75. Planting (which includes garden planting design, plus planting of desired plants and seeds, two follow-up visits and one-time plant replacement) for a 6’x8′ garden costs $150.

The Grow Co.

Cabell Cox and Hunter McPadden

996-0770

Grow@TheGrowCo.com

$30/hour, plus cost of materials and a design fee for custom gardens (land-scape design, custom arbors/garden structures). Services range from 4’x8′ raised beds to 16′ bed gardens with additional landscaping, fencing, walkways, etc. 

BACK TO FEATURE

 Interest in a “simpler time” is nothing new. But revived awareness of the primitive Southern mountaineer has touched a new generation of musicians and fashionistas that look to their legacy as a poignant example in protest of modern consumer culture. Indeed, their voices echo out in the backporch verse of Carter Family yodels: “Carry me back to ol’ Virginny, Back to my old mountain home.”

Katrina Powell’s Answer at Once gives further insight into this exotic creature of American lore. The collected letters by the families that were removed from their land to make way for the Shenandoah National Park read like an assemblage of Depression era folk songs. From its striking cover photo of a man sitting on his ragged, hand-built porch overlooking the Shenandoah Valley, to its well-placed photographs of mountain families looking gothically American, the book is beautifully rendered throughout. It builds a tragic sense of tension, as correspondence through letter grows more conscious of eminent displacement, revealing a rhetorical sophistication that belies the mountain people’s lack of formal education.

It might be a bit far-fetched when Powell, in her opening essay, compares their plight to that of the Native Americans. Her portrayal of Shenandoah National Park as an exploit in pure greed hardly stands up. Yet she makes the case that, though the displaced mountain families were paid for their lands and assisted in their moves, their homes were first declared “condemned” by the Virginia legislature and the families were purposely misled as decision-making for the region moved forward. Powell makes clear that this happened because “mountaineers and/or those with little formal education have often been misrepresented by the media and by people with power to influence their lives.”

Beyond its ability to instill nostalgia, Answer at Once reveals another side that often gets overlooked. For every saintly resident writing with gentility, there are an equal number of letters in the book that reveal mountain people willing to rat out their neighbors in an effort to save themselves from displacement. In this sense, our “noble savages” become all the more human in the complex struggle to defend their identity and way of life.

Powell’s intent to create an affective portrait of a culture being dismantled succeeds brilliantly. Even as the broken language and phonetic misspellings make the letters difficult to decipher at times, the passion and innate sense of dignity make the book hard to put down. As a treatise of modern protest, Answer at Once may be less resounding. It is far easier to look back with whetted eyes than it is to look in our own backyards and realize that cultures all around us are in danger of displacement, as gentrification and irresponsible property assessments make it impossible for next generations to afford higher taxes on their structural inheritance.

On February 3, Judge Daniel Bouton of the Orange County circuit court heard arguments from attorneys concerning the proposed Wal-Mart to be built on Route 3 near Fredericksburg, on the hillside that overlooks the Wilderness Battlefield, where 29,000 casualties were sustained during the Civil War.

“We as preservationists can’t move the Battlefield,” argues Zann Nelson, spokesperson for the Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield (FOWB). “They can re-locate a building that hasn’t even broken ground yet.”

The special-use permit was approved by the Orange County Board of Supervisors 4-1 in August, after which time the FOWB, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and six Locust Grove residents filed suit against the Board, claiming that its decision to grant permits was arbitrary, lacked valid recommendation from the planning commission and that the zoning fails to comply with state code.

Sharon Pandak, an attorney representing Orange County, argued that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring suit against the Board, and what their case ultimately boiled down to was that “the board didn’t listen to ‘them.’” Robert Rosenbaum, attorney for the plaintiffs, argued that the Board failed to consider dozens of recommendations from planners and experts, as well as the Governor and the House of Delegates.

“This is about traffic, noise and pollution,” Rosenbaum told reporters on February 3. “Real concerns for someone near the project and cause for study.”

“Even if you take their complaint at its very best,” says Pandak, “all it shows is another school of thought for that piece of property.”

But preservationists aren’t giving up that easily. “We have no axe to grind with Orange County, the Board of Supervisors or even Wal-Mart,” says Nelson. “We are opposed to any super-structure of this profile on this location.”

Established by an Act of Congress in 1927, the Wilderness Battlefield is part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (FRSP). The park-owned portion of the Battlefield comprises 2,774 acres, and offers visitors driving tours, walking trails, and tours of the Ellwood Manor, its lone remaining structure on Wilderness.

“If you ask residents if they want a Wal-Mart,” says Nelson, “the answer will be a resounding ‘yes’. But ask them if they’d rather have a Wal-Mart closer to the town of Orange or at the Wilderness Battlefield, and you might get a different answer.”

Judge Bouton must first rule on whether the plaintiffs have standing to even bring this case to trial. Pandak’s first move was to file a demurrer calling for dismissal. She argues that even if what the plaintiffs say is true, the Board of Supervisors was well within its rights to grant Wal-Mart its permits, and that there are no legal grounds for the case.

“As far as the matter of standing goes,” argues Nelson, “one of the elements of Virginia code is that you have a monetary investment in the outcome. Well, for 15 years the FOWB has had a formal agreement with the National Park Services to manage the Ellwood Manor. We have an investment of almost $600,000 raised, which we are responsible for, and which we’ve put back into that house to allow it to be offered to the public as a place of history.”

After hearing arguments from both attorneys for more than three hours, Judge Bouton handed down no opinion on the matter, admitting that it could take several weeks until a final decision is made. 

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.