About an hour before sunset, Jen Fariello climbed to the top of a grassy hill with her camera. She looked through her lens down on the bride and groom exchanging vows under a rustic moss-covered altar with 10 rows of white chairs neatly arranged in a romantic countryside garden at Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyard. And in the background, a panoramic view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in misty, muted light. She waited for the moment when the sun sunk below the clouds to get the perfect shot. Click.
“It’s the quintessential picture of the Blue Ridge,” says Fariello, who has been a wedding photographer in the area for more than 15 years. “It captures what’s so beautiful about Charlottesville. It’s so simple and natural.”
Local wedding photographer Jen Fariello has been capturing brides in picturesque Blue Ridge settings for over 15 years. She has also seen the local wedding industry develop from intimate, country ceremonies to opulent affairs. Photo: Ron Dressel
It’s also the quintessential picture of a idyllic and fabulous high-end wedding. Fariello took the image in September 2011 soon after Pippin Hill opened. “I was the first person to climb up on that hill and shoot that,” she says.
Earlier this year, Brides magazine made a list of “the dreamiest spots in the country to say I do,” and named Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyard one of the top 50 romantic wedding venues. The short write-up on Pippin was paired with the iconic image Fariello took back in September 2011. The other high-end venues that made the cut were the Beverly Hills Hotel, New York Public Library, Bellagio in Las Vegas, Sundance Resort in Utah, as well as exclusive beach resorts from Miami to Maui. Just the other week, it was even rumored that celeb couple Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux exchanged vows at a quickie wedding ceremony at Pippin Hill—the perfect locale for a celeb couple looking for a private and exclusive wedding off the beaten path and out of the limelight from the paparazzi.
Last year there were 924 weddings in Albemarle County, and the local wedding market was valued at about $28 million, according to The Wedding Report, a research group that collects wedding industry statistics and trends. Charlottesville’s wedding industry has exploded in the past four years, and its value is becoming comparable to bigger, more notable markets for destination weddings, such as California’s Napa Valley area, where last year there were 1,041 weddings bringing in $37 million. In the Southeast, Charleston, S.C., is the most sought-after wedding destination, playing host to 2,925 weddings last year worth an estimated $72 million, according to the report. While Charleston’s market is almost three times Charlottesville’s, several wedding experts in the area told me that Charlottesville takes the No. 2 spot for wedding destinations in the region, because of its beautiful Blue Ridge backdrop and plentiful venues from wineries to historic estates.
“I think everyone is talking about Charlottesville and Charleston on the East Coast,” says Lynn Easton, co-owner of Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyard and owner of Easton Events, with offices in both Charleston and Charlottesville. “Our reputation is going to continue to grow and so is demand… Charlottesville has a bright shiny future ahead of it for the wedding world.”
After living in Central Virginia for almost four years, I knew that Charlottesville was a hugely popular wedding destination, but having never planned a wedding myself, I didn’t realize it was so expensive. How did a wedding venue in little, ol’ Charlottesville, Virginia, get on the same playing field as the infamous Bellagio and the Beverly Hills Hotel? And, if the rumor is indeed true, how did a high-powered Hollywood couple like Aniston and Theroux choose a spot in Appalachia?
I am a young woman who has friends getting hitched left and right. Also, at the age of 26 (the median age women are getting married these days), I can see myself tying the knot in the next few years. As I venture into the wedding world, watching friends and family get married, I’m starting to wonder how much of a wedding I can actually afford as a 20-something journalist. And, in the end, I keep coming back to a question that TLC and a whole pile of magazines and blogs keeps asking me: Is a wedding—one day of the year—really worth shelling out a year’s salary for? Or, as wedding professionals say, is it really priceless?
“I am not the kind of mom who scrapbooks,” said Taylor Harris, a Charlottesville stay-at-home mom, of her blog, sweetmilks.com. “This is a cool way to chronicle what’s happened. I’m a creative type and not organized, and I try to have some sort of organization with their lives.”
Blogging is Harris’ way of creating a sort of digital look book for her two children. With the click of a mouse, she can go back in time and read her own recollections of her first-born’s birth or the onset of her youngest child’s hysterical and endearing temper tantrums.
“Hopefully my kids will say, ‘This was mom’s way of showing what we were up to and she cared and she was crazy,’” she said, laughing. “And, maybe they’ll appreciate it, and maybe I’ll have some whack scrapbook to show them, too.”
Harris—like Mary Rekosh, Kath Younger, and Whitney Morrill—are typical Charlottesville mothers. They are active, health-conscious, and highly educated. But they also do something that makes them stand out: They chronicle their lives for public consumption.
Scarborough Research, a marketing research firm that recently conducted a study on the mom blogger phenomenon, has defined Mommy Bloggers as “women who have at least one child in their household and have read or contributed to a blog in the past 30 days.” According to the study, Mommy Bloggers make up 14 percent of American mothers.
Harris, Rekosh, Younger, and Morrill all have blogs dedicated to what motherhood means to them. They write about everything from how to deal with a baby’s colic and diaper rash to losing much-dreaded baby weight. Rekosh takes a silly perspective on her blog, poking fun at herself for her shortcomings and shortcuts; Morrill addresses heavier issues like postpartum depression and feminine identity; Harris uses her humor to write self-deprecating essays about her life as a stay-at-home mom, consciously crafting a narrative in her digital scrapbook that her kids will one day look back on.
And then there’s Younger, by far the most popular (and unpopular), who attracts an estimated 30,000 unique visitors to her site per month and has even inspired her own self-contained parody website. Younger already had an established and popular food blog called Kath Eats Real Food, where she would post as much as three times a day before her son’s birth in September 2012. She started babykerf.com after the birth and now maintains both sites.
Younger’s ability to attract traffic to her sites has afforded her the opportunity to sell Web ads, making her blog commercial, unlike the other women I interviewed for this story. Last time I checked, babykerf.com was running Web ads for Google Chromebook, gDiapers, Charmin toilet paper, the fashion line Jack Spade, and an ad in Spanish for an Alzheimer’s disease treatment patch. Although the numbers are a bit hazy, big-time bloggers can make $4,000 to $5,000 per month, depending on what they charge for their placements.
The point is that local Mommy Bloggers, like mommies, come in all different shapes and sizes, and bring a range of motivations to their online storytelling projects. As a young woman and writer who is unmarried and doesn’t have children, I often imagine how motherhood will define me and what I will write in the future. Instead of packing up my laptop to head to the office in the morning, will I find myself refocusing my writing efforts on diaper bag reviews and tales of the terrible twos?
The Scarborough study attempts to define who Mommy Bloggers are.
“Their social and political influence reach far beyond the confines of the playground,” the study says, a conclusion I find demeaning but sort of funny.
And: “Among other findings, the study shows that Mom Bloggers are much more politically involved and socially minded than their non-blogging counterparts.”
It also says that Mommy Bloggers are, in general, more concerned with social, environmental, and cultural issues, more turned onto eco-friendly and organic products, and 52 percent more likely than other American moms to have completed a college or postgraduate education. The last data point definitely matches up with the local bloggers with whom I spoke. Harris has a master’s degree in writing, Morrill a master’s in architecture, Rekosh a master’s in education, and Younger is a registered dietician.
The idea of women sharing their domestic activities, family matters, and social interests on the Internet may sound liberating and empowering, creating a domestic dialogue that never existed before. But the mommy blogging culture isn’t all sunshine and cinnamon toast. A whole world of snark has grown up around it that, in its worst moments, involves cases of Internet bullying and online voyeurism.
I set out to figure out what makes mothers blog about their lives. At least in part, I guess I’m trying to figure out whether I’m destined to end up like them, detailing the challenges of motherhood in a world where status and self-esteem have so much to do with professional identity.
Virtually family
After the birth of her first child nine years ago, Whitney Morrill started noticing two opposing cultural depictions of mothers: angry mommy memoirs and saccharine-sweet magazine articles featuring blissed-out beauties. Morrill was neither angry nor blissed-out. She was overjoyed with her new baby and completely freaked out about being a new mother.
“Women are set up in a lot of ways to fail because there are so many expectations and I was experiencing all that,” Morrill said. “But being a creative person and artistic person, I couldn’t believe there was nothing in popular culture that really depicted that really difficult time in life with humor or music. There were no songs, no films about it.”
Whitney Morrill—part-time architect, freelance writer, and full-time mom—started her blog coconutgirl.com when her second child was 3 1/2 years old. The first post was a song she composed with her husband about the late night trials of her first-born’s colic phase. Photo: John Robinson
Morrill didn’t start her blog, thecoconutgirl.com, until 2009, when her second child was 3 1/2 years old. A full-time mom, part-time architect, and freelance writer, her first post was a song she wrote about her first-born’s colic phase, called “Coconut Girl.” Her husband recorded a guitar track, and she stayed up late one night to make a music video that captures the nocturnal existence of new moms. Then she clicked “publish” and set the tone for what has become a touching and humorous blog.
“Oh, I wish, I wish that I were far from home. No baby crying and no ringing phone. Oh, I wish, I wish that I were far from home just for a day./ But nobody knows my tiny babe like me, babe like me. She seems to only like me. Oh, nobody knows my tiny babe like me. Can’t tear myself away./ My body aches, my mind’s a flake, there’s dirty dishes, diapers all over the place. My man’s online, I’m always crying, there’s a tap root curling ’round me in the Dutailier.”
For Morrill, the act of starting a blog was a way to give back to a former version of herself, a way to help other young mothers answer the complex questions she asked over so many late nights.
“I made a commitment to remember that newborn time—to honor myself, and to honor other new moms who lack support,” Morrill said. “As it turns out, blogging is the perfect creative medium for me because my ideas run the gamut from writing to cartoons to videos to music. And parenthood provides an endless source of material.”
I reached out to Dr. Patrick Tolan, the director of Youth-Nex, a center started at UVA’s Curry School of Education to promote healthy youth development, for some perspective. As an expert in child development, he sees the importance of mothers being able to share information in the years before their kids interact with the school system of childcare providers.
“It gives that person a sense they aren’t alone and other people are interested in what’s going on, and also that they can learn from others,” he said. “It gives them strategies and emotional support for dealing with challenges they didn’t anticipate.”
Rekosh, a part-time children’s yoga instructor at Bend in Charlottesville, started her blog, mamasaidknockyouout.net, in early 2012. Like Morrill, she felt the need to have a forum that spoke honestly about what it was like to be a parent. On Rekosh’s blog you’ll find laugh-out-loud accounts of her teaching her children the correct terminology for body parts or cataloguing the ridiculous reprimands that have accidentally tumbled out of her mouth in the spur of the moment.
“Parenthood is stressful and challenging by nature,” Rekosh said. “If I can bring some unity and humor to other parents’ lives by reflecting on the absurdity in my own, that’s rewarding to me, and I feel like I’ve contributed in some small way to the community of parenthood.”
Tolan surmises that as people have come to live farther away from their families, spreading out across the country for professional opportunities, they lack a sense of support and community that at one time existed. The Internet, on the other hand, provides a virtual community, connecting women who discuss everything from baby bumps and breast pumps to bigger issues, such as isolation and their child’s education.
“Parenting is a very challenging task. We expect people to just be able to do it because they’ve been parented themselves,” he said. “We don’t really view anything in life like that.”
According to Tolan, people parent their children in an embedded network, which means that they don’t raise their children alone, but rely on family and friends as well. “These blogs and the Internet provide that to people who may not have their mom to call or be able to bring themselves to call their mom and say, ‘I don’t know what to do.’”
W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and associate professor of sociology at UVA, said that Mommy Blogs go beyond a supportive network for women, they also give women who aren’t in the paid workforce a sense of meaning and purpose, “online status.”
According to Wilcox, American women are disconnected from the traditions and people that used to make a vital domestic life: grandma, religious institutions, home economics classes, etc. Mommy Blogs, he says, supply women with the tools they need to create a domestic way of life fit for the 21st century.
“Announcing that you’re a stay-at-home mom in some Charlottesville settings can be met with an awkward silence,” Wilcox said. “Mommy Blogs, with their gorgeous depictions of ordinary home interiors, their celebration of family-centered living, and their recipes not only for good meals but also for good parenting, have moved into this gap with a vengeance, making stay-at-home momdom hip.”
The Blue Ridge Tunnel opened in 1858, and now a nonprofit organization and a class of UVA students are working to bring national attention to the historic tunnel. Photo: 1916 postcard
When the Blue Ridge Tunnel opened in 1858, its narrow 4,273′ passage through the mountains near Rockfish Gap created a corridor connecting Richmond to the Shenandoah Valley. Engineered by French civil engineer Claudius Crozet, it was a feat at the time, constructed in the most difficult stretch of the Virginia railroads—a very steep, craggy passage—and was the longest tunnel in the country. Now, the tunnel, an acclaimed Historic National Civil Engineering Landmark, is an echoey cavern beneath the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Skyline Drive, and a home to roosting bats and crumbling walls covered in graffiti. But after nearly 70 years of abandonment, new life is being breathed into the Blue Ridge Tunnel.
Clann Móhr, an nonprofit organization dedicated to studying the history of the 17-mile Blue Ridge Railroad, is working with the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation to have the tunnel listed on the National Register of Historic Places, shining a spotlight on not only the tunnel’s architectural grandeur, but the history surrounding its construction. This “Rails-to-Trails” project would reopen the historic tunnel near Afton Mountain to hikers and bikers, and put it on the map as a tourist attraction for both Nelson and Augusta counties.
If the Blue Ridge Tunnel is listed as a landmark, it will be the first tunnel listed in Virginia, said Clann Móhr’s Dan Burke, who is also a tunnel foundation board member. “The Blue Ridge Tunnel, while long abandoned, is still the epitome of [a] tremendous effort that took place in our state’s history. Sitting very quiet for too long, it has a wonderful story yet to tell.”
According to the tunnel foundation, the planning and design processes for the tunnel preservation have been completed, but the tunnel foundation is waiting on additional funding and the settlement of property easements. A formal application will be submitted to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to be reviewed for a listing on the state register, and if it meets requirements it will then be sent to federal offices for review for that National Register of Historic Places, Burke said.
Clann Móhr’s efforts to educate the community have gone beyond the interested citizens who are a part of the tunnel foundation. Members of the organization have been auditing University of Virginia Professor Richard Collins’ architectural preservation class, and also educating his students about the history behind the Blue Ridge Railroad’s construction and builders, while the students piece together how they can help preserve and protect the tunnel.
Collins, who has taught preservation planning classes since 1975 and is a faculty member in the department of urban and environmental planning at UVA’s Architecture School, learned about the Blue Ridge Tunnel through the Virginia Endowment for the Humanities, which supported research on the tunnel. After meeting Clann Móhr members at a Rotunda event in 2011 he decided the Blue Ridge Tunnel would be the perfect project for his students to take on.
“I thought it would be an interesting topic to highlight cultural landscapes,” Collins said. “Not just the structure [and] engineering, but the story and narrative of the Irish workers and their sometime fellow workers, black slaves leased to [Claudius] Crozet from local owners.”
His students’ project included mapping technologies and 3D models of the tunnel site to address aspects of the planning process of preserving and protecting the tunnel as a landmark. His students even worked on the nomination application to have the tunnel listed on the historic register.
While Collins taught his students about preservation framework and how it relates to planning with legal and policy guidelines for the tunnel, Clann Móhr shared its cultural and historical research on the Blue Ridge Railroad with the students.
“I think the most valuable thing we learned from Clann Móhr is that a small group of people passionately interested in a place are an unstoppable force,” said Madeleine Hawks, an urban and environmental planning Master’s student. “I am impressed by their persistence and I hope that their research and planning transforms the tunnel soon so that others can enjoy the place and stories as much as they do.”
Claudius Crozet and his engineering accomplishments are well recognized in Central Virginia—from founding Virginia Military Institute to working with the state’s railroad—but the history surrounding the Irish workers and slaves who constructed Crozet’s railroad and tunnels is a bit hazy.
“While we have seen the books about the brilliant Claudius Crozet and have read the very dull reports about the railroad, our interest was in the many Irish immigrants and local slaves who actually did all the work in building the railroad up and through the mountains,” Burke said. “Our research interests have grown to include the local community that existed in this particular part of Central Virginia during the decade of the 1850s when the railroad construction took place.”
The organization has studied old courthouse records of local landowners who lived near the railroad in Albemarle, Nelson, and Augusta counties, as well as census records from Irish immigrants and other documents, such as railroad payroll ledgers. So far, Clann Móhr has collected the names of more than 1,900 workers and their families and 100 slaves who were involved in the railroad construction.
Efforts to bring the tunnel back to life are gaining more and more momentum. Two documentary filmmakers—The Stone Carvers director Paul Wagner and his wife Ellen—attended a tunnel presentation by the UVA students in December, and were so inspired by the preservation project and by Clann Móhr’s research that they have decided to pursue a film about the Blue Ridge Tunnel and the push to open it to the public as a hiking and heritage trail.
“This effort is obviously at the earliest planning stage, but as you can imagine, Clann Mhór is simply over the moon with the prospects,” Burke said.
