Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 1, 1990 TAG: 9006020419
SECTION: SMITH MOUNTAIN TIMES PAGE: SM-1 EDITION: BEDFORD/FRANKLIN
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SCRUGGS LENGTH: Long
Then came the developers.
Beginning in the late 1960s, speculator after speculator knocked on the Joneses' door with offers for their farmland and its mile of gently sloping frontage on Gills Creek.
"They came around so much until I was about to die," Virginia Jones said.
Developers eventually got the message that the Joneses would not part with their land - for any price.
"I could have sold it 50 or 70 times already," said Nelson Jones, 68. "But money ain't everything."
The Joneses have clung to their lifestyle - with a few adjustments - as Smith Mountain Dam has transformed somnolent farming communities along the Roanoke River basin into bustling summer resorts.
Today, their 150-acre farm is one of a dwindling number of large, undeveloped tracts available on Smith Mountain Lake. Most of the shoreline has been subdivided for single-family homes and condominiums. Land records show there are fewer than a dozen remaining farms of 100 or more acres.
"There's not too many of the old-timers left around here," said C.W. Toney, a Franklin County native who last year sold 90 acres of waterfront farmland for $3 million.
The prime tracts are located on the Franklin County side of the lake. The last of the large farms in Bedford County was subdivided last year. "In the good part of the lake, I don't think there's any left," said a spokeswoman for the Bedford County real estate office.
Several of the remaining tracts are held by Appalachian Power Co., which created the lake in the early 1960s by damming the Roanoke River at the notch in Smith Mountain.
Many farmers who worked the rich bottom land along the Roanoke and Blackwater rivers departed when the the dam inundated 20,000 acres. Most of the remaining farmers eventually sold out as demand for waterfront property drove up land values in the 1970s and 1980s.
The holdouts consist of landowners who are waiting for property values to peak and landowners who could care less how high prices go.
Toney is a property owner who held out for the right price - a record $33,000 per acre for raw lake land.
Developers had been courting Toney for years. With more than three miles of shoreline on the main Roanoke River channel, his family's farm was one of the most sought-after properties at the lake.
"Everyone was after that land," developer George Sutherland. "I talked with him about it for years."
Toney and his sister, Bernice Stone, were in no hurry. The farm had been in their family for generations. The homeplace, which overlooks the Roanoke River and Smith Mountain, is built around a log cabin that Toney says may date back 200 years.
Another reason they did not want to sell was that Toney - like many of his neighbors - had a waterfront trailer park built on part of his property to supplement his farming income.
Still, developers kept visiting in hopes that one day Toney and Stone might change their minds.
Ron Willard, a Franklin County native who has developed two golf communities at the lake, first approached Toney in 1977. "I started on him with a half-million-dollar offer."
Toney said "no" so many times by the early 1980s that developers stopped coming around. The traffic picked up again a couple of years ago when word got around that Toney and his sister were entertaining offers.
Toney explained that he and his sister were getting older and that high land values made it more difficult for farm income to cover taxes.
"I don't think we made a mistake holding onto the land for so long," he said. "I know some of the people let property go a few years ago and now see their mistake."
The decision to sell is not easy for many farmers, said Harris Ferguson, a real estate agent who grew up on a dairy farm on Gills Creek in Franklin County.
Even if they are willing to part with land that in some cases has been in their families for generations, farmers are wary of federal tax laws that no longer give preferential treatment to capital gains.
"They don't want to sell and see half of it go to the government," Ferguson said. "Some of them have a price - generally a very high price."
Not everyone, however, has a price.
Nelson and Virginia Jones have no intention of leaving the Franklin County farm where they raised eight children and spent most of their 53 years together.
Their roots run deep in the 253-acre farm. Virginia Jones' grandfather owned it for a while in the late 1880s. Nelson Jones' father leased the land for growing tobacco in the 1920s.
"When I was big enough to pick up a hoe, my daddy rented this place out and we worked it," he said. "I said if I ever had a chance to buy it, I would."
That chance came in 1946, in an era when the farming communities along the rivers and creeks of northeastern Franklin County were made up of neighbors who knew each other and were often related. When the Joneses' homestead burned down, neighbors joined together to help the family rebuild.
The region was so isolated that many homes did not get electric service until 1949 - three years after the Joneses bought their farm on Gills Creek.
Light bulbs and labor-saving appliances paled in comparison with changes that Apco soon would bring to the region.
Virginia Jones recalls the day in the early 1950s when two young men came walking through the field to announce they were Apco employees surveying for a hydroelectric dam at Smith Mountain.
Jones said she "prophesied" then and there that upsetting changes were coming.
"We had a pleasant life before the lake came up," she said. "And all these people from up North. I'd just as soon see them go back."
Gills Creek began spilling over its banks onto the Jones farm shortly after the gates of Smith Mountain Dam were shut in 1963. The reservoir eventually claimed more than 80 acres of their most productive bottom land and left them with water frontage along both sides of a deep cove.
In the past 20 years, many of their neighbors have been replaced by newcomers whose values they do not share and whose preoccupation with recreation they do not understand.
The Joneses - brought up to "pay as you go" - cannot fathom why someone would go deeply into debt to build a showcase summer house used only for an occasional weekend.
"People went crazy," Nelson Jones said. "It's the same as the gold rush."
"I think it will be a ghost town one day," Virginia Jones added.
Their farm is a refuge from the world of speculation, fast-living and onerous government regulations encircling them. Selling their land would be giving up their freedom.
"It's a pleasure, to be free for the rest of my days," Nelson Jones said.
As much as they complain about the lake and the changes it has come to represent, the lake has not been all bad for the Joneses.
Income lost from their bottom land has been replaced by annual fees for the more than 100 trailer sites they lease on their land. For more than a decade they operated Jones Marina, selling gasoline to boaters. And their eight children spent their free time on water skis.
"It's been a life change," Virginia Jones said.
Their children are grown now and raising families of their own. All live within an hour's drive of the farm, where the entire family gathers several times a year.
Stepping onto their farm is like stepping back in time. White-faced cattle grazing in the pasture occasionally step into the lake to cool off. Wild ducks float by.
Framed photographs of their eight children and 12 grandchildren ring their living room. One shows everyone together at the Joneses' 50th wedding anniversary a few years back.
Their farmhouse does have television and a few modern conveniences. But they have continued to live a simple life.
Virginia Jones, now bent with arthritis, still cooks on a wood stove. Nelson Jones tends a large garden plot and raises beef cattle. There is an outhouse behind their home.
But the Joneses would not think of selling out and buying a modern house in a subdivision.
"If I had my choice," Nelson Jones said, "I'd rather go into that tobacco barn there, sweep the floor and live in it."
by CNB