Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302260473
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BURKE'S GARDEN LENGTH: Long
NATURAL HISTORY
Along about 100 million years ago, back when the Allegheny Mountains first took shape, something strange happened in the southeast corner of Tazewell County.It's the reason why the weather's 10 degrees colder here than the rest of the county and why the names on today's mailboxes are the some of the same names in the circa-1800 graveyard.
Geology is also why, after all these years, there's still just one steep and winding road leading to "out" - the word residents use to describe any place but Burke's Garden.
Meaning, it's not easy to get there from here. When the glaciers ran amok all those years ago, they left behind a geological oddity that still governs the land and its inhabitants.
Like God reached down and made a giant thumbprint, leaving a 5-by-10 mile dent in his wake.
Burke's Garden is a bowl, a picturesque valley completely encircled by a single mountain, save for one narrow gap where the water drains out to sea - and where Virginia 623 carries people through 10 miles of hairpin curves and sometimes icy inclines to the other side of Rich Mountain.
Tourists regularly wobble into the Burke's Garden post office to ask postmistress Colleen Cox if there isn't a better way to get out.
There are two other passageways into the place, but they're bumpy gravel roads - and even more spiraling than Virginia 623. "I've been tempted to send them across the dirt roads," Cox grins.
Ruth Hancock at the General Store gets tickled by similar inquiries: "The tourists all say, `I bet you really stock up in the winter.'
"Well shoot, we have graders and salt trucks just like everybody else."
In fact, few of the Gardeners who work "out" ever miss work because of the record-setting snows and cold temperatures here. Their motto: Respect the mountain. Respect your vehicle.
Indeed, Burke's Gardeners are a hardy lot, have been ever since 1745 when James Burke followed a wounded elk into the bowl and discovered a hunter's paradise - and, eventually, many angry Indians.
But there was something about the isolated, hemmed-in feeling that drew people to Burke's Garden and kept them there. Maybe it's that majestical, almost mystical quality that strikes you the first time you come into the place and look up and around.
The moon seems to rise slower here, perching itself just above the mountain ridge and shining down.
Centuries-old oak trees stand stark against a backdrop of lush, rolling cattle pastures.
Turn around 360 degrees, and there are mountains in every direction.
Drive around the scant few roads here and you can't get lost - you either dead end, or go in a circle.
Burke's Garden is isolated, like an island. You can hear it in the down-home talk at the General Store - who all's gained weight, who's lost it and who's lost it but gained it all back.
You can see it in the details, like the hand-painted intersection signs: Each family gets its name on a sign, along with an arrow pointing to their home place and the number of miles it takes to get there.
The homespun touch is even there on the official highway-department "Burke's Garden" sign. Retired sheep farmer/one-room schoolhouse teacher/county treasurer Ed Greever got out his white paint and paint brush one day and personally added the apostrophe between the E and the S.
"All the old records and maps, they've got the apostrophe, so I like to hammer on that," he says.
Some call it community pride. Others say Burke's Gardeners are clannish, that the isolation has made them stubbornly resistant to outside influence. But the throwback attitudes definitely have appeal.
When three Maryland Amish families went searching for a quiet, peaceful place to escape the fast-encroaching Washington, D.C., suburbs, they brought their bags and buggies - and many curiosity-seekers - to Burke's Garden.
The response among locals, so far, has been mixed. Resistance to change here is as steadfast and strong as the winters are long.
It was there when the Amish came two years ago, and it was there last year when a merchant decided to be the first in the Garden's history to sell beer.
You can hear the resistance, too, in Jim Hoge's voice when the third-generation native outlines his No. 1 fear: that Virginia's largest rural historic district could some day fall prey to developers.
"We think it's the best uncommercialized place in maybe the whole United States," he says. "I mean, we've got all the rest of the world to do something with.
"Why not leave this alone?"
Colorful characters
Burke's Garden is a gem in many ways. Sociologists have written books about its uniqueness. Geologists and biologists have spent decades studying the rare species and formations found here.
Historians, naturally, have a heyday, too, thanks in part to Jim Hoge, a man whose home is a veritable museum of community artifacts, antiques and records. Hoge is also the unofficial mayor of Burke's Garden, self-appointed: "I like the title, and the neighbors are nice enough not to contest it," he deadpans.
When Hoge was young, the saying about Burke's Garden was: The only way you could get land was to "heir it or marry it."
Hoge, 74, inherited his 600-acre spread in 1936, when the Washington & Lee student gave up lawyering and came home to farm sheep. Now mostly retired, Hoge and his wife, Louise, can describe the days when everybody walked to work and to school, back when walking paths - not roads - linked farmer to farmer, home to school and church.
Back then Gardeners numbered more than 1,000, over three times the population today. Hoge recalls fondly the "colorful characters" who told stories about the Garden and its white settlers, beginning with explorer James Burke.
Burke is said to have shown his discovery to a group of surveyors for a claim to 400 acres of his choosing and 10 pounds of English sterling. Cooking breakfast for the surveying party one fall morning, the story goes, he left behind a mound of potato peelings covered with brush. When the surveyors returned the next year, they found a bed of potatoes - and Burke's Garden got its name.
In the early years as now, cattle was the staple of farming, mainly because of the Garden's short growing season (the shortest in the state) and the strain of taking bulk items to market.
Driving to Tazewell or Wytheville wasn't as simple as a short car ride up and down the mountain; it took took sweat and muscle to push a wagon up Garden Mountain.
Getting it down - at a safe speed - was even harder. Early settlers tied trees to the back of their wagons for brakes.
Because of the isolation, people depended on each other in creative ways, farmer to farmer, neighbor to friend. University of Colorado history professor Ralph Mann researched the Garden's antebellum years recently, noting the intricate barter system Gardeners used to exchange their crops locally. Credit was so pervasive, friendships so entangled, Mann learned, that sometimes siblings found themselves on opposite sides of court cases.
Jim and Louise Hoge read Mann's report, and they found it, frankly, boring. "He found that if someone was sick, the neighbors would pitch in and help on the farm," Louise, a retired schoolteacher, says. "Like we didn't already know that."
"The Garden has always been like that, people looking out for each other," Jim Hoge adds. "Growing up here, I didn't get into any meanness that the older people wouldn't tell my parents."
Burke's Garden's heyday was at the turn of this century, when there were three schoolhouses, an academy, three stores, grist and lumber mills, and a Union Church where the various congregations rotated services. Five farmers controlled 40 percent of the land.
Large tracts were so hard to come by that millionaire George Vanderbilt, looking for a place to put his Biltmore estate, was actually turned away. He went to Asheville, N.C., instead.
Two Virginia governors lived in Burke's Garden, Dr. John Floyd (who, incidentally, had a pet bear) and his son, John B. Floyd, who later became secretary of the U.S. Navy under President James Buchanan.
Perhaps the most famous Burke's Garden native was the "varmint" of 1952, a coyote that eluded Gardeners for over a year, killing 410 sheep. Local hunters were so flustered by the coyote that a big-game tracker from Arizona was paid $2,500 by the county's "varmint account" to put an end to the coyote.
An estimated 3,000 cars came to get a look at the dead coyote, hung up by its feet in front of the schoolhouse. It was the Garden's first and only traffic jam - and its largest wake.
Jim Hoge still has the fangs of the famous coyote (he had them made into a set of false teeth for posterity), plus a dozen or more other local legends to tell. "His stories, they've been told so many times, they're worn out," Louise Hoge says.
Which is part of the draw of Burke's Garden - storytellers eat it up.
Hoge fondly remembers the characters of decades past. People like the late Deacon Lineberry, an old farmer who, when asked how he got the name Deacon, responded: "The rougher element of the congregation rose up and demanded representation."
`Nobody ever turns anybody down'
Joe and Pauletta VanDyke's James Burke Inn may not be well-steeped in history, but what the bed and breakfast/ranch house lacks in antiques and lace, it makes up for in ambition.
The VanDykes will tell you about their plans for a mini-resort-restaurant-health spa, then show you the place out back where construction is ongoing. A cavernous building, the property is covered with floor-to-ceiling tile, remnants from the ham-curing business that once operated from the site.
"The first batch of hogs came out OK" for the former owners, recalls Pauletta VanDyke. "But when it came time to do the second batch, the men got drunk and over-salted the hams. Ruined the whole batch.
"It turned out the wife didn't really want any hogs being killed in her backyard anyway, so they gave up."
Former Tazewell residents, the VanDykes got into the tourism business last year after noticing all the cars from outside the community - some 50 a weekend day last summer - stopping by the Amish farms to buy butter and baked goods.
People in the Garden have been puzzled by their plans, Pauletta VanDyke concedes. "Rumors here spread so quickly," she says.
"When we first moved here we had a party telephone line. And every time I dialed I could hear the guy [who shared the line] on the other side breathing."
The VanDykes' plans to serve alcohol at their restaurant, as well as have live music, have also raised brows - a reaction that Tommy Dunford, a Burke's Garden native, knows all too well.
Owner of Burke's Garden General Store, Dunford found himself the center of controversy last year when he applied for a license to sell beer. Though the license was approved last April, many old-time Gardeners worried about increased drunk driving and litter on the mountain, and refused to support Dunford's appeal.
Last fall, a General Store visitor asking to borrow the Burke's Garden telephone directory - handily contained on one side of one sheet of paper - found several names crossed out in red ink: the people who refused to sign the store's petition to sell beer.
The beer issue is still divisive, Pauletta VanDyke says. "There are families here who won't trade with Tommy now or ever," she says. "They'll drive over the mountain, all the way to Tazewell, for a loaf of bread rather than give him the business."
The Amish have also sparked concern, some Gardeners say, mostly over rising property taxes and tourist traffic. Some people fear more Amish families from Maryland and Pennsylvania will move here, paying more for the land than what area residents can afford.
"The farms have been handed down from all the generations, and people here are afraid that when they're gone, that's it," says Gail Lampert, a third-generation Gardener.
The Amish keep mostly to themselves, relying on just a few local families for such things as transportation outside of the Garden. Like the early settlers, they learned the mountain's too steep for horse and buggy.
The Amish would not consent to photographs or interviews for this article, but knowledge of their peculiarities and old-fashioned ways is widespread in the Garden.
Among the tidbits residents passed along to a reporter: The Amish have 500 acres for sheep and cattle farming (they paid $1,000 per acre). They built their own houses and their own school, in which the oldest child, an 18-year-old, teaches the other students.
They left Maryland because it got too expensive, too crowded and they couldn't expand. They're hoping to lure more families to Burke's Garden to live.
They built a phone booth across the road from their house; it's OK to make outgoing phone calls for necessities, but the Amish don't believe in telephones inside the home. They don't have electricity, but they do have a generator - and a washing machine powered by a string-pull Briggs and Stratton engine.
While their arrival has alarmed many tourism-weary residents, the Burke's Garden Rule of Thumb still applies. "In this community nobody ever turns anybody down," says Jimmy Brown, a native Gardener. That is, even if you aren't friends, you still help community members in need - whether they ask for help or not.
For instance: When a 6-year-old Amish girl was kicked in the face by a colt last year and had to be flown to a Roanoke hospital for emergency surgery, residents quickly collected money to help with medical expenses.
`A personal decision
It would be easier to earn a living someplace else, as so many Gardeners have learned, traveling "out" each day for jobs elsewhere.
Jimmy Brown tried that once; had a good job working for the state even. "But it just didn't suit me working for somebody else."
Brown's father, Mac, came to Burke's Garden in 1941. A dairyman, Brown paid $6,500 for his 130 acres, including "all the cattle and machinery, plus three horses that only had three eyes between them," Jimmy Brown says, laughing.
By 1980, the farm was no longer big enough to be profitable. The Staunton-based Moore family, the largest landholders in Burke's Garden with a 5,000-acre livestock operation, owns the land surrounding Brown's farm, and refused to sell off sections. "They're good neighbors," says Jimmy, "but it hems you in."
The 48-year-old has since become Burke's Garden's most resourceful entrepreneur. He put two pure-water springs on his land to use, beginning a trout-farming operation that hatches more than 300,000 trout a year. He grows Christmas trees, too, for wholesale and commission sales, and recently began operating two sawmills and a solar kiln for furniture lumber.
Growing up on a Burke's Garden farm was hard work, still is. Brown remembers the winter of 1960 well - there were snow drifts so high up "you could walk down the road and never see a fence; you'd walk right over them."
That was also the winter his father got heart trouble and couldn't work. "So I'd get up and milk, then drive my truck to school, then come back and milk and feed . . . until I just couldn't do the work anymore going to school, so I quit."
Teen pregnancy and drop-outs are a problem in the community, concedes Brown, who earned his high school equivalency degree in 1988. One reason why is that kids miss out on after-school activities in Tazewell because it's hard finding rides home across the mountain.
Still, he wouldn't raise his three daughters anywhere else. "I was in Charlottesville recently, and I saw all the things kids have to do there, but there's so much pressure on them that you don't find here."
The days when the only local traffic you ran into was a herd of sheep are getting fewer, though. Brown worries about his 12-year-old riding her bike on the roads. "We have all these outsiders coming in, wanting to look at the Amish now. . . . The traffic's not so good, but it is better than housing developments. I'm afraid that 30, 40 years down the line, that's what will be here."
It's on Jim Hoge's mind, too. Hoge is working with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and other community landowners - trying to get consensus on a project to preserve Burke's Garden.
"Of course it will have to be a personal decision," Hoge says. Landowners will be asked to commit to property easements that would prevent subdivision of their land.
Preservation is a delicate issue, Hoge says. "If people get the idea that they think somebody outta Richmond's trying to get something done, they won't like it."
But already the Moores seem interested, Hoge says, as do the Hanes, the family of hosiery magnates that owns 2,000 acres in the center of Burke's Garden.
More than anything, Hoge is banking that Burke's Garden itself will persuade residents to back historic preservation. The huge old oak trees, the family histories that date back 150 years, the snow-topped hay bales that look like giant Frosted Mini Wheats.
The glaciers knew what they were doing all those eons ago when they created this scenic limestone soup bowl - and fertile ground for a sentimental sense of place.
They say an air-conditioning salesman would go broke here, that the snow can drift up so high it touches the telephone wires.
They say that God pipes the sunshine in, that Burke's Garden "stays safe, like in the hollow of God's hand."
As Jim Hoge explains, "A lot of us are just real conceited about being from Burke's Garden. We like to think it's unusual, that it can't be found anywhere else, so it ought to be preserved."
That's not just conceit and pride talking. It's geologic fact.
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PROFILE
BURKES GARDEN INDEX\ \ PRESENT POPULATION: 275\ POPULATION IN 1965: 200\ POPULATION IN 1915: 1,500\ HOUSEHOLDS: 108\ \ FARMING HOUSEHOLDS THAT WORK "OUT": 30\ HOUSEHOLDS THAT FARM AND WORK "OUT": 6\ RETIREE/WIDOW HOUSEHOLDS: 18\ NON-RESIDENT (OR PART-TIME RESIDENT) LANDOWNERS: 11\ FARM PRODUCTION RANKED BY OUTPUT: LIVESTOCK CATTLE, DAIRY, SHEEP.\ PAVED ROADS INTO THE GARDEN: 1\ DIRT ROADS INTO THE GARDEN: 2 (NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CITY FOLK)\ AMISH PEOPLE LIVING IN THE GARDEN: SIX ADULTS, 20 CHILDREN\ NUMBER OF STORES: 1\ \ RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE: -26 (JAN. 27, 1987)\ MOST SNOW IN 24 HOURS: 23 INCHES (JAN. 4, 1942)\ INCHES OF SNOW IN DECEMBER 1992: 15\ ENDANGERED SPECIES: THE VIRGINIA LONG-EARED BAT\ \ TELEPHONE SERVICE: COMMUNITY SERVICE: COMMUNITY-OWNED; THE OLDEST TELEPHONE COMPANY IN THE STATE (CIRCA 1899, BEGINNING WITH A SINGLE LINE FROM A LOCAL COUNTRY STORE TO A TAZEWELL JEWELRY STORE)\ FIRE DEPARTMENT: VOLUNTEER, BEGAN IN 1980 WITH A 1941 TRUCK AND AN OLD MANURE SPREADER-TURNED WATER TANK\ \ BEST OFF-THE-SUBJECT QUOTE: "HE WOULDN'T KNOW ME FROM ADAM'S OFF OX." = JIM HOGE, SPEAKING OF A RICHMOND POLITICIAN. (THE RURAL VERSION OF "HE WOULDN'T KNOW ME FROM ADAM'S HOUSECAT.") ORIGIN OF SAYING: WHEN FARMERS WORKED WITH TEAMS OF OXEN, THE SMART OXEN WAS THE LEAD OX; A NEW, LESS INTELLIGENT OX WAS THE "OFF OX."\ \ SMALLEST OLD-TIMERS VS. NEWCOMERS ISSUE: SHOULD BURKE'S GARDEN HAVE AN APOSTROPHE OR NOT? (OLD TIMERS THINK IT SHOULD.)