I COULD FEEL THE HISTORY OF THIS PLACE

Cathy Bennett, and her husband Andy Bennett, lives in the Grapevine community where they farm and operate Doubletree Logging and Milling. They have lived in Madison County for eight years and have two young children and Andy’s older daughter from a previous marriage.

Cathy Bennett: My neighborhood near Louisville, Kentucky, was like a child’s dream. It was perfect in a lot of ways. People had enough space to keep a pony or a horse. There were farms around and there was one school in the community that went from kindergarten to ninth grade. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. When we walked to school, we knew who lived in each house, and we probably had a connection with somebody at every other house. We could just walk to school and nobody was afraid that they’d get snatched. It was a really small community and the kids could just be free so we felt like we pretty much owned the place.

It was a very social community for both the parents and the kids. They had community barbeques, cookouts, and celebrations for the Fourth of July. On the 4th there was a greased pig chase where a pig was let go and the kids would chase it until they could catch it. If you caught the pig you had to keep it. They probably don’t do that now; somebody would probably get mad. One time our neighbor’s kid caught the pig, or somehow they just ended up with it, but it thought it was a dog. It would just eat grass. I don’t know whatever happened to it, but it lived right next door for a while. They named it George.

For me, the perfect summer day would be to have nothing else to do but mess around with horses and your friends. We would decide the night before to meet somewhere and then we would all go riding for hours. We had special fields where the horses knew we would let them gallop. I remember coming home from school and watching TV, and then getting bored with it and going outside. The environment was just so wonderful for being outside and we had the animals to keep us company. I think those kinds of activities were encouraged. I look back on it and I think, “Gosh, I might have grown up in Pleasantville!”

I went to college in Oregon and in my senior year I focused on education in the Southern Appalachian region, specifically the settlement schools, like at Pine Mountain and Hindman in eastern Kentucky. After college, I was trying to figure out how I was going to live and make a living and I was really unsatisfied with the jobs I had that required a lot of sitting and doing office work. I was reading a lot of books and essays by Wendell Berry and his ideas, and others that promoted local agriculture and an honest living on the land made sense to me. I began to think maybe agriculture could fill in this need to be working outside on the land so I began apprenticing in the agricultural field. I was interested in organic agriculture. I connected with some people in Greenville, Tennessee, that had a farm and were looking for somebody to help them. I farmed there for five or six years and then I met my husband and we moved here, to Madison County.

I loved Madison County even before I moved here. Andy was already living here and we had friends who played old-time music and I would often come to visit when I lived in Tennessee. I could feel the history in this place. I could feel the hard times that people had experienced. I could see the old buildings. I could wake up in the morning and imagine what it would have been like a hundred years ago. That was important to me. I don’t know if it was romantic or whether I wanted to live in a different era, but I wasn’t going to be getting that in Louisville, Kentucky, or in the suburbs. My childhood community had changed too much. I needed to be living close to the land and living a less consumptive lifestyle. When we looked at our farm, the land looked good. It was a nice layout, you could farm here, you could raise vegetables here, and you could keep horses. The things that were important to me from the standpoint of my livelihood, which had been raising vegetables, that specific farm seemed to offer that.

We moved into a community where we had some friends that knew some friends that knew some more friends. We were automatically absorbed into a community of people that had already been here for twenty-five or thirty years. We didn’t really know anybody who lived on our road, but since then, our community includes our neighbors right on our road as much as it does the people we knew before we decided to buy the farm. We know almost everybody on our road and the kids know them too. It’s a little bit like the neighborhood where I grew up. The kids have learned that the neighbors will often have a piece of candy or a treat for them so they get excited about visiting.

It’s important for us to know our neighbors, to stop and talk. The people that have lived on our road for so many years or generations are used to people stopping and talking. We’re real glad to take some time out and talk to our neighbors. That’s probably the best thing you can do to build to community. We have even connected with some members of the Latino community when the Center Community Center hosted a tamale-making workshop and a Latin Mothers Day celebration.

It has taken me awhile to find a place to call home as an adult. I cannot imagine going back to live in my childhood community. Although it was a perfect place as a child, I believe it has changed too much; or perhaps I have changed too much. The kids there no longer walk or ride their bikes to school; there isn’t much room to keep a horse; the trails have been built up into very expensive subdivisions. People drive everywhere. Home is our farm with our children. It’s a place where everyone is comfortable and happy. We can walk or ride horses around the neighborhood, and grow much of our own food.

There are a lot of positive things happening in Madison County, especially if the trend continues to promote the county’s food, art, and places for kids. We seem to be attracting lots of creative people and also people who want to live outside of the “rat race.” The community centers and the improvements in the library are great for everyone here.

The flip side to all of the great things is that Madison County is going to be “loved to death.” I think there’s a place for appropriate development, but there must be ways for the county to grow without overdevelopment. As far as splitting up farms, building on steep land, ruining watersheds, and chopping up wildlife habitat for big huge vacation homes, I don’t see any sense in that. I have already seen an increase in traffic and huge trucks on the road and signs for gated-type “communities” all over the county.

When I think about the importance of community, and thinking about it through the experience of my children, it’s more important than I ever imagined. My biggest hope is that my kids will grow up loving Madison County and decide to make it their home too.