A FAMILY SUPPORTS YOU

Gail Lunsford’s family has lived in our mountains for many generations, but in 1975 she moved with her young daughter to New York City where she fashioned a career in computer consultant. In 1984, she married Steve Bardwell, a transplant to New York from Colorado. In 1998, they moved back to the mountains, to Gail’s family land, where they operate Wake Robin Farms and make bread for local markets. Gail’s daughter, Cady Eades, joined them in 1999 and is raising her daughter Cassidy on the farm, which is off of Meadowstown Road.

Gail Lunsford: I had 50 first cousins when I was growing up. Now that’s a lot of cousins and I didn’t understand what it meant. The Lunsford’s were big talkers and they were everything you know a Lunsford to be. They were schoolteachers; they played the piano. You would walk into my grandmother’s house and she would be throwing up her hands, screaming, “My god, it’s like Grand Central Station.” We knew who we were. We were Lunsford’s. We would come out here to visit my mother’s family, the Teague’s. We would visit her sister, her children, and her grandchildren who lived just on the other side of the property that we’re on right now. It was very, very quiet out here and nobody was screaming, yelling, and doing cartwheels in the yard. I didn’t understand the peacefulness and quietness of this place at that time. I was not somebody that it spoke to immediately. I was not listening to it. I kept saying the quietness was isolation; the inability to be connected to the rest of the world. It was not something that I wanted. I didn’t see it as contemplative or meditative.

I saw it as isolation and I had to try to get out of that.All I could think about when I was growing up was, I’ve got to get to New York. I want a place where there are a million books. I want to go to the opera. I want to go to the shows. I want to be part of that large city. So when I had my daughter and I was getting a divorce, I knew there was only one place I was going to raise her. I was going to give her everything that I didn’t have. What I thought was a gift, only many years later, Cady said, “I felt so isolated.” There were the museums and there were all of those things, but there was no safety net.

Cady Eades: My biological father lived down here, so I would come down and visit him maybe twice or three times a year. Gail and I would come down and see him, and I would come down later for Christmas vacations or a week or two. It was small glimpses. It wasn’t long extended amounts of time. It was enough to give me a good taste of it and then I had to turn around and leave.

You have your friends growing up, however, they’re not going to support you unconditionally. A family supports you. They support what you do. Your friends are going to change overtime and some are going to be coming in or out of a group. They’re always going to be changing. Your family is a much more stable environment.

Steve Bardwell: I remember very clearly the first time I spent quite awhile down here. It felt right. I never felt any hostility, suspicion, or distrust because people saw me as an outsider. I knew I was not coming in with pre-formed opinions, judgments, or with prejudices against people; and I came with the imprimatur of Gail’s family. So I wasn’t an outsider. I always felt very welcome. People were very warm and they had time for what I was interested in. There was a meshing of outlooks that was very striking to me. It was very different than what I’d ever seen in a big city or growing up, but it’s not that I would’ve said, “This is what I’m looking for.” I didn’t know I was looking for that, but it was clear when I came down that this was a great place.

Gail: I feel the community has changed. There’s a much broader feel. My mother, not long before she passed away, said, “you’ve to got to remember something Gail; I came from Sandy Mush before it was cool to be from Sandy Mush.” That’s the difference. I can tell you when I was growing-up; it wasn’t cool to be from the county. But people who have come into this community in the last ten years have recognized the value of the birthright that’s been sold in this area. An entire line of farmers is gone and I think there’s a certain obligation to preserve the family farm. My mother grew up in a farming community, in a farming household, and she constantly monitored the weather and how it related to farms. That is not something I passed on to Cady. Rain means something different to a non-farming household. All you have to do is take one generation off the farm and it is lost, and it takes several generations to bring back. There’s a quality in what we’re doing here, in terms of Cady, who has joined in the bakery, and Cassidy, who has a better understanding of farms and farming than Cady had at the same age in New York City. On her third birthday Cassidy was going to invite Prince Philip and Joe Miller who fix the local tractors. Those were her two invitations she was sending out so I think she knew the values. She rides down Meadowstown road and calls out everybody who lives on that road. Now that’s a feeling of community.

Steve: I think a part of this sense of community and connectedness is a question of scale. We’re directly connected through family or the bakery with ten percent of the people in Madison County. That’s huge. I can’t think of another place you could be and have that close a connection with a significant portion of the population. It means that the emotional energy, reassurance, or sense of security, whatever shape it takes, is quantitatively significant. It’s not something you have to reach for. The geography, the whole area, has a very human sense of scale. The whole environment is fitted to people our size. There is something different here and it’s definitely worth protecting. People come here and they pick up on it. It’s one of the things that is good from the past. There’s an essential element that is very good, and if not unique, than special. It could be ruined if a large part of Madison was bought by developers who put million-dollar homes all over the county. These are people who buy a house when they’re sixty years old to retire in and they have no essential tie to the community.

Cady: I think a lot of the people that move here are in search of that feeling of, when a person gives their word, their word is good. The majority of the people that I know that moved here from bigger places moved because they knew one person, and from that one person they were welcomed by tons of other people. I think in a larger city, where people are so preoccupied with their personal goals, they have no ties. And they have their own personal accomplishments that are not necessarily for the good of everybody. Here in Madison County, you get the feeling of “what I do is to help somebody else.” It’s passed one person to the next person. That’s why people come here. They feel like they’re doing something for the good of everybody.