Neither a product of the world, nor a reaction to it

Although I can eat a lot of vegetables myself, it's only the smallest fraction of what I grow—so why bother doing all this work to grow so darn many? Clearly the farm plays a big part in your dinner plans, the vegetables being your main interface with what's going on here! But there are many reasons to have a farm, just as there are many reasons to join a CSA: there's the ecological principles, living in the natural world, or engaging with an enterprise that contributes to connection with sustainable agriculture and local food systems. These are all things that you might appreciate, and that I do appreciate. Another facet is to be a part of the local economy, and for you to support small businesses, ideas you're probably familiar with in general. It's a little harder, though, to get a feel for why exactly to do that, and what arises as a product of that small-scale, local economy. For me, one of the main things I appreciate about the farm in my own life is that it is a way to support my livelihood with an engaging, positive project while living as a part of the economic patchwork of the world around me.

The area I live in is based on farming, at least in a historical sense; there's still enough of that agricultural community left that I fit into it on that basis. But it also contains repair shops, parts stores, mechanics, truck drivers, and all the other support businesses and tradesmen required to keep an agricultural area going, all here in this same place. My farm is an operation that lives in that larger picture—my peer group is comprised of the people and businesses who are doing that same thing, living in that same world. These people are the vegetable farmers I learned from, selling at farmers markets to provide for their lives, and now, retirement. They’re the neighboring businesses we sold next to and thought well of for the fact that they could do the same. They're the farmers I pass on the road, people I don't even know, driving tractors to make hay before rain. It's the machinery repair shop, the traveling mechanics; it's Fred the plumber in his truck heading the other way down the road, and the propane delivery drivers delivering fuel for greenhouses and winter heating. In our own way we're all doing the same thing, a part of the same world.

This social fabric is the cultural history of the place where I live. Describing the society of immigrants who came to Pennsylvania, then spread down into the Shenandoah valley and across the Potomac here to Lovettsville in the 1730s, Warren Hofstra writes in A Separate Place that “No farm was entirely self-sufficient, and few farmers sought to live in isolation from their neighbors. Many...could not produce all they needed to feed, house, and clothe their families. They had to depend on local trade. ... The need for wagons called for wagonmakers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights to make them and teamsters to drive them. ... Thus the farm and the limited scale of commercial activity on the farm generated an intricate goods-and-services economy. ... This network was a community premised on a set of exchanges that were reciprocal and mutually supportive.”

Not all farms, though, are a part of that goods-and-services economy, today or in the past. I use the same equipment and production systems as farms many times my size, to produce vegetables of largely the same types—tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, squash. But the giant farms of agribusiness out in the Salinas Valley of California, they aren't owned by people—and a monocrop of thousands of acres of lettuce isn't really my speed. The tomato fields of southern Florida, the same: whichever businesses control that ground are designed to export the resources of the region to generate more and more money and power well beyond a human scale, rather than to live with their neighbors in small-scale commercial relationships.

On the other end of things, many small sustainable farmers have the opposite orientation to the business side—in fact a deep discomfort with the imperative to support one's livelihood with one's farming efforts. I didn't encounter this questioning in the world of farms I came up in; here it was laudable to support one's long-term life by selling vegetables. In my first job, the farm owners talked about money and shared their numbers; anybody paying attention knew how much money they made and how they saved for retirement.

Being neither a product of the world that seeks money and power, nor a reaction to it, is what in fact allows a farm to exist via human-scale commerce as a node in the local social fabric. And it's the economic interconnection of buying and selling, and relying on local repairmen and service providers, and employing people from the same networks, which allows the world I live in to flourish under more or less the same principles as it has for centuries. When people talk about local economies, small businesses, main street, etc., this is what I feel like they're getting at. There's no aspiration to endless growth as a metric of success, nor to make a farm bigger than what one person can run—never mind to build the sort of empire a true business entrepreneur might. I'm doing the upper level planning here for the farm, and also still picking the lettuce.

And my farm does this in conjunction with all the other small businesses in my world who share this orientation, in a network of mutual reliance comprised of people who despite being entirely different characters understand that holding a society together as neighbors does not require being friends. For all our apparent differences in farming methods, products, and professions (not to mention the variety of social, political, and religious backgrounds), yet we share a common orientation towards our own work and interface with others.

Describing the social organization resulting from William Penn's land policies, Hofstra writes that “Englishmen, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, and others...built Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Sectarians like Quakers, Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers founded their own towns. … But although religion and ethnicity provided a basis for community among small groups, neither could bring cohesion to the whole society. … Only the commercial life of Pennsylvania provided a basis for community beyond the neighborhood.” As these people moved through Maryland and into the mountains of Virginia, the contrast with the society of Virginian plantation owners to the south and east became clear—a world built on class difference, subjugation, and hierarchy, formed for the purpose of exporting profit to England.

But for those Pennsylvanians, and their economic descendants in my neighborhood today, commerce and trade bring positive results, the exchange of goods and services encouraging connection and social cohesion, not exploitation—a system of economic exchange where everyone is better off, no one person more powerful than another, no one business large enough or self-sufficient enough to take advantage of others less well off. There's a place in this fabric for everyone, from the scrap man collecting cast-offs useless to others, to the well-driller's assistant able to run the shovel and retrieve tools from the truck—not much, but enough.

In the 1790s Irishman Isaac Weld spent three years traveling through our new country and published a popular book of his accounts; I'll conclude with this passage about the area of the Shenandoah Valley due west of here around Winchester, where he describes the social organization and aspiration of the Pennsylvanians, of their communities in the Shenandoahs, and by extension, of those who came across the Potomac to Lovettsville. “There are no persons here, as on the other side of the mountains, possessing large farms; nor are there any eminently distinguished by their education or knowledge from the rest of their fellow citizens. Poverty is also as much unknown in this country as great wealth.”

Mulch History

As a new worker at Wheatland Vegetable Farms back in May of 2005, my first summer job as a college music student who knew nothing of farming, it felt like my first days and weeks there were filled with mulching. We mulched with those giant round bales you see in fields on the side of the road, pushing them out to unroll the 700lb bales down the aisles between rows of tomatoes, squash, and peppers. A third-year worker showed me how thick to keep it, how to feel the edge of the bale to tell the smooth direction or the pokey direction that indicated the way it needed to face to unroll properly. “Unroll” is a generous description of the process; although the baler rolled up the windrow of dried grass around and around like a carpet until the bale reached about 5' in diameter, and 4' wide, it never unrolled quite so easily. This was mulch hay, not high-quality horse hay; full of weeds or briers, or had been rained on and maybe gotten moldy, or was otherwise not fit to be fed to cattle, and sold for $10 a bale. Occasionally we were surprised by a nest of ground bees or an unfortunate rabbit that had got caught up in the baler. Since the 20-acre farm used so many bales all at once in the spring, before the new year's hay had yet been baled, Jay Merchant delivered rows of bales in the fall to stockpile over winter for use in the spring—and from sitting, they inevitability developed a flat spot, making them all the more difficult to push out. It was hot, heavy, dusty work.  Somehow it didn't even occur to any of us to wear gloves.

Most mornings that time of year began with mulching for everyone, before some groups were siphoned off for smaller or more specialized tasks. Knowing nothing yet myself, I was often one of the ones left to continue mulching. The reason for mulching was, at the most basic, to use a cheap, readily-available, natural materiel to block weeds from growing. And it added significant amounts of organic matter to the soil and protected vegetables from rain-spattered mud. Mulching also provided a unifying identity for the farm; it was a difficult job that everybody did and a practice that few similar vegetable farms employed. We heard once of a former worker who'd gone up as far north as New York State, and, upon telling of where they had worked down here, were greeted with--”oh yes, the mulch farm!”

The reason for our outlier status was our location here in an outlier agricultural area, one which had recently been entirely rural, but was turning over to houses as development pressure crept west. At that time there were acres and acres no longer being farmed for crops, in some sense waiting to be planted to houses, whose owners needed to take advantage of the “ag use” tax benefit from producing some sort of agricultural product on their land—and there were enough farmers of the old generation still around to make the hay, which was produced in such quantity that the price was kept low. It worked out that they were hired to hay the fields, and basically needed a place to put the bales. We were that place for a lot of it.

So, when I started farming on my own, I also used hay for mulching—at first in the exact same round-bale system, and then later with square bales, which could work with the narrower aisles resulting from the narrower tractor system I'd worked out to make more efficient use of space. Mulch was the system I learned, and mulch was the system I used. Still heavy, hot, dusty, hard—and never quite 100% weed control with all the Johnson grass and thistles. Jay Merchant still delivered the bales and mostly did the unloading himself, whether tipping the round bales off the trailer or stacking 100 square bales up tall and straight, interlocked so the stack wouldn't collapse. After watching a few times, I got to where I could make an all-right stack, and he tossed the 40lb bales from the trailer up to me to arrange on top of the stack. It felt like we were two people sharing the work, but even though he was over 70 and more than twice my age I knew he was doing most of the work throwing them so high; I was just doing the arranging. I did my best to keep up.

Eventually Jay came one time and told me he was retiring from making square bales, on account of their being too much hassle to move around anymore. I couldn't blame him. I went back to the list of phone numbers of mulch sources that I'd photocopied from my now-landlords' farm records, and worked down the list. Mostly these people, by now, were long retired (if not dead), and none knew where to send me.

As luck would have it I reached one man south of Leesburg, who I'd never heard of, but who did indeed have square bales—a giant stack of perhaps 800 or 1000 bales, under a tarp some years old, but still good hay he said, and cheap at $1.50 if I could move them myself. He was still at it making square bales, but he was a person to have all manner of mechanization to make squares easy to handle, I don't think he touched them once by hand from baling to stacking. But while we were chatting, as I handed him the check after loading up with a relative of a neighbor I'd hired, he told me how it was getting too dangerous to drive tractors down the road anymore, and how he was probably about to stop. His impression was that new people moving into the houses built on those former hayfields were glad to live in a rural area, but impatient with slow tractors on the rural roads. That giant haystack proved to be a two-year supply for my farm, and even though he gave me the old tarp they'd been stored under, still they ended up pretty rotten and full of snakes on the bottom layer setting on the ground.

After that stash ran out, I got along for a few years on luck and Valley Trader listings, or Craigslist, buying 50 or 100 bales here and there for cheap from people looking to clear the last of their prior year's bales out of the barn to prepare for the new-cut hay. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of packing bales into the 1997 U-haul truck that I had at the time for deliveries. When that truck died and turned into a shed on the farm I was happy to give it up. To my dismay, however, the only source of square bales I could find was a longtime Lovettsville farmer, who'd had nice bales the whole time but for more money than I wanted to spend. Now I was desperate having no other source, and so I paid him the $3.50, and then $3.75 per bale. At least he did the stacking & delivery.

By this time, about 5 years ago, economic and demographic change had come to the area. Those hay fields had turned to houses, no longer in need of land-use taxation, and that generation of farmers had pretty well gone away, with few folks left to fill that haymaking economic niche, even if there had been still hay to make. Agricultural change had also had come to the farm: I heard from a former neighbor in one of our yearly catch-up phone calls that he had begun using a thin landscape fabric, newly marketed in the produce-supply catalogs for laying down between crop rows, fulfilling the weed-blocking purpose of hay mulch. It was easy to put down even in hot weather and as fast as mulching with hay, blocked weeds 100%, and could be reused over and over again. I was beginning to find hay bales too hot, too dusty, too ineffective—the people who worked here were feeling the same way. And to my (continuing) surprise, the one-time cost to buy the fabric was the same as buying a one-year supply of hay bales at current rates. I didn't like—still don't, really—how it isn't a natural material from down the road and doesn't add organic matter to the soil, but there's no arguing with the benefits. We've gotten to where I've built a machine to roll the fabric up again, and learned to put it down in just 15 or 20 minutes a row—mulching the same amount with hay would take about an hour.

A year or two ago, in October, Jay Merchant called me up to say he had a truckload of square bales he'd made for his church's Halloween festival, for benches and all, and so they'd been set outside but really were fine. Did I want to have them? He really was just looking for a place to put them. Although I wasn't buying hay anymore, sure, I figured I'd take them for free. After all, it was garlic planting time and, of all things, garlic is traditionally grown under a thick blanket of mulch. I figured I'd do just that, since the bales were free and all. Jay came with his truck and trailer, and his grandson to unload. Jay stayed in the truck; his grandson and I dropped the bales down the garlic rows as he drove along. It turned out the garlic shoots came up faster than expected, and I missed the window for mulching them. Those free bales were still in the field, though, and had to be collected, transported, stacked, and stored in a greenhouse-style shelter for use on next fall's garlic. Over the winter, a windstorm destroyed the shelter and tore all the grommets out of the new tarp I'd put over it. The free bales survived under the tarp laid over the stack with sandbags, until they went straight-away in the spring to a neighbor.

I've so far kept my vow never to have a bale on the farm again.

"old way of life"

Sometime last winter my friends/neighbors/landlords and initial farm employers were clearing out some old files in their basement and came across a copy of the original application I'd mailed in to work for them on their farm here when I was nineteen, my first farm job—really my first real job at all. In response to a question on what interested me about the farm job, I wrote that “I would not be simply another employee of some retail chain. It always saddens me to see the sort of 'old way of life' disappearing. ... Farming is a fundamental institution, what people have done for thousands of years. ... It is not just a job that takes up free time; it will be my life for three months.” Although I knew next to nothing when I wrote it, there's nothing in there that isn't still true.

Recently a new neighbor was telling me about the temporary tutoring work he's been doing and, in conversation, I asked what sort of job he's looking to find more permanently—or whether, like his farm neighbors, he would hope to carve out a life with less distinction between “job” and “the things one does with their days.” And in posing that question, it became clear to me how far removed from my own life the concept is of maintaining that dichotomy of a “career” separate from "non-work life," although I do plenty of work on all sorts of projects every day. They're all simply projects I'm working on, with some being more critical than others.

That “old way of life” I imagined in that old job application isn't farming itself, exactly, but what arises in a world where many people have projects going on that need doing, profitable and non-profitable activities all mixed up together, the sum total of which happening to yield enough money to live on—and where people are tied to place, and therefore to neighbors.

The local plumber, who's in his 40s, was in my basement once and we were talking about Lovettsville history. He said that, of his high school class, about half of his classmates had stayed in the area after graduation. His father, also a plumber and also in my basement, pointed to himself and said, “For me, ninety-five percent.” What that "old way of life” of generational history and overlapping livelihoods generates is a different kind of community, a different kind of neighborliness, a different kind of friendship—there are not "work friends" or "professional connections," which largely evaporate when people change jobs or careers, but "community" and "neighborly" connections that arise as people live their lives in close proximity, doing what matters to them personally and interfacing with each other through the course of their daily activities. And even when people change projects, or switch jobs, they still all live in the same community. That connection of necessity, of needing to visit the members of one's local community in order to get something done on one's personally relevant work, creates and sustains a relationship different from a work friendship or a purely social relationship: one that, although less personal, can become stronger than one where people only see each other out of intentional action.  And when these interconnections reach a critical mass, a different social fabric arises.

This year I rented the greenhouse of the retired farmers directly to the south, neighbors who I like and often chat with through the fence line. We've known each other for over a decade and are friends dedicated to supporting each others' farming, although as much as we'd like to see each other socially, we rarely do. But this year, in the course of going over to water my transplants each morning, I saw them more days than not and in passing we inevitably registered the briefest observation or complaint, talked about some happening, or asked some question we'd never think to call each other for "on purpose." Now that the greenhouse season is over we're no longer brought into contact by my transplants and my neighbors' morning gardening, and we see each other less. Similarly, eight or ten years ago—I remember this because I remember when it changed—people talked on the phone to ask even a quick question (if you can believe it!), because there was no other way. A call to sell some lettuce or to buy some tomatoes might last only a minute, maybe two...but there, several times a week—without even thinking about it—in the course of accomplishing our work we would hear something of the news of the day in each others lives, and thereby maintain our relationship through such frequent and mutually-necessary interaction. By now, texting has solidified as the norm: straight to the point, no need to answer the phone and spend 60 or even 90 seconds talking to one another; no need to hear another's voice or to chat without intention. This new mode is admittedly more efficient, but I do feel the loss of that connection that arises when people are forced by the necessity of their work to cross paths not for social reasons but simply in the course of living their daily livelihood.

I've mentioned here before how I enjoy building and repairing the old farm equipment I use on the farm. During the evenings, for the past month or two, I've been fixing up my farm shop—organizing tools and sorting out an overwhelming volume of auction lots haphazardly stacked, much of which came from Bill Moore the welder's sale last year, which had been, til recently, sitting as it came home including his enormous 1000lb drill press from 100 years ago or more (a $40 bid) sitting awkwardly in the middle of things where the tractor set it down. A farm shop well organized and ready for work is just on the horizon, in time for the winter season. It's true I am looking forward to enjoying time spent practicing out-of-date mechanical skills learned from old books, a sufficient reason to be sure, but in no small part I'm also setting up the place with a mind that I might come to make repairs now and then for others. In the practiced assessment and hand-work of making a repair there’s a joy entirely different from the work of creating a tomato, and in fact there's not all that many things that break on my own farm so it would be interesting to have access to a body of repair work greater than I can generate here on my own. But moreover, to be able to send neighbors away with something that was previously broken but now allows them to do something that they want to do in their daily lives, that activity brings people into contact with each other in that “old way of life," keeping relationships strong through the interactions that happen to occur because we're living in reliance on one another.

Last week I invited a neighbor from down the road to come see the progress I'd made on the shop—a friend I like though we rarely talk to because we're both busy, but of course the shop capability was interesting enough that they made a point to come over to see it. We talked at length about drills and vises, and ended up with a social visit to boot, where we never would have gotten together "on purpose." We farm-types certainly are intermingled with each other, but we're also often busy, often sequestered off on our own projects, too caught up in our own activity to think of a visit except by necessity. In a world moving on from such inefficiencies, it's possible I might be able to create some of those necessities, with old-school metal and mechanical ability.

Bill Moore, the welder

Today is the anniversary of Bill Moore’s death last year at 63, of a heart attack. His family had kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years and his repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm. Other writing about his life is further down on this same page.

I always do see Bill Moore with a hammer, when I drive by his shop in Lovettsville and remember what it was like for his roll-up door to be open, to turn and record the momentary image as the car passes of him bent over, arm raised, working on something with a blacksmith's hammer just inside the shadow of the building. Well—the memory is just that, that single frame compiled from the hundreds of times I drove past him there on the main road—the story my mind extracted from that shape of him, bent over, arm raised, is of hammering. It wasn't a hammer, though. That would have been his grandfather, swinging a hammer at a forge, or perhaps his father. Bill, he would have been reaching for the vice grips, or returning with the cutting torch, or flaking out welding cable for slack and more precision, or standing up to lift his visor to take a closer look before bending back for the next weld.

When I needed his skill for a repair for my own farm, or his take on a mechanical problem, I stopped and parked and walked down the short gravel driveway between the weeds and up to that shape of him, bent with work, until he stood, half surprised to see someone, curious what I brought. He always had an answer to my problem, but it often came sprinkled through a longer exposition, almost stream of consciousness, of interconnected recollections stuck end to end, relating in some way to the problem at hand. One time I came to seek his advice on a thermostat I was trying to repair, and came away with an accounting of mercury switches, how mercury was used in critical applications because being a liquid it wouldn't corrode. Surely that story came because mercury switches are often found in old thermostats, although I don't think he included that detail. Later on I noticed the thermostat in my old house had just such a switch, and I watched it in action.

His stories might have been of recent events only ten or twenty years ago, or from his time on the mobile welding truck in the peak of his career, or might comprise a profile of somebody recently died, though told through old anecdotes; and other subjects from time to time appearing (like the highway being built over in Maryland and all the work and machines that went into it or the Black school built with community funds against opposition from the local government) that seemed to be reported of his own experience but in fact turned out to be a recollection of events that occurred when he was a child, or long before his birth. All the same, he kept the record.

Any story, really, is about something that occurred in the past, but many of the people and all of the places his stories were about, they still exist—and in that way those stories to me were just stories of the current world, as all stories are a telling of what happened in the past to inform an understanding of a place, of a time, of an event. In this case, Bill Moore's stories were telling of the world he lived in—the town of Lovettsville and its surrounding activity. The field was right around here where the man had a heart attack by his tractor, where the pilots who worked for the airlines out of Dulles lived and flew their private planes and where one of them once took Bill up in a glider, where the man once planted his corn in a spiral for simpler cultivation, Bill's church up the road and the mechanical problems of an old building, the stories of his neighbors in the community: the honest, crooked, hard-working, or the self-important—who all happened (just by chance) to now be old and some already dead. I never saw a young man with work for Bill at his shop.

When I came to him I inevitably and without even trying, or noticing, brought something of this same world: to weld a new ball onto the tie rod of my little International Cub, designed in 1947, (I learned how International Harvester tested new equipment in the southern hemisphere's summer, to be ready for summer sales up here, before losing its global dominance to the 3-point hitch), or a broken sprocket from a McCormick grain drill from the 50s that needed a new tooth brazed on, or a disc tongue that had cracked from some farmer's poor repair long before I got it. Cleaning out the grease channels on a used disc I bought, with uncommon 7/16ths carriage bolts, Bill remarked that such bolts were often used on equipment built by Ford, in the 70s, and wasn't surprised when I told him it was, in fact, a Ford 201 disc.

These days as I drive south on the main road, through Lovettsville down towards my farm, I no longer look over and see Bill working in his shop. His bay door is closed, as if he's just away for the day, or it's after hours, and he'll be open later. He won't be open later. The grass is grown tall, now that he's not here to keep it mown on his tiny old riding mower. Instead I drive down the same road as ever but I don't see Bill and the world he described through his stories—though I still know which person built his own house and everything else before in his old age becoming obsessed with growing potatoes (never successfully) and from whose son I happened to buy a wagon frame after Bill sent me there looking for potato equipment; and how the traveling salesman (from whose catalog Bill's father bought a welder) helped a man start the business down the road, now run by his son; and how Lovettsville is all farms and Brunswick across the river is all railroad; and how the humble scrap man is more respected than the cabinetmaker who is industrious and highly skilled but thinks he's better than you. Instead of the world these stories are a part of I see the houses, and the new strip mall, all built over the last 20 years since developers discovered the flat, perfect farmland of Lovettsville was also perfect for houses, offering an amount of money no retiring farmer could refuse as fast roads came west and the suburbs grew from DC to connect isolated towns in the country into a continuous exurban expanse. The thousands of people who moved into those houses on every cornfield don't know of the hundreds who comprise a parallel world of activity—or who used to, anyway—and now it becomes difficult to reconstruct the connections, to feel the presence of that world anymore.

Thing is, that world was on its way out when Bill Moore was in his forties. Long before I knew him. Bill just never saw a need to change—he kept things mostly as they were in his father's day; even the rack of wooden tool handles still hung from the ceiling, from when the shop served as the local hardware store, ages ago. His stories too were probably just the same as ever, new ones added to the canon as they came up. He had something to share from the moment I walked up until long after the work was completed. Sometimes I looked for a pause where I might add a topical anecdote of my own, but I rarely found one; he needed to tell me what he needed to say.

On the final page of the classic memoir The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien keeps people and place alive by making up stories, and writes of being dead as “like being inside a book that nobody's reading...the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hoping somebody'll pick it up and start reading.” Bill Moore seemed to live through stories, some recent, some from long ago, some incidental, some personal, but mostly just an accounting. Maybe he wasn't just keeping the record, or sharing it with me, but in the telling of it, he was keeping his world alive. For himself. Like a memory, whose neural connections have to be refreshed, if not gone over in recollection now and again, it fades. Without his stories keeping the threads knit together, his world would soon unravel. As it begins to for me, without him. He kept it alive as long as he lived, alive enough for me to feel it was real.

The lasting imprint of Germans & Jefferson on July 4th

I thought last week, for the Fourth of July, I might write something at least mildly patriotic while watching those fireworks blooming on the ridge. But it took me a week to nail down the idea—in this political time, to write anything on large-scale “patriotic” themes seems likely to feel divisive to one faction or another. The important point though is not the national politics and government, disagreeable to all in one way or another, but the small-scale patriotism of the local society in which we live our day-to-day lives. A patriotism of being proud and appreciative of that social fabric of schoolteachers, librarians, letter carriers, volunteer first-responders and the other connections of the community fabric, which I think (I hope!) might be more universally appreciated: to focus not on the greater concept of the Country, but on literally the country (as in country-side) in which we live.

Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about lofty national ideals, but when it came right down to it, one of his core visions was of a country whose social fabric would be comprised of farmers—independent, self-sufficient, self-governing homesteads reliant on neither government nor employer, and therefore truly free to vote and act towards the best interest of the nation. (Even though the only people eligible to vote in the first decades after independence were those who owned land—and who were white and male.) This agrarian vision of the American Family Farm remains rooted in our national consciousness, showing up in children's books, the famous Fisher Price Farm, and in grocery-store (and pickup-truck) advertising. But at exactly the same time as young Jefferson was developing his agrarian perspective on the colonial plantations of the Virginia Piedmont, German immigrants were moving down from Pennsylvania into the flat fertile farmland here where I live between the ridges west of Leesburg...and down into all the hills and valleys of Virginia west of the Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley. Jefferson's plantation culture of the day was indeed one of self-sufficiency, each plantation essentially an outpost for the purpose of exporting profit back to England, a company large enough for all work to be done in-house—and mostly with enslaved labor, while somehow claiming the virtues of an agrarian moral high-ground. With no need for outside help from independent tradesmen or merchants, there was little need for towns, or for that matter, roads. Social connections developed from status; government, the same. Perhaps Jefferson imagined the virtues of agriculture remaining the same at any scale, with a modest homestead maintaining an equally self-sufficient lifestyle, as if the goals of a multinational corporation could be in any way compared to those of a small business in town. The German agrarian society worked in just about the opposite way—there was no social hierarchy, no aspiration to wealth, and no sense of self-sufficiency, but rather, community resilience and a focus towards modest, stable, agricultural livelihood. No one family's enterprise was large enough to employ their own tradesmen, and so there had to be independent blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, transportation businesses, and every other ancillary function the community needed to get by. In this way the German society was a society of equals, who, through their livelihood, were drawn into contact with each other—in towns, and along roads, and in the daily course of business—and so developed strong social ties, and an understanding that the success of the community as a whole relied on the success of one's neighbors, each person's livelihood reliant on the others'.

The imprints of these two agricultural societies—one based on large-scale agrarian virtue, a nation made up of independent and self-reliant farmsteads; the other based on small-scale agrarian relationships, a local community made up of interconnected economic activity—are still visible today, faintly but indelibly marked in the generational echoes of our past. For one thing these cultural differences between the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians caused Clarke County to split from Frederick County, to the west of here. But more locally, the dividing line is just as clear. To the north of me, the Lovettsville area has had a concentration of small-scale farm enterprises and support businesses for nearly 300 years, persisting long after people stopped speaking German and new families moved into what had been “The German Settlement”—as in “Those Germans Over There, In That Settlement.” Even as the individuals changed, the values and social norms persisted and the Lovettsville area remained a place where people knew who had what skill to offer, and where people were inclined to help a neighbor out of a jam. To the south, where the plantation-centered society set the culture, and then dissolved, there is not the same unbroken thread. I don't believe it can be a coincidence that every single plumber, electrician, builder, welder, hay salesman, machine repairman, fellow farmer, and “old-timer” I know around here happens to live to the north of me. Not a single one of these people lives to the south across Rt 9, even though the main town of Purcellville is down that way. I just can't believe that's all by chance, and not by history.

It doesn't seem that Jefferson's agrarian vision, scaled down, looks like the independence and self-sufficiency he imagined. From where I can see, the country of small farmers is an interconnected, inter-reliant one, as people necessarily are brought together in the course of their day-to-day livelihood, and that those small-scale economic connections of daily necessity bring about a robust social fabric of neighborly, community-minded relations. It's that way among the people I know in the farm world, at least. Relationships are kept up as an inevitable result of calls to buy and sell vegetables, inquiries of who to call for a repair, stories told and news shared while waiting in line or during a practical visit to somebody not seen in a long time. Even at the farmers market, the purest exercise of supply & demand economics, the farmers are competitors in name only. When I first worked here, for a vegetable farm selling at a dozen markets a week, it was clear that we were not competitors with our compatriot farms—we knew many of them, wished them well, lent equipment or workers to help out when necessary—we knew that the farmers market only thrived (and brought customers to our own stand) if each other vendor saw success. And in that way, we became woven into that fabric of our agricultural community, neighbors to all and friends with some, all engaged in the mutually understood “group project” we each recognized in the others: that of the success of our small-scale farm world.

Bill Moore, the welder

The news on the farm this time is more consequential than most. Bill Moore, the 3rd generation welder just up the road from me, passed away last week. His family kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years until his death, and his work tracked the development of farm machinery and farm land in this region. His repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm, and without him my farm would not be as it is now. He was 63 years old.

Twelve years ago I was a young twenty-four-year-old trying out vegetable farming, and I had an idea for a mechanical seeding contraption to run behind an old 1950s Farmall Cub tractor. I needed somebody to build it before the season began. I was sent—of course—to Bill Moore, the welder. Unusually, I called him on the phone, since he was at home recovering from his heart attack, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing he would love to do, but he'd need to stay out of the shop for another month or so. But he was happy to talk—of course—about the Cub tractor, and old-school machinery, and surely would have told me several of the stories of his own well-cared for Cub that I later heard him recount in his shop. He sent me to another local welder, with whom he'd gone to high school, who normally did an entirely different sort of metalwork but was helping people keep up and running while Bill was recovering. Later that season, with Bill back in the shop, he made me some clamps for a new cultivator setup, a design I later modeled my own work after, once I had learned to weld and began to build more of my own farming equipment.

No matter what I brought to him for repair or advice, Bill was always game to stop what he was doing to help the walk-up customer, whether it be a quick fix (“Five dollars”) or a discussion of design considerations told in stories of past machinery built, tried, broken. At that time there was almost always a line, a steady trickle of people stopping in to drop off, or pick up, according to the day of the week, or the weather. Bill never rushed through one person's work to wait on the next; mostly one person's appointment seemed to conclude when the next person walked up. I was never sure whether the work or the talk was the main purpose, and learned to block out at least 45 minutes for a visit to Bill Moore, most of that taken up with listening to Bill tell about mechanical history, local history, and his own family history, a deep repository—a catalog, really—of the activities, characters, relations, and deaths of the farm-based Lovettsville world. He remembered unnecessarily specific stories that even the people they were about had forgotten had ever happened. But of course, he had his old favorites: the one about the man who planted his corn in a spiral, cultivated his way around and around to the middle, then came back a couple weeks later with a can of gas and cultivated his way back out again (that was the first story I heard him tell to somebody else, that I had already heard), or others concerning the success or failure of an unusual idea (going bankrupt borrowing for a steam-powered thresher; industrial potato planting not earning more than to pay the freight, etc). And the humorous one about the new folks coming in from the city, the man who showed him a picture he took of something very exciting in his yard: “He had a photo of a deer. A deer!”

Bill Moore no doubt carried with him three generations of mechanical craftsmanship, but he wanted it understood that he hadn't just picked it all up from his father. “I learned from LOTS of people,” he impressed upon me, “I have a lot of books.” Bill developed the shop towards his own interest of practicing greater levels of craftsmanship, bringing in the mill, the lathe—even the press, a machine used every day—as new tools to access work his father didn't do, or to do the same work better. And he learned to use them—in fact the first thing made on the new lathe was a part to repair the new press. Other people, stopping in for a quick fix, might think that the machine does the work, but Bill he knew it was the craftsman. I made that mistake once, watching him cleanly melt a nut off of a bolt with a torch to fix my tillage disc, remarking in awe that the metal of the nut would just melt away from the bolt, leaving the threads intact. “You're not going to give me anything for skill?” I got his point. Like most people with high-level skill and knowledge, the layman can't appreciate even 10% of what's interesting to the craftsman. When I passed the standard welding test, I brought my bent pieces of metal to show him. Recognizing them immediately, Bill said I ought to be proud of my work and began describing his own time practicing at the Hobart welding school, perhaps glad to tell the story to someone who might understand something of what he was talking about, and would appreciate the skill he'd developed. “I still have all my own bend tests,” he said, “They're on a shelf in my basement.”

It was clear that Bill lived and breathed mechanical work, and I felt him to be so fortunate to have happened to grow up in his father's shop and to now be able to live his life walking down from his house every morning to do work he so clearly enjoyed—and then going back home to yet more mechanical projects. But like most people who work it was simply his profession, work which paid the bills and that he happened to be good at, and liked enough. And he understood that, at the most basic, he ran a customer-service business that played a vital role to the community of working people in the Lovettsville area—as had his father, and grandfather. People needed him to get back up and running, during haying, or harvest, or the snowplow season, and he prioritized his work according to how critical it would be to whomever needed his repair to get going again. He would tell me, as I stopped in to get his advice on some mechanical retrofit I was building, “I'm happy to help you, but I need to get a certain amount of work done,” gesturing to the repairs in progress around the shop, “And I don't know what might come in.” At first I thought he meant financially, that he needed to work a certain amount to make enough money, and of course offered to pay him for his time. But in fact he meant that he simply needed to get the work done, because other people were relying on him to do it.

Years ago, well before my time, in an era when the Lovettsville area was thoroughly a farming economy, and when now-outdated machinery was new technology, there was such call for the shop's services that they had a jig to set up a common repair on one particular part on the front wheel of one particular make of tricycle tractor. More recently, when I would stop in with a farm repair, there was no longer even a line at the shop. Bill would be able to talk for an hour or more without anyone arriving to interrupt. And the work had changed, too. “People bring me things that just aren't worth repairing, or aren't worth the time...and there's very little about it that's at all challenging, that tests my ability.” I remarked to him that his business these days seemed mostly to serve old people with old stuff—and, newly, landscapers and their trailers—which he confirmed was the case. The era of his work was coming to a close, as Lovettsville changed and his customer base aged. “Tractors and machinery just don't break down much anymore,” he explained, “And there just aren't many people around here anymore who are really farming.”

If he was becoming bored by his work, he was becoming more excited about the projects he maintained in his home shop, projects that to most people would appear indistinguishable from his “work” activities, but which as far as I can tell he spent nearly all his time on after closing up for the day. That is, when he wasn't sharpening chainsaw chains, or helping out at the church—or at an auction. He often talked about the precision lathe he was working on setting up at home, and the clocks he was repairing, and their mechanisms; he told me about having such a delightful Christmas morning last year, sitting at home on a Saturday finally getting a difficult clockwork back together, and how he'd got it running so cleanly that it had only lost so many seconds over a long period of time. He had a lifetime of projects to work on up at the house, and Bill was so looking forward to having time to sit down with them. To work on things that really interested him, to have time to execute the craftsmanship that he liked, to whatever level of precision he desired. His dream was to someday use that precision lathe to build a complete copy of an old but innovative Canadian-made clock. Bill Moore, not designing something new, but enjoying the use of his skill and knowledge in reworking something old.

Most weekends, Bill could be found at an auction. He loved attending auctions, and especially enjoyed showing off what he had bought for a song at the last sale. “Guess what this went for! … Five dollars!” A motor, welding leads, buckets of pipe fittings (“Oh, I'll use them all eventually, to make bushings.”) Once I learned to attend auctions as well I brought him my own stories to share, and useful things to show him, some of which he was happy to buy for a few dollars, or to trade for some minor work. One time I'd ended up with a box lot of about half a dozen old brace hand drills, not very serviceable, and he went right to the one with the rounded-out chuck, the worn shaft, the handle re-wound with soldered wire—an unusual repair for such a drill. “Oh my,” he said, taking in the record of the tool's life. “This one's seen a lot of love. I would be glad to have it.” I'm sure it's still somewhere up at his house, with all the other things he cared about.

One more piece on Bill Moore — fiction writing on the topic of his upcoming auction, at which I ended up buying, among many, many other things, an old worn hand drill and some bent pieces of metal.

A Visit to Bill Moore

November 30, 2022

“I went to an auction last Saturday.” He pointed to something just over there, asking, “How much do you think I bought that for?” He waited for my guess, which was too high, as usual. “A dollar!” I acknowledged the good buy. “It was a great sale. You know, I go to a sale every weekend, somewhere or another. Even if I don't come away with anything, I just love going to an auction.” I nodded; that much was clear. “There used to be so many more auctions around here, back when there were more farms—somebody was always retiring, or dying, and having a sale.” I noted the bluntness of his description of the way of the world. “Well, that's how it works. People collect what they need over their life, and then when they no longer need it, it's dispersed to whoever can make use of it for their own lives.”

“There's a sale coming up in December—I'm not going to be able to go to it though. I wish I could, but I can't make it. It's going to be a really good one. Cochran's doing it. This man's family had a welding shop for at least 100 years—well, it was a blacksmith shop first—the two of them, with him on the truck and his father in the shop, they did work for just about everyone around here, kept everyone going. I mean, the machinery people needed in those days, to get their work done. Of course, that was back when this was truly an agricultural area, everywhere around here. There's hardly anybody who's really farming anymore, and things just don't break down the way they used to. He could repair anything, or make it from scratch—few people appreciated his skill, but me, I knew what he was capable of. It's been a while, though, since anything came through the shop that really tested his ability, not for a long time.”

“Well, I guess he'd finished up his work for the day, closed up the shop like usual, and walked on home—he lived just up the street, between his shop and the church—apparently he got as far as taking his shoes off and sitting down to rest by the television. Had a heart attack. Robert Jackson, actually, went to check on him since he didn't come down to open the shop the next morning—it's sort of a funny story—Robert called 911 when nobody answered the door, and the dispatcher said all the officers were busy, and someone would be there in a few hours. A few hours! So he called our friend who lives just north of town, he's an officer, and he had two police cars over to his house before Robert even hung up the phone. The TV was still on when they found him. No two ways about it, he had a heart attack and that was that. I mean, that was the end of him. He just—died.

He stood silent and shook his head for a moment, considering.

“He was 63 years old.” I didn't know whether to be surprised, or whether that was just a statement of fact. “Well, he was. His father lived to be 90, and his mother, she lived to be 92!” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, nobody knows how long he's got left. That's just how old I am now, 63.” I already knew his age, always surprised to hear he's so young. “One time Robert Jackson and I—you know him?” I nodded. “Well he and I'll often go to a sale together, and one time I was off looking at something or another and Robert was talking with someone, who must have seen me off in the distance, and he says to Robert, 'Look at that man work, over there, why, he must be 80!' And Robert shouts to me, 'Bill!' I was some distance away, you know. 'Bill! This man here thinks you're 80!' Well I stopped what I was doing and shouted back to him, 'I've never seen an 80-year-old work like this!'” I smiled. “Well, that's what I said to him.”

“I'm not as young as I used to be, everything's gotten heavier, and in the winter, the cold just comes up from the floor, but I can still get done everything I need to. Well, I can. I'm only 63, you know.” I nodded. “My father, he lived to be pretty old, older than a lot of people. But he lost his mind. To know how much my father knew, what he could accomplish—to look at him, you'd never guess what he was capable of. But like I say, he just got to where he was completely demented, lost his entire mind. Now that's a sorry way to go. That's a sorry way to go.”

“Anyway this sale, like I said I can't go to it, but it'll be a good one, a two-day sale, the first two Thursdays in December—you can look it up. Sort of unusual timing. But anyway one day will be in the shop, you know, what everybody saw driving past on the road, and the other day up at the house—had a whole other shop up at home, to work on his own projects...nevermind the amount of safes, guns, clocks. He just loved anything mechanical.”

“Cochran's listing says of him, by way of talking up the sale, you know—'He could do just about anything for anyone.' Now, they'll say that sort of thing about any number of people, but this man—now, I knew him—and that's an accurate description.” I nodded. “Well, it is.”

“There's going to be a couple welders—I mean, real welders—a precision lathe, like that you could use to make a clock, a great press, all manner of tools...everything, and I mean, everything. Really, there's probably everything there I'd ever need for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it'll be a good sale. I'm real sorry I won't be able to go.”