Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 10, 1995 TAG: 9510090009
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-8 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WHITETHORNE LENGTH: Long
NOTE: Color photos 1.-3. and map ran October 8. Tombstone photo ran color Oct. 8 and B&W Oct. 10.
On a hill overlooking the mansion at Kentland Farm, an ornate tombstone watches over the grave of Elizabeth Cloyd Kent, the farm's 19th-century matriarch. After Kentland was ramsacked by Union troops during the Civil War, Kent rebuilt Kentland and also donated the land for Wake Forest, a nearby settlement for former slaves. It remains a predominantly black community today.
On an early autumn afternoon, from a hill above Kentland Farm's old manor house, you see green pastures rolling to the mountain-rimmed horizon and hear the drowsy hum of farm machinery.
It's hard to imagine all the tumult that occurred here - more than three hundred years' worth, in fact. From Indian wars to Civil War cavalry raids to controversial land swaps, this fertile riverside swath of northwestern Montgomery County has been the stage for some down-home drama.
Virginia Tech, the latest of Kentland's many owners, employs the farm as its outdoor laboratory for agricultural research, a role the farm will carry into the 21st century.
Agriculture has been the thread of continuity throughout Kentland's diverse history, a story that took root hereabouts long before European settlers arrived.
Prime land made Kentland the hearthstone of Montgomery County's history, as author Patricia Given Johnson relates in her new book, "Kentland at Whitethorne."
Some people still resent the massive 1986 transaction that saw developers trade Kentland to Tech in return for several smaller sites, Johnson says. One of those smaller sites, formerly Tech's horticulture farm, has become one of the New River Valley's largest commercial complexes.
To many county residents, the abrupt transformation at the intersection of Peppers Ferry Road and U.S. 460 from farmland to shopping center negatively symbolizes the effects of rapid growth in a rural area.
Yet Johnson defends the swap, and suggests other doubters might agree if they saw Kentland today. "At least this one beautiful place will remain," she says.
Tech agriculture professors, their students and farm employees mostly have Kentland to themselves now.
The original inhabitants, as Johnson tells in her book, were American Indians, who grew crops, hunted and built villages along the New River plain.
Before the first explorers passed through the site as early as 1671, the Indians had left, leaving behind several significant archeological troves of relics and bones on the present-day farm. But the Indians came back about a century later to harry Kentland's first white settlers, a group of German immigrants who originated ancestral names still common in modern times: Price, Long, Wall, Harless and Harman.
The first settler was Adam Harman, who lived near a ford where Indians crossed the New River. His brother, Jacob, lived across the stream and hung a lantern to mark the ford at night - hence the name 'Jacob's Lantern' for the Blacksburg Marriott's lounge, Johnson explains.
Frontier battles with Indians such as the 1755 Draper's Meadow massacre drove Kentland's first residents inside a fort built on a hill above the ford, then away from the property for good.
After the American Revolution, Kentland - then called "Buchanan Bottoms" - was acquired by a series of prominent families. The first was the local congressman, Abraham Trigg, who gave the farm as a dowry in 1818 when his daughter married her first cousin, James Randal Kent.
Kent, an ambitious businessman and politician, gave the farm its name and became a wealthy cattle farmer. His farm, Johnson says, "was the nearest thing this New River region would ever have similar to the slave plantations of the Deep South ... And it would not have existed had it not been for the labor of his slaves."
By 1860 Kent, the "leading man of Montgomery County," owned 122 slaves, most of whom who lived in 13 two-room cabins. Johnson says Kent was a paternalistic master but was not above selling slaves off - down the New River - with little notice. They worked the farm and built the fine manor house with their own hands, making bricks and cutting timber on site.
Kent supported secession and drew unwanted attention after the Civil War began. In May 1864, after routing a hastily assembled Confederate army at the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain, Union soldiers crossed the New River and sacked Kentland. Family members buried their silver or hid valuables in petticoats, but the Yankees stripped the farm naked, butchering cattle, carrying off horses and freeing 48 slaves.
The war broke Kent. "Desolation stretched in all directions," Johnson writes, and he died in 1867, "an old man with two helpless daughters." Yet the older of those two, Elizabeth Cloyd Kent, was resourceful and possessed the kind of moxie Victorian women weren't acknowledged to have.
She began to rebuild the farming operation, a process completed when her sister married an older war veteran, John Thomas Cowan. With the same entrepreneurial spirit as Kent, Cowan became a prominent businessman and politician. In the 1870s he served on the first board of visitors for the state's new land grant school, Virginia Agriculture and Mechanical College, which would later become Virginia Tech.
Johnson says Elizabeth Kent's other contribution to prosperity was donating the land for Wake Forest, a nearby settlement for former slaves, which remains a predominantly black community today.
Cowan's ancestors held Kentland for several generations, until heirs began to break the property up. Part of it remained an active farm, the rest changed hands several times as its value changed from agriculture to industrial development.
From the late 1970s until the mid-80s, Kentland was viewed as a possible site for a brewery, a synthetic fuels plant and a steel mill. In 1981, the site was rezoned from agricultural to industrial use. For various reasons, however, all the plans fell through.
"That would have changed that whole end of the county," said Joe Powers, Montgomery County's planning director, who is glad the land remained agricultural.
Developers J.D. Nicewonder and William B. Matthews bought part of Kentland in 1983. On Dec. 31, 1986, Matthews - then an associate athletic director at Tech - and Nicewonder, a wealthy coal operator, quietly traded their part of the Kentland property, plus additional acreage bought from T.K. Adams, to Tech for three university-owned parcels, including the future site of the Marketplace.
The speed and secrecy of the deal, in addition to a possible conflict of interest involving Matthews, sparked a criminal investigation that later found no wrongdoing. But many people, particularly state fruit growers who stood to lose their horticulture
(ended here in paper).
research farm, criticized the swap. Tech agriculture officials defended the deal. Andy Swiger, now dean of Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, called it "a landmark event which will soon be recognized as such."
Eight years later, he stands by that sentiment. The successfully consolidated agriculture facilities at Kentland - including a new horticulture farm - have proven the critics wrong, he says.
Today the university conducts a variety of experiments at Kentland to enhance farming and environmental practices. "For our purposes, to get this large tract of land this close to campus, it's really a great benefit to the university," says Dwight Paulette, the farm's manager.
Some experiments have global implications, such as the Low Input Sustainable Agriculture (LISA) project, which seeks to farm profitably with fewer chemicals and less soil erosion.
At Kentland, Tech has weatherproofed the old manor house and shored up the foundation of what may be the county's oldest remaining grist mill, which sits on the property above Toms Creek.
However, state funding cutbacks over the past six years have sliced deeply into Tech's agricultural programs and have checked plans to develop classrooms and a small conference center at Kentland.
Paulette says the university saw Kentland as a "role model research and teaching center for the East." Instead, with the budget cuts, the farm has been forced to turn a former manure pit into a machine repair site.
"We're right at the bottom line now," he says.
Perhaps Kentland Farm would get better support from the public and the legislature if more people knew about it, Paulette says. He thinks an open house for the public might help.
Johnson agrees. "The story of Kentland is told with the hope that the state of Virginia and friends of Virginia Tech will save it for the future of the university and the people of Virginia," she writes in the introduction to "Kentland at Whitethorne."
"It's a good thing the state got it," she adds.
Memo: CORRECTION