Description
Description from the back of the book:
“This is the true story of a 355 acre farm of Bedford, Virginia and the eight hardy families who came and went during a period of 250 years. They worshiped with and intermarried with neighbors. They came, they built, they had children. They worked but ultimately passed away. And then another family lived its cycle, its way.
It begins when slavery was commonplace and the only satellite was the moon. It shows that the South’s dependency upon slavery was far more prevalent than generally believed. Indeed, even a neighborhood church owned slaves.
The second half of the book shows life and times without slaves. It examines the impacts of the Civil War, new technology, and the invisible hand of economics in driving people to change the use of the land, to change the relationship of landowner to the tenant farmer and sharecropper and to change the role of the neighborhood church.
Author Viemeister draws on old court records, neighborhood recollections and legends, and includes “agro-archaeological” evidence: Indian relics and building ruins found on the farm, now called Solaridge.
What happened here may be typical of many other Southern farms: hardy folk coping with unpredictable weather, cyclical economics, and changing competition.”
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