~ "My children would all be of the persuasion and they would have been trained to think if they had to live in suburbia, they would dig up their front yard and plant a garden." ~
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I am from here I grew up in South Roanoke. My mother’s side of the family was from Roanoke and my father’s side of the family was from Floyd. My father had a local business that his father had started. Though my father’s family in Floyd did own a lot of land and they did have a farm, he would not farm. My family has been in the area for a few number of generations.
On one side of my family I can trace genealogy back to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I think I am still here because, [my husband] John had access to a farm that was here. And we like the beautiful area, so I didn’t have any objection. I did not want to live in a Roanoke per se because that’s where I grew up.
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My husband and I have 3 children Evelyn is 24 and lives in India. She is in New Delhi. She is a graduate of Tech and she went to Delhi as an intern for a NGO that is part of the foundation founded by the Dalai Lama when he won the Nobel peace prize. And after a year they invited her to stay another year and hired her.
My younger daughter Suzanna, who has just turned 18, is taking her senior year as kind of like a year off. She just finished school and I make my children take a year off between high school and college. Suzanna spent the fall semester with her sister in India and she is currently in Vera Cruz, Mexico.
Both my husband and I are thoroughly educated and both of us are vested in the project but we don’t like freshmen year as much. We just think first year is stupid. So what we did was say 'if you take a year off we will make it possible for you to do very interesting things and then you should apply to a state school unless there is somewhere else you want to go otherwise.' Because they {[public universities] are good schools and they have much better prices. So Evelyn was in Bolivia and San Francisco and England. Lucas my son was in Bolivia and Australia and out west in Idaho. I am really not the average farmer.
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My husband went to Princeton and then he got a law degree at W&L. But he never went to practice law. He wanted to farm since he was a little boy. His father was a lawyer and he had a farm for recreation. He always wanted to tend that farm and so when he finished law school, we did that. And we had a commercial dairy. We first had beef cattle and then we realized that if we wanted to be on the farm, we would have to buy the farm from his family, his mother. We would have to go into dairy business because dairy business was the only thing we would get money in, so we milked cows for about 20 years. Now we have beef cattle.
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No, there was absolutely no influence from my in-laws and farming was not in my husband's family, his father was a lawyer in Roanoke. He just decided this is what he wanted to do. He’s always wanted to do that and so it’s just one of those things. Everybody wanted [John] to go straight to college and be a good lawyer. But he really didn’t want to do that. He always wanted to be outside. He likes the law but he really didn’t want to work inside really. John took a year off between Princeton and going to law school. His father developed bowel cancer and so John went to law school because his father was worried that he would not have made enough money,on the farm.
So he started law school and then his father died and so he almost didn’t finish but he won this big fancy prize his first year that gave him his third year free. So he went on and finished but he never practiced. Not really, he never practiced law. I mean you know incidentally. But he,…you know…but his father’s death reminded him…his father died when he was like 52 or 54. And his father’s death reminded him that he should live the way he wanted to and not wait until he was retired. So he decided he would farm first. So he'd come back and was renovating a house that was on the farm and the his father persuaded him to go to law school and so he just commuted to W&L from our farm north of here.
John had come back to the farm as I said and then he commuted to W&L. He graduated I mean he lived on the farm in his summers through his high school years even sometimes when his parents weren’t in town they didn’t live on the farm…the farm was a vacation home. I had to take some courses I was certified in 40 states by virtue of my diploma from Brown and yet for Virginia I need to take like some health courses which I took at Virginia Western to be certified so I was certified and then I did some sub teaching but I didn’t start. I don’t think I started community school until he finished law school.
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He was also farming and I mean we had these cows, I married him after his freshman year in law school and I helped him calve while he was in law school and umm… He has a sister who is a pianist, she is a Julliard graduate and she plays the piano. Oh yeah, we don’t have any farming background to speak of except for as I said my father's family’s land in Floyd, even they weren’t traditional farmers.
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John and I still have beef cattle, we don’t do a whole lot of farming. He does construction and development on the farm and you know which we began. Oh, we struggled with it a lot you know whether or not he could practice law…he wouldn’t make as much practicing here [referring to Roanoke], whether he could do it part time, supplementally, but he really couldn’t…he really didn’t want to because he would get sucked in one way or the other. And perhaps also because he couldn’t give both things 100% of his time. Right now my husband, what he’s doing is you know that same house that I was talking about, we are renovating that to sell it and he’s developing a couple of other places so what you would have to say that what he does now is construction landscaping and development now I mean as well as farming. And that’s just because you know we quit milking cows because we really… the children they were…it was time for them to be gone doing other things and we didn’t want to do it non-stop and there still wasn’t enough money in it to have a small herd and have somebody else do it.
I work in my family business and direct the high school. The family business is a warehousing business H.L. Lawson and Son I am the financial officer. And the nice thing is the reason it’s never bad is because it’s a family company, it’s a fairly big position I mean...it’s a really big position, it’s the CFO. I have my own time. I am on my own schedule and I am the director of the high school and it is a part time position and I have wonderful coordinate teachers that do most of the heavy lifting. So I am the director and I really do just that direct and that’s on my own schedule…umm…my children are not…umm…they are all gone right now so John and I see plenty of each other but we both have pretty busy lives. A typical weekday for me now is umm you know John and I will get up and have tea and I well go into the gym to exercise and then I might go to a faculty meeting at 8 o’clock at school. I do that once a week [referring to faculty meeting] umm when I am through there I’ll go to the warehouse. Umm umm which is downtown umm then I am depending on the day I might teach a class so I’ll go back to school. You know last week two or three days out of the week we were interviewing architects landscape architects, for the project on the farm. So I head back at 3pm and I am through with the day.
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When my kids were small we were all on the farm umm and because I would always chair the board or do something with community school. But I didn’t work full time I have never actually worked any of these jobs full time except farming which is kind of a life so… And of course mothering too but umm… We were milking cows it was pretty nice one of the things we always thought was a tremendous advantage for the children, the children all knew what their Daddy did. You know if your father is a doctor, lawyer or an Indian chief than you know Daddy gets in a car and he goes off. You know and you have to be of some age before you have a clue of what’s really going on. We really like the much more seamless nature of the farm where you know the kids could go up there and find Daddy and Daddy would be around and Mommy was always almost always home.
And it was they that left you know to school and so yeah we liked the fact that they could participate. Susanna the littlest is by virtue of being the third child always wanted to catch on quicker so she was standing up milking cows by the time she was six. And the kids all did and they did…It was a very good way for them to learn to participate and and umm they were able to do most things around the farm by the time they were in high school. The kids helped out around the farm...we started paying them quite early. Well we always thought it was a good idea that they should understand that you know it was real work and we were paying them for it.
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Well I think all my children really do value what they learned on the farm they…Umm…one of the things that we thought was important and we believe is true about the farm is that you are living outside much more and your closeness and the reality of life and death and its sort of real and practical terms is much more available. We grow turkeys and then we butcher them and we have them for Thanksgiving turkey…uh…dinner and so my children all learnt that that good dinner… Well they dug the potatoes they grew the potatoes all summer long, they dug the potatoes they peeled the potatoes, they mashed the potatoes. They fed the turkey, they were chased by the turkey, they both loved and hated the turkey and they plucked the turkey and they learned about its insides and they said grace over the turkey and thanked the turkey for feeding them then and you know…umm…that’s what you realize we did that stuff.
The kids when they come home now, its really funny they always ask “Why aren’t you doing that anymore Mom” even though all they ever got was homemade preserves. Evelyn grew up on when we would grow our own wheat and make our own bread for several years we thought it would be fun and worthy worthwhile to see how self-sustainable we could be and uhh…so we grew our own wheat ground, our own flour, and made our own bread and preserves. And Evelyn in elementary school she always has this heavy brown bread with these seedy preserves was here memories and all she really wanted was white bread. Now she comes back from India and I will go to On The Rise, at the market and get the bread and she will go “Mother why aren’t you making bread” very funny and I say “God you hated it when you growing up.”
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Uhh I have no I idea we don’t think any of our children will farm we certainly wouldn’t want them to. Because what was marginally economically viable for us is now not viable at all for them. We would be happy for them to live on the farm we you know they can all farm where ever they happen to be in some sort of incidental way but we would not want them nor do we think it would be viable for them to try to make their living that way. But they I mean they are not but Lucas would love to. I mean he might will all of them feel deeply about land and feel deeply about their experiences…
No, we specifically did not raise them [her kids] to be farmers but we raised them to be independent and we raised them to recognize that the world is a big place and there are a lot of interesting things to do and I expect them to all, go do it.