journey
| Larry begins: I'm the seventh out of ten kids and I grew up west of suburbs--Rosemont, Pennsylvania. My family moved to Maine and I spent my teenage years there. I went to Philadelphia College of Art. In the early 70s I did a little time in the army and since then I've been on the run. What it means to be "on the run": You’re pretty tied down when you’re farming, so I guess you probably thought that was pretty amusing. I guess it means that I didn’t want to be beholden to anybody, either monetarily or in a social situation where you’re stuck in something you don’t want to be in. I’m obviously not really on the run because I haven’t gone any place. From art school in Philly, to farming in Floyd, Virginia: After I did the art college thing, I did a little time in the military . I went back to Pennsylvania where I had family living and lived with a sister and a brother. This was the middle 70s when things were pretty economically depressed. I was doing farm labor and trying to do anything I could to make a buck. Then I got a job as a delivery man and salesman for the equine distributorship. Then I bought a small farm, lost that job. It was back to farming, working for a guy raising hogs. This is in western Chester county, Pennsylvania. Then we were partners in that and went out of business because the hog market fell out. Then we had Mr. Jimmy Carter for president. I didn't have any work, had a wife and so I got a job on a construction crew and started making more money than I ever would have farming. So next thing I knew, I was in the construction business. Basically I'd leave home at six in the morning, if we got home it wouldn't be till seven or eight at night. |
In the course of all that my first
wife left and I still was keeping up the same
schedule. Then in the early 90s I met my 2nd wife [Debbie] and started to
slow
down a little bit. I had my feet underneath me economically and wasn't
feeling as pushed. By this time I had one farm, I had sold and the other
farm. I really wasn't doing any farming at all, just raising a couple hogs
for myself along with some chickens. Just small scale homesteading kind of
stuff. So then in the early 90s my first wife and I decided to leave Pennsylvania and find another farm that we could afford to live on. We didn't have to go out and pay mortgage, so basically I was in the construction business. I'd get a weekend here and weekend there to drive around. We got a map of the eastern United States and we figured that we'd have to buy some place that would be more than 25 miles from an interstate. When you look at the eastern United States you see that the only places that are more than 25 miles from an interstate are places that are so mountainous that only trees grow, or swampland down on the coast. We had realized that we wouldn't be able to do cattle. We started to look for ground that would be suitable that we could afford to buy so that we could have a nucleus to work from. So we started driving around and we made a grading system from one to ten. As we'd be driving along we mapped out the areas that were more than 25 miles away from the interstate and we'd go for a long weekend, four days or five days, and we'd just drive. We'd have a destination for wherever we were going and we'd just drive to wherever it was and start grading how it was. We wanted to see if it would be suited for what we needed. After we did that for about two years we narrowed our search. This all took three or four years. |