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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0505, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this interview, Richard Lee Hoffman Jr., a real estate broker in Mars Hill, North Carolina, describes his response to the area's growth, ushered in by the construction of the I-26 corridor. Hoffman is ambivalent about change—he longs for the undeveloped land he explored as a child, but is willing to sacrifice it in exchange for the economic development that he will likely benefit from and contribute to as a real estate broker. However, economic growth seems uncertain, as housing values are rising but few people seem willing to buy. In Hoffman's account, Madison County seems trapped between the past and the future. Longtime residents mingle awkwardly with newcomers, pockets of undeveloped land hide between housing developments, and an expanding population challenges community bonds.
In this interview, Richard Lee Hoffman Jr., a real estate broker in Mars Hill, North Carolina, describes his response to the growth ushered in by the construction of the I-26 corridor.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I am in Mars Hill, North Carolina, with Richard Lee Hoffman Jr. who we will from this point on address as Lee. We are in his office in his real estate business, where he works with his mom, Jean Hoffman. Lee, go ahead and tell me your name.
It's Richard Lee Hoffman Jr.
And where do you live?
I live here in Mars Hill. 788 South Main Street.
Lee, how old are you?
Well, actually, I'll be thirty-nine tomorrow.
Happy birthday.
Thank you.
Tell me your occupation.
I'm working now as a real estate broker. I've been doing that since 1988; I worked part-time in real estate for about five years, and I taught public school during that period.
Elementary or high school?
Elementary. I taught Spanish. I hopped around to different elementary
schools in the county, and had kindergarten through fifth grade. And
then the last two years I taught at the middle school, and that broke me
from teaching.
Am I correct in thinking that Will teaches Spanish, too?
He's in Yancey County, and he's primarily doing English as a Second Language over there. He's really trying to coordinate the Latino population and link them with services that are available, but also to develop the program there and integrate the kids into the public school system in an efficient way. I think they tend to plug kids into whatever grade their age would place them in, whether or not they're academically ready to be there. With all this emphasis on testing now in the state and that reflecting on teachers' abilities, there's a lot of concern about mainstreaming these kids. That's a big part of what's going on over there. But I was just teaching Spanish in the classroom.
You're married?
Yeah, married Rachel Ammons. Her family has been here forever.
From down near Marshall on Ammons Ranch?
No, they're from Mars Hill. Big clan here. Her great-grandfather was president of Mars Hill College—John Ammons. He was one of the first presidents of the college.
So your daughter really has the college in her blood.
She's got it on both sides. Her family are all teachers as well.
Does Rachel teach?
She did. She actually has her degree as a Physician's Assistant. We
lived in Washington, D.C. for a few years, and then when we moved back
down she practiced here for a little while but didn't like it. The
situation here was a little different. So, she
Your mom was just [saying that] the business has been here for a long time. How old is Hoffman Real Estate?
She organized it in 1986, so about thirteen years. She worked with Asheville companies prior to that, and then decided to open up her own business out here. It was really one of the first full-service real estate companies in the county, and has historically been one of the leading companies out here. Of course, now there's a lot more competition, so we're sort of in the mix. But we've been around for a while.
You've been working here full-time for . . .
For six years, full-time.
It seems to me that there's been an increase in the number of real estate companies coming into the county in the last six years.
There has been. There are probably five new companies physically located in the county. I would say that there are probably twenty or thirty new agents who either live in Madison County and work with Buncombe County agencies or who live and work in Buncombe but focus on Madison County. So the competition has really increased.
Are most of those people dealing with residential real estate?
Most, yes. The primary market here is in re-sales of existing homes and
raw land. So everyone's doing one of those things, and typically a
combination of the two.
Is there enough of a market to handle all of the new agencies coming in?
No, no. Just take me for example. I find that I have to do about three different jobs in order to have this job. It's going to be tougher as things go on. But I think there is going to be an increase in the level of activity. I think it's going to be a gradual increase over the years. People have looked at the road out here as suddenly "boom" there's going to be this huge surge in real estate activity, and that hasn't happened. I've begged builders to come out here and build speculatively, and I can't get them out here. Mars Hill is still looked at—from the Buncombe County side—as being way out in the country, even though it's only eighteen miles to Asheville. They still see it as being a high risk in terms of building out here.
That seems amazing to me. You were just saying that there hasn't really been this boom in real estate since the highway was announced and construction was started. It looks to me like there's been a definite rise in land prices.
Well, that's really what we got first. Prices went through the roof, because everybody suddenly thought that they had a gold mine. Really what we have seen in a lot of cases is the market just beginning to catch up with where people priced properties five years ago. We were talking about the interchange down here. Well, there's a quadrant that's been for sale there for five years—a five acre piece there—and nobody's bought it.
And you were thinking that would be for some kind of commercial development?
It's definitely a commercial tract. And there's an adjoining eleven acres, so you're talking about a big chunk of land. If someone were interested in coming out here and doing a retail something—we always hear Wal-Mart and that kind of thing, so if somebody wanted to do that kind of thing there's a piece of land sitting there. But I think the price on it has been so high that nobody's willing to come in there.
Is that also true of residential real estate?
No, residential is not as bad. Well, let me back up. I guess in the early '90s the average residential sale in Madison County was around $87,000. Now we're up to $130,000 for the average sale.
And that's for the piece of land?
That's for a house on a piece of land. So, we've seen a big appreciation in terms of values, in terms of what people are willing to spend out here. I would say right now if you looked at our inventory of homes around Mars Hill, it probably falls into that average. Most things tend to fall right now around the $150s range. I just did a search recently to find if anything had sold around $500,000, because we just listed a piece of property there. There hasn't been anything sold in the last eighteen months that I found in that price range. The market is heading in that direction out here, and we're getting a lot higher priced properties on the market, but the buyers still are slow to come into this area to spend that kind of money. Residential properties have tended to be priced pretty well. The average time on the market, for example, used to be about eight to nine months to sell a house here. Now that's down to about three months. Activity is picking up on average, so it's not as bad. And residential real estate tends to turn over much better than commercial property does.
What kind of people are buying these places on that average price?
We've got a mix. There are people inside the county who are moving around. The majority of people we're working with right now are people who are moving in from other parts of the country, either to retire here or they're coming back to this area after having left and worked. Or they just see western North Carolina as a good place to be and want to be close to Asheville—people who have made money in the stock market, maybe, or a younger segment who are coming in looking for a tract of land to get out a little bit. Do a little bit of farming—gardening, really—and build a home. We're seeing a real mix of people coming in, but really the majority are folks that are moving in from outside.
It seems like I'm seeing an increase in what I would call communities. Housing developments. There's a couple of them that I'm seeing springing up. There's been a few developments throughout the county for years—Wolf Laurel, of course—but it seems like there's more of these little suburban developments.
We're seeing more of that, and I think we'll continue to see that. I
think that's going to be where our growth will come—it'll be
subdivisions and these planned communities. Wolf Laurel is probably the
prime example of that here. I'd say there's been more activity in Wolf
Laurel in terms of property than any single part of the county. There's
been a lot of activity over there in the last three years, I guess. A
lot of that's driven by price, just because people from Florida—when
Wolf Laurel first started they came up, bought lots, built houses for
vacation homes, and now they're not using them anymore. So what you're
seeing is that's sort of evolving from a vacation community to
And I would think the fact that there is going to be an interchange there off the interstate, it will be a really significant thing. Well, I was about to say for an elderly couple, but maybe what I'm hearing is maybe not as many people up there are elderly.
No, it's young people raising families, and middle-aged folks who want the elevation and the views. And some retirees, so it's a mix up there. But the other thing you're seeing is that you've got Wolf Laurel, which is a 5,000 acre development, and then the county just passed the zoning for some sort of a resort area that's going to be adjacent to it. It's the one where they thought there were militia guys or something. So that's going to be adjacent to it. And then across the road from that is another deal called Wolf's Crossing, which is a 300 acre subdivision. So, you're seeing more and more stuff sort of clustered right there. There's going to be a lot of residential development there close to that interchange. It's going to be a great location; it really is. And Wolf Laurel—where before it was forty-five minutes or more to Asheville it will now be twenty-five or thirty-minutes, and it will be just as close to go to Johnson City. That whole end of the county is going to open up as a result of the road and that interchange up there. That whole big Laurel section and all that property up in there—that has typically been the least expensive land in the county—is going to see increase in demand.
Are you speculating that when you head west into Big Laurel and Shelton Laurel and all those places, it's going to keep moving in that direction also?
I do. We don't do much work in that section, but there are a couple of
real estate companies who primarily work that end of the county and even
into Tennessee. So
Why do you think that is?
What I see and sort of sense is that as more people come into the county
and bring with them their world views and their expectations for how
people relate to one another—I think as the population increases in
those areas that the traditional modes of relating will decline even
further. I was thinking a little bit about some of these things, and I
was trying to think of some examples. One example that I experienced
recently that really opened my eyes was in the last school board
election. Historically, there's been this antagonism between Mars Hill
and Marshall. We've got districts. I'm very much in favor of having a
middle school here in Mars Hill, and that's been an ongoing battle here
over the last few elections. So that was the main issue as far as I was
concerned. I saw a lot of people who became involved in the process,
which is good, but they were involved without having a very clear
understanding of the history of relationships. So I think that you had
people who said, "Well, I want to work in a very cooperative way and
build
Those people tended to be more the new people that were coming in and maybe coming from larger school systems?
Yeah, or where the model would be different in terms of how you go about getting a middle school. Or getting anything, really.
Not to mention the geography is going to be totally different in a lot of these places, and when you think of someone driving from up in Wolf Laurel to get to the middle school over on Brush Creek. That's a whole lot different than if you're in Asheville.
Exactly. And the other issue, too, was the money issue. I think that
people who don't really know the relationship between this end of the
county and the other end of the county were under the impression that if
we don't just fight for this thing that we can negotiate it out later
on. But what I have seen over the years is that there seems to be some
sort of a political bias—for some reason all the schools tend to go down
there. Now, I know that's a central part of the county, and that makes
sense. But I think if you look at this end of the county in terms of
this road, and if you look at growth issues and where growth is probably
going to be—and if you look at it in terms of making
Kind of on the same subject but back tracked a little bit was the idea of who was buying the property and who was moving into the area; how these different people who don't know the history, who have not plugged into the ( ) and the cultural values here, how are they going to have an effect? What is the effect of those changing demographics?
I think that Madison County has been changing for a long time. I think
if you go to ( ), Laurel, you see some pockets of Madison County culture
the way it was. My dad came here in 1959 or '60, and he came here and
affected a lot of change. I don't want to sound like all these people
coming in here and change is a bad thing, because I think a lot of the
change that we'll see will be good change. Just the pro-active view that
Mars Hill has toward what may come down the road when I-26 is built is
an example. You've got a good mix here in Mars Hill of people who have
been here forever and people who have moved into Mars Hill. I think that
they've put together some good ordinances and good planning to help
direct and guide some of the growth that may happen. I see new
businesses in Mars Hill—mostly people sort of taking a chance and doing
things that aren't typical or that aren't what people are used to seeing
around here. And they're contributing to the picture. So, I think that
my example was a very personal one. But I think on balance you can look
at planning and zoning board meetings, and you
One of the things that is real important with my work and plays a role in most of my documentation here is the idea of place. What place means to me personally, what place means in a general way in the community. You were born in this county and have lived basically all your life in this county. Where did you go to college?
I went to Mars Hill.
So you've been here pretty much all your life, then.
Yeah. We were in DC for a while.
Where'd you go to school there?
At American.
I was raised in DC.
Oh really?
Silver Springs. I was born in DC.
I love it up there.
I could go on forever about how my homeplace has changed. My parents are a mile from the beltway, and I remember very clearly when the beltway wasn't there and what has happened in the thirty-five years since that one section was built by my parents house. It's monumental!
I can imagine.
So again, you're a native to this county. Is your mom from here?
She's from South Carolina.
So your parents weren't from here, but you are. I'm curious about what place means to you, and then whether that might be different for someone who goes back for generations and generations in this county, and someone who has just moved in in the last year.
That's a good question, because that was probably one of the driving
factors that made me want to come back here to raise a family. My wife
and I were married and we lived in Washington for a couple years, and I
had a business up there. We could've stayed there and certainly made
more money up there. But that whole sense of being connected to a place
and being a part of a community was really important. And I saw my
father's family. He's from Pennsylvania. We'd go to reunions, and I'd
see the old farms where he grew up. His father's brother still had their
big farm, and that was something that I really wanted for me and for my
kids. My wife's family is from here, and they're a farming family. Of
course, I grew up working on their farm in high school and in college,
working on tobacco. So it was really something that was important to
both of us. I wanted to be a part of the Madison County community, and I
wanted to be a part of the Mars Hill community. I wanted my kids to
experience that depth of place,
He lost it and was able to get it back?
No. It went into foreclosure. But it ended up that his brother ended up
buying it from him, and then he ended up re-selling it. But anyway, that
was a big blow. This, too, is someone who had the opportunity to take a
corporate job and move away and make lots of money, but opted to stay
here and work in the school system but stay in this place. I remember
dad talking some when I was in high school. He encouraged us to go
off—Will and I both—to travel or to go off to school. He didn't really
want me to go to Mars Hill College, even, because he saw this culture as
being a kind of culture that tried to hold you back in a sense. To keep
you tied to the place—tied to family; tied to all
When you were growing up, how did you—given that your folks moved in here in the late '50s, early '60s—how is that sense of place taught to you? How did you come to learn that?
It's kind of ironic, I guess, but I learned most of it by going to
Pennsylvania—seeing that my family did have a place and did have a
history in a place, and even though I couldn't be a part of that place
this was going to be it right here. I didn't come to that realization
until a few years ago, really, but I think that that's where I saw
it—that place is important and that people stay in a place for a long
time. There are a lot of people who don't ever have that sense that
there is a norm out there that people stay in one place for generations
and generations. Well, I grew up around a lot of the college kids, so a
lot of them had come in here from somewhere else. But then at the same
time,
You mentioned that you worked a lot of tobacco. How did you come to be doing that?
My wife's father, he was one of our teachers and coaches when we were in the eighth grade. He had a big farm here in Mars Hill. So when we got into high school—me, Kevin Barnett, who's a coach over here at the college, and Marty Reese, who's a friend of mine, worked on his farm from the time we were in high school through college. We were just like his farm hands. So that was it. He just kind of hired us all.
Did you like it?
Yeah. Well, it was good. It was a way to make money, but I did like it. It's hard work, but it gave me an insight into culture that opened up a lot of doors for me in the sense that I was accepted in a lot of ways by people who may not otherwise accept me.
Well, it's almost like the work bound you together.
Too, it gives you a point of entry with people. "How's your tobacco?" And then you can talk about it. We worked on that farm for years and years.
Is that something that surprised you, that you did that?
Well, no, because dad always made us work. We had to work. On Saturdays my friends would all be out riding motorcycles, and I'd have to work. And I guess that's another part of it, too. He carried a lot of that stuff growing up on a farm, and he wanted us to experience that.
He was all for you being over at—is that Woody Ammons?
Yeah.
So he encouraged you to go up there and make your own money. You went to school—you must have been in one of the first graduating classes?
I graduated in '80. I guess the high school opened in '76, something like that. I guess I was one of the first groups to go four years.
Did you take the bus there?
I can't even remember. No, I didn't. I know I rode with some neighbors who were upperclassmen. I rode with them the first couple of years, and then when our group started getting their license we kind of carpooled together.
Was that the old route then?
Yeah.
That old really windy two-lane? Well, it's still two-lane, but it's a totally different road now.
Yeah, actually they were just starting to work on 213 when they opened the school down there. I can remember we used to ride motorcycles out there, too, on the construction part.
Do you have a memory of when you were growing up what it was like when you left Mars Hill and this community to go into Marshall, to go into Asheville, to go up to Pennsylvania? What's different about it now?
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I can remember going to Asheville on that old road, before they did
19-23, and going down to South Carolina, to my mom's family in
Greenville, before they did
I'm not sure there was an end to that question; much more just what that was like. When I started teaching out here in '75 there was the old two-lane road all the way into Asheville. It's a totally different ball game than it is now.
I guess we've gotten so used to having big wide roads to travel on that you don't even think about it. I can remember when we were in eighth grade, we used to get out on our bikes and we'd ride way over off in Beach Glen over ( ) Fork. We'd always go out looking for our teachers for some reason—trying to find out where our teachers lived. So I can remember distinctly just riding miles and miles back in that part of the county. Of course, we were always pretty mobile anyway, because we had grown up with motorcycles. There was a lot of dirt roads around; we weren't supposed to, but we'd go on all the dirt roads drive all over the place. Of course, all of that has changed.
Do you remember at all what you were thinking about? You know, you're tooling down some dirt road in the county and you're fifteen or sixteen years old. What was going through your head then?
I think it was just a sense of freedom for the most part. We were always
pushing our boundaries. That was one of the things that we always did,
was go a little further the next time. And we were able to. One thing
that I've thought about with my
And you feel like that's a function of things like I-26?
Well, it is, yeah. It's a function of growth. It's a function of modernization, in a sense, that we want to pave all the roads. People build and they want to close off their space. It's a combination of a lot of those things. But primarily, it's just that the world is getting smaller.
I agree with you that the world is getting smaller. But at the same time my guess is that back then you probably knew people in most directions that you went exploring.
That's true.
And my guess is that your parents probably felt comfortable that
somebody would find you.
Exactly. And we had a good sense of how to get back once we got out
there somewhere. But that's part of it. You hear too much these days;
you hear too many bad things and so everybody is paranoid to a certain
extent. A lot of it's false in the sense of
Am I hearing you say—it's like the community would have been looking out for you, and maybe there isn't the strongest sense of that right now? Or maybe it's different?
I think that it's just a little more fragmented because you don't know everybody. I guess that's probably it primarily. That and the fact that there are just more people in general, so there's more cars and more opportunities for things to go wrong. On our street, for example, I know most everybody. But I guess when we talk about community here, it's really these institutions that create the sense of community—like the church and the school—more so than your neighborhood anymore. I think that sense of community in a neighborhood isn't quite as strong as it probably once was, when people were depending on one another more for getting things done or helping out one another. But I think the institutions in the community are still very strong. It's still very supportive, and you get a lot of that interaction there. But still, it's different. For me anyway, it's not as intimate as when I think about people sitting around the living room talking about things. So, it's different, and it'll continue in that direction because we've got subdivisions going up behind our house.
How many houses?
Well, there's like twenty-two lots. They're building two more, so there'll be four houses. So, that's okay.
Well, it'll be interesting if nothing else. It seems like that would provide probably more children for your daughter to play with. In that sense, maybe broaden her sense of community.
Exactly. And it'll give her a sense of neighborhood, because we're on South Main, which is a road you can't get out on, really.
The road to nowhere.
Exactly. So this will be a little neighborhood kind of a thing, where people will interact a little bit more in the front yard. Which is what we do with our close neighbors. So that's going to be interesting to see how that shapes up there.
I'd be curious to know how you think about this, or your wife, or your daughter. When you were in fourth grade up here, which would have been fairly close to when I was just moving up here, did you have a sense that you were missing things by living here?
No, no. See, I bought into this whole deal here. [Laughter]
What did your dad think you were missing?
Well, I don't know. At fourth grade probably not much. And that sort of
goes into his interpretation of the culture and its holding me back. But
no, I didn't really feel that way. I think part of that is because we
had so much freedom. In fourth grade I could walk to school even though
we lived a good ways a way, or we would ride our bicycles to school. Or
we would walk from the school or the college and play around
Do you still know a lot of the people that you went to school with? Are a lot of them still in the community?
A lot of them are, yeah.
Do you still feel like you're friends with them?
I don't see a lot of them that much, but there are a couple that I've been friends with since kindergarten that we still talk a couple times a week.
That's great. Well, having a history with someone eliminates so much stuff that you have to deal with.
It really does. And that's another really nice thing about place, is the
people that you know and grow with. It really is not only my peers, but
growing up in the church up here. A lot of the elders of the church that
are beginning to pass on now—I look at those people and I wonder who's
going to replace them. I see them as being at such a high caliber of
person and substance. I feel a sense of responsibility on one level that
I should be stepping in and filling some of those voids. I think this is
another interesting thing that goes back to the question of people
moving in. You look at institutions and you look at the people who have
guided and nurtured those institutions for years and years and years,
and now they're passing on. Who's going to step in there? What effect
does that have on that institution, the direction that it goes in and
its relationship to the past? I think Mars Hill College is a good
example of that in the last four years or so. I'm not that involved with
the college anymore, but I hear a lot and see a lot. I think that
there's been a period that Mars Hill has really drifted away from its
You will become an elder in your church at some point. I know we're getting close to when you've got to leave, but I wanted to backtrack to ask you another couple of questions about the highway. They have to do with what we've been talking about, but how do you see the interstate affecting the community? What do you think the effect is going to be, both immediate and down the road?
Well, the obvious is that it's going to stream a bunch of people through
here. All those people coming through may have some effect on the
environment. I think it'll have an impact economically in the sense that
it will introduce more people to this part of
What about environmentally? You feel like that's an issue?
Well, I think that it's an issue in the sense that—of course, all the
emissions from the cars coming through. I think the environmental impact
from the road itself is going to be tremendous in terms of all the cut
and fill and work that's been done. I have to assume that they're doing
it the best way that they can, and I'm willing to accept that they are.
I'm willing to accept the degradation to the mountains in exchange for
this corridor. I think that in the bigger picture it's a needed piece of
infrastructure, because I- 40 is such a piece of crap. I think this
east/west corridor is needed. I know that there's a huge tradeoff there,
but I accept that. I think that on balance, it will have a positive
impact. I think there will be some development around those
interchanges. I think that hopefully we'll get some decent kind of
development. Maybe we'll get some things where people can spend money in
the county rather than going to Buncombe County to spend all their
money, which could help benefit in terms of having more sales tax money
in the county. At least I hope that we can get that sort of thing. If it
helps to attract clean industry to the county, then I think that could
be a good thing. But again, I think primarily what we're going to see
from it will be an invitation for more people to live
How do you balance all of what you just said, which I think is certainly legitimate. It's right on the money. But how do you balance those ideas with what you were mentioning before as nostalgia for those dirt roads? Or for those times not only when you were able to bicycle, but also what that meant to you, along with what your hopes may be for your own children?
It doesn't balance. If I have any resentment toward the whole thing and
toward more and more people coming, it's because of that. I mentioned
earlier that I have a lot of images in my head that I'd like to get.
It's those images like the dirt road or the old barn or the tobacco
field. Those are the things that I see that are going to be gone. And I
think they're going to be gone whether the road comes or not. It's just
a matter of time. I see the road not so much as its own problem; it's
just sort of a symptom of development and growth in general that was
going to find Madison County sooner or later anyway. But I hope that
there are parts of the county that retain that. And hopefully I'll be
able to go visit.
That had always struck me about this place, too. I moved here and was hanging around with someone like Delly all the time and spending a lot of time with her. I was really captivated by these old ways, coming from the suburbs in DC. It's like I had never seen a spring or tobacco, and I was totally enchanted by it all. At the same time I looked at the people from the community—Delly's children and grand children—and they were all ready to get the hell out of [Dodge?]. They were tired of living on dirt roads, tired of being cut off from the mainstream, tired of not having any money or access or anything. And I remember being totally baffled by that. Why would you choose to leave here? Why would you choose to change it? But I think that that's kind of the way it is.
I think it is. Well, you know, there's sort of a paradox here, because I want that to continue. I don't want to live it, necessarily. I want it to be over there, so I can participate in it when I want to and claim it as part of my culture.
Right. But as far as growing a crop of tobacco . . .
Yeah, really! So it's kind of hypocritical on my part, but it's real none the less. It separates you. It's something you want to hold on to. I guess in some way Bailey Mountain is kind of my way—and I think our way, Will and I especially—of sort of capturing a piece of history and trying to just hold onto it and keep it and let people experience it on their own terms.
If you could, very briefly, because I know time is starting to become an issue for you. You had mentioned Bailey Mountain. What it is, what its purpose, its goals, all those kinds of things.
Bailey Mountain is the highest peak around Mars Hill. It's a significant
landmark in that it's part of the town's seal, and it's part of the
college's seal. Mars Hill high school, it was part of their alma mater.
At Mars Hill College, it used to be a requirement that freshman climb
the mountain. It was sort of a freshman initiation. It's just always
been a fixture in Mars Hill's life, anyway. But it also has a very rich
history associated with it that really has not been captured. Levi
Bailey is the man for whom it's named, and he apparently was a huge
landowner in the early 1800s. We've got a copy of his will from when he
died. He's buried just off of 213, we just recently discovered. There's
significant Native American history on the mountain. There's some
African- American history there. There was a family that used to live in
Hamp Gap—the Hamp family—and there's a little cemetery back there where
they're all buried. Apparently, they all died one winter. So that's
something that we need to research. Basically what we're interested in
doing is, there was 200 acres that came up for sale, and after looking
at it it seemed like it would just make sense to preserve that piece of
land and hopefully
And you set up a foundation surrounding that?
Well, dad had started up a non-profit before he died that he was going to use as—the original name was, "The Education Foundation for Expanding Human Capacity in the Global Community."
That's a little heavy.
Yeah, it's a little heavy. But I think his ideas were to sort of develop
service learning and experiential learning opportunities in western
North Carolina and Latin America. He had just been to India, so he was
looking at some community development models there. So, get the kids out
and working in communities and really involved in social change issues.
He started the foundation in '94, and he died before he really did
anything with it. We used it for the first year as a way to raise money
for Nabalone in
When you were growing up, was that idea of doing service in the community something that was instilled in you?
Well, from an early age dad told us that it didn't matter what we did, but we had to help people.
That's great. And you've kind of kept that in your head?
So, that's always been a guiding criteria. I guess it just seems like the right thing to do in most situations. It hasn't been something that was hard to live up to, necessarily, but that was definitely something that was laid out before us as being a value that we needed to embrace. And it was "demonstrate us" by our whole lives. Dad always had a family or two that he had adopted. We used to take Christmas presents over to Tennessee. It was around Morrison, Tennessee. The Lawson family. Dad used to trade land a lot. He and Dr. Sears would buy and sell land. One of the farms that they bought and were selling, this family lived there. I think in their buying and selling they were going to end up displacing this family, so they ended up just sort of helping them for the next decade or so. It was an annual pilgrimage. We'd take all kinds of presents and things and have Christmas with them. It was interesting, because when dad died there was a fundraising effort to endow a chair at the college. Not enough money came in, but the Lawsons sent $10.
Are you still in touch with them?
Not much, no.
What was that like as a child? Were there children your age in the family?
Yeah, there were. I guess there were about six or eight kids. At first it was just one of those things that I just didn't want to do, because it didn't hold a lot of value for me as a teenager or as a youngster. But we went, we did it, and we learned the value of helping people and saw how lucky we were and how we could affect someone's life. It took a while for that all to sink in, but it did. Then, too, there were a lot of things that I didn't really even participate in, but I would always hear conversations around the house—A lot of things that dad would have been involved in, and grants that he was writing, projects that he was working on. It all sort of came around to reinforce these ideas that there were issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice that you needed to come down on a certain side. So that was always present. So it took root.
What religion was your father raised?
I don't think he was Mennonite, but I think he was in that tradition. His family didn't practice like Mennonite, but I guess it was like Quaker. I don't know if there was a certain denomination that they were, but those values were present. I don't know when he became a Baptist. But that is how we were raised.
At Mars Hill Baptist?
At Mars Hill Baptist.
So was Richard Price the pastor there?
Yeah, he was pastor when I was growing up.
Do you know his sons?
Yeah, they were older than me, but I remember them. I didn't really hang out with them.
( ) and ( ) when I was up here. I really like them a lot. Just good folks.
Oh yeah. And then there's another thing. I didn't ever really appreciate him until he was gone.
Well, he left and then he converted to Episcopalism. He always told me that he thought he was a little bit ahead of his time at Mars Hill.
Well, that's like dad, you know? He was more Catholic or Episcopalian than Baptist. And really, I think that what dad saw in religion and in church as an institution was more, "How does this thing work to affect social change and social justice more than religion." I think that's why he got so turned on by Catholic church and movements for social change in Latin America, and then the Ghandian movements in India. Those community ( ) and other movements there that were really just looking at what social force can bind people together to affect change. The church seemed to be the most logical institution and the most effective institution for bringing people together. I haven't seen that working so much here in churches. I think it works on a project basis. Like, we just did this In As Much project. There were about 300 people that came out and did gobs of projects across the county, and it works in that format. But if you look at those movements down there, you can't get that kind of solidarity in the communities here.
Well, those movements by definition become more political.
Well, they do, and the issues are—
Much clearer.
Yeah, and they galvanize people.
Whereas here, I think that would be a movement for Mars Hill Baptist to
have land reform in Madison County.
You're exactly right.
Did you happen to adopt a family in the eastern part of the state during the flood, or anything like that? The Hurricane Floyd thing. I know a lot of churches state- wide did.
No. We got the kids and we all went through and got a lot of our things and donated them. We tried to involve our kids in it in that way—made them give things— or, didn't make them, but impressed upon them that they didn't need to get their junk out and donate it. They needed to give something that had value to them. But that's what we did. We donated a lot of work. Well, Will introduces us to families we can help in the immigrant population that he works with. So we'll go through and the kids will get together stuff on a pretty regular basis and let him take it to the kids he works with in Yancey County. But we really don't have a family that we've really adopted.
That's something that you and Will are both probably aware of in terms of the immigrant population in Madison and Yancey County. It's really very much a changing dynamic. It seems to be getting more and more strong every year.
It really is. And for some reason, it's really growing in Yancey County.
In Madison County there's a much larger population than I thought,
because they're about to start a program at Mars Hill Elementary—a
tutoring program, I think, to help with
Yeah, I think there are like one or two at ( ). And that makes sense to me that it would be thirty more kids here on this end of the county. Out by Jupiter. It seems like there's a lot of them around Zeno's place.
Yeah. I think that he's got close to around 100 kids in Yancey County.
That's amazing. I wonder what their parents are doing, because there's not nearly as much farming there as there is here.
Well, they'll do tobacco, then they'll go work Christmas trees. And then before the tobacco they work apples.
END OF INTERVIEW