Plants of the Past
By Cory L. Higgs
Trisha Overby was looking through her old pictures and found a sweet image of her late grandparents, James William Jones and Gracie Mae Willard Jones. Overby said the family started farming in the 1940s. “Tobacco farming was how our families supported themselves back then. It wasn’t a get rich way of living. It was barely getting by and a very hard living. We had stick barns, not bulk barns like most farmers nowadays. My grandma even taught me how to hand-tie tobacco on the sticks. I think I could still do that in my sleep. It was a lot of hard work back then, but looking back now it was worth it for all the memories. My favorite memory was grandma’s home-cooked meals, spread across the tailgate of my grandpa’s Ford truck.”
Beverly Belcher Woody is enjoying the blooms from her lilac bush that been in the family for nearly 100 years. She recalled traveling up Rock Castle Gorge to go to the Benjamin Belcher Cemetery, reminisce and enjoy the scenery. While there, she visited the” old Conner homestead” and was given a ‘start’ to a lilac bush planted by her great-great-aunt Annie Laura Belcher Conner. “It is about eight feet tall. It is actually larger than the one in Rock Castle now. I am afraid it is “playing out. Up on Tater Hill in Rock Castle, at the homeplace of my great grandparents, there are still daffodils that come back every spring. My great grandmother died in 1911,” she said.
Kevin Wood and Amber Rodgers discovered a potential trail marker made by native people who predated the European settlers. The pair found the marker on a hike in Smart, Virginia. The marker is a tree bent at a near perfect 90-degree angle, a landmark used by many native people in North America. Natives may have used these trees to mark routes or establish borders. The natives would have used raw hide to tie the tree down, stones or dirt to bend the tree into the desired shape. Different tribes may have used different shapes as well. Rodgers and Wood said they relied on their trusty smart phones for directions nowadays, but found a new purpose for the ancient marker, seeing it as the perfect spot to stop for a photo shoot.
