A MAN OF THE LAND

“If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it.”
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath


“This story begins some 63 years ago, approximately December 10, 1932. That’s when we moved over to the Dabney Place. I remember the day very well. Willard, Jack and me (my father’s brothers) got off the truck down here at my grandmother’s place at the foot of the hill here and the rest of them went over to the farm to start unpackin. We got so wild that along about 11 or 12 0'clock, our grandmother walked us through the woods up by what is now Jackie Tuck’s place over to the farm.
We lived there for 25 years and had a pretty good time there. We had plenty of food. We raised wheat and corn and pork. A fellow asked my brother, Willard, one time how we made it through the Depression. Willard said that we didn’t even know it was going on because we had this farm and plenty to eat and our daddy had a job at the American Viscose in Roanoke. That lasted until the late 1950s when the plant closed down.
Mr. Hurt and some different men lived on the farm and helped us. Finally, Aubrey Krantz came and stayed quite a few years. We lived a pretty normal life. Later on, Daddy got sick and had diabetes. He sold the farm and moved over to the Kasey Place.
The Kasey Place was sold two or three times. It seemed that all of the Martins owned it. Finally, me and Willard got it in the late 40s, then I bought it from him in 1948. We lived there about 5 years. I remember how his first wife, Ann, used to cry because she was from the city and had never lived in the country before, but she pulled through.
One of the things Mama Jirdie (my father’s paternal grandmother) told me was that where our house is now was once called the Kasey Seats. There were church services that went on here on Sunday evenings.”

The Audio Diary of Harold Martin



My father had, as all farmers do, reached down many times and grasped a clump of earth in his hands, held it, contemplated it, and felt a kinship with it. Whether the soil was dry because of drought or rich and fertile due to prayed-for rain, he was one with the land. At the end of his life, he was able to understand just how much he had loved it.
One summer afternoon in 1995, while sitting in the front yard under one of the willow trees, my father recorded a bare-bones account of his life on the Kasey Seats Farm. The steady pace of the July tourist traffic can be heard in the tape’s background. Since my father, unbeknownst to him, lived by the Shakespeare dictum in Henry V that men of few words are the best men, he left out a few details about his life.
During his lifetime, my father moved only about five three miles from his birthplace and he enjoyed only a few travels away from home. He took a seventh-grade class trip to Washington, DC in 1938 (with the requisite $5.00 in spending money); he traveled to Tennessee several times to visit his brother, Willard and while there visited parts of Kentucky. Once, with my mother, he took a bus trip through the Pennsylvania Dutch country. When he worked with my grandfather, who was a construction superintendent for a large firm, as a timekeeper and general laborer on various high school construction sites, he worked in Danville, Blacksburg and Culpeper, Virginia.
My father was a farmer, but not a rugged man in the image of a John Wayne or a Matt Dillon. Rather, he was a John-Boy Walton who did not pursue his college dream. He held education in the highest regard from his early teenage years until his graduation from Huddleston High School as Class Valedictorian in 1943. For my father, teaching was the most noble of all professions. He taught Sunday School for 30 years and spent hours each week preparing his lesson. He was an avid student of Thomas Jefferson’s life and the era of the antebellum South. He relished trips to Monticello, Appomattox and the Booker T. Washington National Monument.

My father’s youthful ambition was to teach. My Grandma Martin and her sister, Sally, attended Radford State Teacher’s College, now Radford University, in 1921 for two six-week summer sessions to earn first-grade teaching certificates. Upon graduation, my Grandma Martin came home and taught at Ayers’ School, a typical one-room schoolhouse that was composed of the first seven grades. In my grandmother’s spare time, she and her sister taught their father, Bruce Thomas (B. T.) Huffman how to read and to write. My father loved to tell me this story because he thought it was an act of great love, and he kept my Grandma Martin’s teaching certificate until his death.
Often, my father would recall that his high school years included the chores of helping his siblings with homework and corresponding with their teachers when necessary. He would lull his sister, Sue, to sleep while studying, rocking her crib with his foot while he rocked himself back and forth in a rocking chair. In 1943, the erstwhile student, who dreamed of becoming a Latin teacher, set out with his high school diploma and valedictorian award to pursue his dream.
During his senior year at Huddleston High, my father said he wrote to “every college in the South” to obtain admission information. But, for a meek, sensitive farm boy, traveling out of state would have been akin to traveling out of the country. Instead, he opted for nearby National Business College in downtown Roanoke. He tried to commute from home, but the combination of a long drive on winding country roads, the farm work that awaited him when he got home, and a youthful lack of self-confidence overwhelmed him. Soon, he left school.
For the rest of his life, my father recalled his last day at National Business College. He had finished the withdrawal paperwork and was leaving when he encountered one of his professors on a stairwell. A few steps above my father, the teacher looked down and said, “Martin, you’re leaving us already? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I should have turned around and stayed,” my father often said.

Granddaddy Martin, though, felt he had made the right decision. He had wanted his son to be at home on the farm like the other boys in the community. Now my father would be where he should be, “where he belonged.” With Granddaddy’s help, my father bought his farm, which was originally 140 acres, and he built a dairy barn. Soon, he was milking a herd twice a day, seven days each week.
But the Coble Milk Plant in Moneta (where Lake Christian Ministries is now located) eventually closed, and my father, like his father before him, had to find work off the farm to support his family. He joined the construction firm that employed my maternal grandfather and from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, they worked on elementary and high school job sites in southwest Virginia. When my grandfather was forced to retire due to work-related injuries in 1973, my father found work first at Rubatex Corporation in Bedford (he was laid off after three months) then at Klopman Industries in Bedford. It was his last job at a meat-packing facility in Evington, though, that changed all of our lives.
My Uncle Willard, my father’s oldest brother, had a successful surveying business in Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon after my father took the meat-packing job, Uncle Willard began the difficult task of convincing my father that he should go into business for himself by operating his own slaughterhouse. Uncle Willard even offered to finance the venture. My father, though, proved to be an initial hard sell. Yet, after friends and family helped to convince him that he should take a gamble, my father, after firmly but graciously refusing his brother’s kindness, decided at the age of 50 to roll the dice and give the business a try.
Martin’s Meat Processing opened in 1975. It became a success not only because it met the need of a large number of farming families that still butchered an animal for family consumption, but my father, just like his father before him, was an extrovert. His personality, combined with my mother’s own sociability, was tailor-made for the public, and their business prospered. In later years, as my father prepared to retire, he phased out custom slaughtering to sell retail cuts of meat to the Smith Mountain tourist trade, and both my parents and grandparents made new friends.

When he assumed the nicely fitting role of gentleman farmer and business owner during the last quarter of my father’s life, he finally became comfortable with the path his life had taken. He loved to talk about farming and farming techniques. He was fascinated by Thomas Jefferson’s farm at Monticello and how the President had made wise use of his resources. He made soap with beef fat and lye and sold it to customers in his store. He loved to explain to them how tobacco and corn was grown and harvested, how to raise cattle and when to plant certain vegetables for a garden. He loved to regal them with farming stories from the days before tractors and hay balers.
My father had taken a gamble when most of us have lost the energy to take one. He had taken a huge bet, though, and won. Armed with a strong religious faith, sustained by the help of a loving brother, family and wonderful customers, he had achieved a comfortable level of success. He would always regret not fulfilling his youthful ambitions, but he had been offered a second chance to make a living on the Kasey Seats farm and he did not waste it.
Farming, Dwight Eisenhower writes, looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. My father dreamed of using a pencil instead of plow but he let his life take another turn. However, his sacrifice, fight and struggle on his land gave him a love for the land and, eventually, a love for the life that he chose. He was proud that he, too, like Jefferson, was a farmer. “I have done what I came here to do,” he told me several months before he died. He was telling me that his life’s work was over. But, he was also satisfied by his life. My father was satisfied, too, that his hard work had given his son the opportunity to use the pencil he did not get to use.