Home Is Where the Heart Is

This lovely old brick house in southwest Viriginia is where my maternal grandmother, known to her grandchildren as "Memie," grew up. She lived to be 96 years old, and this was always "home" to her, although she did not live there again after her marriage in 1913.

When I was a child, our annual summer trip to see our grandmother also meant spending a few days at her childhood home -- definitely the highlight of the trip for all of us. I'm hoping to see it again next month, when Phil and I are in Virginia. It's still in the family -- my mother's first cousin and his wife live there, and he is still farming.

Known as "Battlemont" for the hill on the property called "Battle Knob," where the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians fought their last battle in that area in 1768, the house was built in 1838 by my grandmother's maternal great-grandfather, Thomas Witten III. His grandfather, the first Thomas Witten in our family tree, was one of the first permanent settlers in that area, arriving from Maryland in the early 1770s and acquiring considerable land.

Battlemont was built of bricks made from clay gathered across the road from the house and baked in homemade kilns. Brick masons from a nearby county lived with the family while the house was being constructed. My grandmother wrote that "We are told that a wagon load of pigs were hauled to Richmond, Va. - and there traded for the hardware - door latches, hinges, etc., used in the house." At the time the house was built, slaves did the farm work; after the Civil War, tenant farmers took on that role.

It may have been my grandmother's older half-sister, known in the family as "B", who painted this, as she was an artist, as well as raising flowers and chickens, making butter for family use and to sell, and cooking wonderful meals for the extended family over many years.

I realized a few years ago that my passion for local food stems directly from those childhood visits to Battlemont, where "B" had the freshest of food to work with, right from the farm. I can still remember sitting around the big dining table at breakfast, slathering her hot biscuits with homemade butter, pouring incredibly thick cream on fresh strawberries, and drinking milk from the morning's milking.

Those memories are worth far more than any tangible legacy, and I am immensely grateful for them.

(For a closer look at the house, here's a undated photo -- probably taken in the early 1960s.)