Laurel Fork Sapsuckers: Land Use History and Culture
If you start to talk about maple syrup with people from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and Virginia, they will likely tell you a story about how their grandmother or great grandmother used to make syrup. If they didn’t have to go to school that day, they’ll recount a time when they helped their grandmother collect sap buckets or “boil.” The Moyers family like so many hung up their sap buckets and flat pans for a later generation to eventually discover and dust off. A series of inexplicable choices made by one generation to the next presented the Moyers family with an opportunity. The sweet forest product, which was once used for trade by the Moyers, is a family business today.
Frostmore Farm – Maple & More: Land Use History and Culture
“Terroir” is a French term adopted by English speakers. It is not uncommon to hear the term used in tasting rooms or wine bars across the United States in reference to the tasting notes of a wine that derive from the vineyard’s climate, soils, and terrain. The Taylor family’s 100 to 120-year-old sugar orchard is on the eastern slope of a mountain ridge not far from the Monongahela National Forest at 2700 feet. Without using the word “terroir,” Adam and Rachel Taylor, the owners of Frostmore Farm – Maple & More, attribute the unique characteristics of their maple syrup to the sugar orchard’s climate and terrain.
Family Roots Farm: Land Use History and Culture
On the outskirts of Wellsburg, West Virginia, on top of a mountain ridge at about 1200 feet in elevation is the Hervey’s family farm. About three miles to the east, as a crow flies, is Pennsylvania and about three miles to the west is Ohio. In 1775 when the Hervey’s first settled on this mountain ridge it was the bustling town of Charlestown in the Colony of Virginia. Two hundred and fifty years later, the Hervey family remains on the land, each generation leaving the rolling pastures and forested slopes to the next. Fred Hervey was the sixth generation to grow up on the farm with his sister and three brothers. There was “always [something] exciting going on at the farm,” Fred remembers of his childhood.