Life on a Virginia Farm - Book 21

I discovered this little treasure on the shelf of my local library.  It was published back in 1968 and it is the memoirs of a man born in Fauquier County in 1879.  It really seems like a collection of essays he wrote over the course of years and some letters too.

Robert Beverley Herbert loved his grandparents huge farm called Avenel.  He really doesn't talk much about his father and in fact he does not have his father's surname, which was Pinkney.  He did have a sister and a brother.  The sister died of diphtheria.  He does mention his younger brother occasionally.  His mother hardly gets a mention at all either.  She died before he was 13 and he and his brother were sent off to boarding school.  For Christmas and summers they came home to their grandparents farm.  Robert loved it with a love he had all his life.  He admired his grandfather and his grandmother immensely.  

The neat thing is that the book is full of local history.  Fauquier County is two counties away from the one I live in.  We used to go there near Marshall, near where this book is mainly set, to buy beef from a farmer there.  The countryside is beautiful but is now being built up and becoming an exburb.  Apparently where Avenel once stood there is a housing development named after it.  A really poignantly sad ending to this beloved place.    I especially was charmed by the book because when I did the National Novel Writing Month in November of 2014, I set it in that county around Warrenton back in the 1960s.  I was kind of thrilled when I happened to take this book off the shelf and realized what it was.

The book is a meandering, nostalgic look back at a different time, 'horse and buggy days', the author calls them.  He remembers the blind horse he and his brother rode, how poor and cold they were until their grandparents took them in, how much he loved the countryside and the people who lived near him.  Another really insightful element to the book is his fond remembrance of stories told about Robert E. Lee and Col. Mosby.  While the author acknowledges that slavery was wrong, most of his memories are of the stories told of great deeds of courage carried out by noble soldiers of the Confederacy.  He says when he was a boy everyone talked about the weather and the Civil War.  The whole mythology was already fully blown.  

If you know this area this book is really fun to read.  There is so much local history and lore, and explanations of flora and fauna in a very homey, genteel telling.  

I googled a map of this area and I found this one.  The author was related through his mother's side to many of the founding families of Virginia.  The big missing factor in this book is a harder look at slavery and prejudice.  However, to be fair, the author whitewashes his own history by avoiding what was too unpleasant or only giving it the slightest passing glance.  He wanted to talk about what he loves, not what he doesn't love about his beloved Fauquier County.

A charming walk down memory lane for Virginians.  

This book fills the square for my Local Author requirement in the 52 Books Bingo Challenge. 

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.