EARLY FOUR YEARS AGO,
on a windy December night, Dianne Nordt, a sheep farmer and
gifted weaver in Charles City, Virginia, watched her family’s be-
loved barn burn to the ground.
Dianne had been up late, finishing holiday orders for her blanket
company, when she dozed off downstairs. “It was about one
o’clock in the morning when I was awakened by a loud noise,”
she says. “I looked outside and saw the flames.” Within half an hour, the 1927 wooden
structure, home to six of her family’s sheep and one pony, had collapsed. Fortunately,
those 30 minutes were just enough time for Dianne and her husband, Bill, a surgeon,
to rescue the animals, along with five horses from the nearby stable. “They were safe,
so for that we were thankful,” says Dianne, who later learned that the cause of the
fire was faulty wiring.
It took a few years, but Bill and Dianne were able to build a new barn in the footprint
of the old one. And to celebrate its completion, they started a new tradition: eating
Thanksgiving dinner in it, surrounded by their animals and nearly two dozen loved ones.
Dianne, a Virginia native, and Bill, who grew up in southern New Jersey, moved to
the 400-acre property on the banks of the James River with their family in 2000. She
started making blankets in 2009 from wool produced by her flock of merino sheep,
fulfilling a dream she’d had since her undergrad years studying fashion and crafts at
Virginia Commonwealth University. After hand-dyeing the skeins of yarn using black
walnut, osage sawdust, coreopsis, and other plants, Dianne weaves them on giant
looms in her basement workshop with the help of two part-time assistants. Last year,
she produced 250 blankets for her Etsy shop (nordtfamilyfarm.etsy.com) and crafts
shows, each one numbered and dated.
She approaches food in the same slow, handmade way. “I take my cues from my
grandmother, who canned vegetables from her garden and cooked everything from
scratch,” Dianne says. At Thanksgiving, she also has a secret weapon in the kitchen:
her friend and neighbor Pauline Elliott, an accomplished home cook who brings des-
sert. Pauline and her husband, David, along with Susan Reed and Robert Walz, have
rented homes on the Nordts’ farm for more than six years and are more family than
friends. “We’re like a rural settlement,” says Pauline with a laugh. “We share the pool,
the dock, and the barn areas; we know each others’ relatives; and we always spend
the holiday together.”
After a southern feast, the entire gang goes for a long walk around the property,
visiting the sheep (they now number 40), horses, and chickens, and lingering by the
river. Later, back at the barn, they sit down for coffee and slices of apple cake, pumpkin
pie, and a rich, gooey peanut pie, a local variant on better-known pecan pie that’s
chock-full of extra-large Virginia peanuts. There, under the rough-hewn oak rafters,
it’s easy to savor the sweetness of life on a farm. “It’s become trendy to have weddings
and parties in barns,” says Dianne. “But ours is a working barn before anything
else—and I hope to keep it that way.”From top: Oriana and Eudora Nordt and their
cousin Anna Katherine Jones make a tight-knit trio
in Dianne’s handwoven blankets. A woolly friend
strikes a pose. After Thanksgiving dinner, the family
strolls across their property with drinks in hand; the
underage crowd sips Dianne’s famous sweet
orange-and-lemon iced tea, while the grown-ups
spike theirs with whiskey or gin.