molly mooching 71farm, we were gathered into that circle. The Webbs unfailingly invite us
to their family reunions. Along with the pleasures of friendship and help
with anything from binding a quilt to canning, we’ve been granted a full
century’s worth of stories attached to this farm.
The place is locally famous, it turns out. Sanford Webb was a visionary
and a tinkerer who worked as a civil engineer for the railroad but also was
the first in the neighborhood—or even this end of the state—to innovate
such things as household electricity, a grain mill turned by an internal
combustion engine, and indoor food refrigeration. The latter he fashioned
by allowing a portion of the farm’s cold, rushing creek to run through a
metal trough inside the house. (We still use a version of this in our kitchen
for no-electricity refrigeration.) Creativity ran in the family. In the up-
stairs bedroom the older Webb boys once surprised their mother by smug-
gling up, one part at a time, everything necessary to build, crank up, and
start a Model- T Ford. These inventive brothers later founded a regional
commercial airline, Piedmont Air, and paid their kid sister Neta a dime a
day to come down and sweep off the runway before each landing.
Sanford was also forward- thinking in the ways of horticulture. He
worked on the side as a salesman for Stark’s Nursery at a time when the
normal way to acquire fruit trees was to borrow a scion from a friend. Mr.
Webb proposed to his neighbors the idea of buying named varieties of
fruit trees, already grafted onto root stock, that would bear predictably
and true. Stayman’s Winesaps, Gravensteins, and Yellow Transparents
began to bloom and bear in our region. For every sixteen trees Mr. Webb
sold, he received one to plant himself. The lilacs, mock oranges, and roses
of Sharon he brought home for Lizzie still bloom around our house. So
does a small, frost- hardy citrus tree called a trifoliate orange, a curiosity
that has nearly gone extinct in the era of grocery- store oranges. (We know
of only one nursery that still sells them.)
The man was passionate about fruit trees. Throughout our hollow,
great old pear trees now stand a hundred feet tall, mostly swallowed by a
forest so deep they don’t get enough sun to bear fruit. But occasionally
when I’m walking up the road I’ll be startled by the drop (and smash) of a
ripe pear fallen from a great height. The old apple orchard we’ve cleared
and pruned, and it bears for us. We keep the grass mowed between the