Pen Druid isn’t just a brewery to the people of Rappahannock.
Lain (left) and Van Carney chat up customers at the bar | Luke Christopher
For the three brothers, Jennings Carney, 38, Van Carney, 36, and Lain Carney, 33, it’s also been a place that’s attracting other young people to the area, some driving over an hour just to have a beer at the brewery, which is a little under a year old.
The brothers made a long trip back to Rappahannock as well, traveling back to their hometown to open a business in 2015 after spending 10 years touring the U.S. and Europe with their neo-psychedelic rock band, Pontiak. After producing 11 albums, they decided to open the brewery about a mile and half from Woodville — the town where they grew up (on a family farm named Pen Druid).
“It was really important for us to come back here to start the business,” Van said.
“It’s been nice after spending so much time on the road touring, to kind of shift focus in terms of creativity and what it is we’re doing,” Jennings said.
Van said he hopes one day he and his brothers will be able to live in Rappahannock again, but for now they live in Fauquier County, mostly due to the housing prices in Rappahannock.
“We’re trying to live here, there’s not a lot of housing stock here, it’s expensive, it’s hard to live here,” Van said.
Van and his brothers aren’t the only ones who want to move back. Jennings said he’s come across people from his generation that want to come back to Rappahannock, but can’t because of limited resources.
Visitors of all ages visit the rustic scene of Pen Druid, which has been open for a little under a year. | Luke Christopher
Only about 12 percent of the county fits into the Carney’s age group — residents between the ages of 20 and 34, according to the U.S. Census for 2010, when county residents between 50 and 64 accounted for 26 percent of the population. In the Foothills Forum’s recent Rappahannock Survey, about 17 percent of respondents were in the youngest category of 18 to 34 years old; 49 percent were 55 or older.
The biggest challenges young people face in the county is housing, work and communication, Van added, pointing to internet access as a need for everyone in the county.
“People increasingly really require the internet … to work, to make money, I mean paying your bills online, it really helps,” Van said.
In the Foothills survey, about 57 percent of respondents said internet was very important to their business. The three brothers were already aware of the need, and Van said they were able to get the Comcast to install a hub nearby for their own business.
The brothers also knew they wanted to keep the production aspects local. They ferment their beer with yeast from right outside their production area, using wild, naturally occurring yeast and bacteria to produce the beer. About 90 percent of their malt comes from across the street at Copper Fox Distillery, and do their fermenting in wooden barrels they obtained from Copper Fox and local wineries, Van said.
“My 20-year goal is to be getting all of these things that you make beer with … from, if not the county, locally,” Van said.
Everything that’s produced in their manufacturing plant is what’s sold to their customers, Van said. Since opening in August 2015, they’ve produced about 34 different beers, but Van said the brothers will focus on producing about a dozen different brews.
The varying brews attract young people from out of town to have a beer sitting on the brothers’ German- and Czech-style picnic tables, which are narrower than American picnic tables, Van said, and bring people closer together.
Not everyone will drive an hour and a half for beer and atmosphere. But Erica Olmsted, 31, of Arlington, and Mark Saylor, 34, of Manassas, said they have made the trip four times.
“There’s a lot of great breweries in Northern Virginia in the area where we’re from and none of them do anything quite like this,” Saylor said. “It’s definitely unique.”
Saylor added that when he and Olmsted plan a drive out to Pen Druid, he looks forward to it all week. The Carney brothers’ personalities, and their willingness to talk to each customer, is a big draw, too.
“It’s worth the destination because they’re doing something different,” Olmsted said.
Reporter Julia Fair’s internship is underwritten by Foothills Forum.
Emily Little was shocked that she had cell service when she moved onto a college campus. She grew up in Rappahannock County, where very little of that has been available.
The 22-year-old Little noticed how often her fellow students used their cell phones and laptops to check if classes have been cancelled, to turn in assignments and to stay in touch with their peers through social media accounts.
Out of necessity, millennials in Rappahannock have developed other habits.
Across the U.S., about 51 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds check their smartphone a few times an hour for a variety of reasons, according to a 2015 smartphone usage survey conducted by Gallup Panel, a research-based consulting company.
In its county-wide survey last winter, the Foothills Forum found that broadband internet access and cell phone coverage were the top two topics of concern identified by community members — and of most concern among respondents in the 18-to-34 age group.
“I’m very used to not having cell phone service,” Little said, adding that her family only got satellite internet a year ago.
Now that she commutes an hour and a half to Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg from her Rappahannock home, Little finds ways around the lack of resources to complete her school work.
“I’ve adapted my sleep schedule, unfortunately,” Little said.
The internet provider at her house has a data cap, but it offers unlimited data from midnight to 5 a.m. When it nears midnight, Little said the service speeds up, making it a good opportunity to upload any assignments due the next day.
When an assignment needs to be turned in by midnight, Little finds herself driving 25 minutes to Culpeper to use the Wi-Fi at the local library or coffee shop.
Little added that she’s also started to email her professors in advance to warn them about her internet connection dilemma, opening the dialogue for them to confirm that they’ve received her assignments.
Aside from school work, all college students try to find time to hang out with friends. In Rappahannock, Little said, that also takes a little more effort.
“I know a lot of people communicate with apps like Whatsapp or Kik that run off of Wi-Fi and not cell service,” Little said.
She also takes advantage of the Facebook Messenger app, which acts as a texting tool, to keep in touch with her boyfriend when he’s on the way to her house, Little said.
While Little is at work at the Thornton River Grille, she said she gets more cell phone service because of a cellular-over-the-web signal booster at the restaurant.
“[The boosters] feed off of the Wi-Fi and they boost any sort of residual signal you might have,” Little said. “With that booster I get three bars of 3G and I can make a call from there.”
She added that she, along with the many in Rappahannock, uses a Sprint phone because of the carrier’s cell towers spread around the county.
Next to the Thornton River Grille is Rudy’s Pizza, where a few more millennials work their day jobs, but also work around the sparse internet and cell service.
John Strew, 19, lives in Madison, but drives to Rappahannock for his job at Rudy’s. He has AT&T as a cell provider, so he has to find other forms of communication.
“Most of the time it’s Facebook Messenger or Snapchat because you have to use Wi-Fi,” Strew said.
Planning ahead is essential to staying in touch with his peers, he said.
“It’s kind of painful when you think about the cell service out here,” said Cory Massey, Strew’s co-worker, who grew up in Rappahannock.
When he was at Rappahannock County High School, Massey said, there was almost no way to do his homework at home because his family had dial-up.
“I work off of a hot spot now but back then there was nothing,” he said.
At the time, Massey did all of his work at school or the library.
He added that he hopes the future of Rappahannock includes more cell service.
“It can be very very beneficial to the county,” Massey said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect cell service, you just need cell service for the kids.”
Rappahannock County is home to 397 farms, each with different agricultural products, farming techniques and backgrounds, but they’re all trying to do one thing — keep their farms sustainable and profitable.
Those efforts to keep the farms successful fall on the shoulders of a diverse group of future farmers. Some increasingly rely on symbiotic relationships, between landowners and young families who move to Rappahannock to lease farm’s acreage. Others have family members to whom the land, equipment and know-how will be passed on, in hopes of keeping the farm both in the black and in the family.
Whether the farm operations are centuries or a few years old, all share a common hope to preserve the land that feeds them — and the rest of the community. It’s a common concern among Rappahannock’s residents — in the Foothills Forum’s recent Living in Rappahannock Survey, “maintaining family farms” was the fourth-rated overall concern. Of those surveyed, 1,346 answered how concerned they were about maintaining family farms and about 50 percent rated it to be very important to them.
Beneath the fertilized fields, meanwhile, answers are being unearthed to questions of financial stability and who will be the farmers of the future.
In the view of the Social Security Administration, the earliest one can retire in the U.S. is at age 62. In Rappahannock County, that’s about the average age of the individual in charge of the majority of the farmland: 61, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2012 census.
Manfred Call, owner of Muskrat Haven Farm, with his youngest son Hunter, who will eventually take over the Amissville operation.
Manfred Call, the owner of Muskrat Haven Farm in Amissville, recalled that he had a heart attack just as he reached that statistical age group. He was 63.
“If I drop dead, it can happen to anybody at anytime . . . you don’t know when the bell’s going to ring,” Call said, remembering the fate of his farm at the time of his health scare.
Heart problems now kept at bay by medication and activity, Call is now 78 — and able to oversee his hay baling business, his cattle, sweet corn, berries and soy beans, among other products that the Amissville farm produces on 130 acres. With a diverse range of products being produced, Call has a plan set in place for what the business will be for his kids and grandchildren.
“I’ve got those four kids to take care of,” Call said. “Every day I look at assets and how to split ’em up, to put them in the right place so their lives don’t get interfered with taking on another project.”
Call added that he doesn’t know what he would do without Hunter Call, his youngest son, who will take over Muskrat Haven Farm with his own son once the time comes.
“You always try to plan for the future, you never know what two steps will take you,” he said. “I might not wake up one morning, and that’s fine, I’m comfortable with where I am and what I’ve done.”
Planning for the future also includes being prepared for accidents that can happen any day on the farm to Call’s expensive equipment.
“I had one tractor destroyed,” Call said. “Someone ran right into it, tore the tractor all to hell.”
A similar incident happened two years ago, Call added, when someone using their cell phone while driving ran into the back his trailer on the highway.
To protect himself against incidents like those, Call insures every farming vehicle he owns.
“We count on [the equipment] for income, a lot of income,” Call said. “You’ve got to have equipment that works when you want it to work.”
Each year, Call said, he buys between $15,000 and $20,000 worth of equipment for the farm, either replacing the old or buying additional equipment, to keep the farm running.
Farmers throughout Rappahannock County take that measure to try to turn a profit. In 2012, though, the average farm in the county reported losing about $6,000 while trying to make a living, according to the agriculture department’s 2012 census.
Before Call bought his farm in 1986, he invested in the stock market, and still relies on that to bail himself out whenever his farm faces financial problems.
“If you don’t think ahead, you’re going to get behind,” Call said.
A sampling of the pasture-raised livestock samples a pasture at Heritage Hollow Farm in Sperryville.
Cliff Miller III of Sperryville has been thinking ahead for a long time about the future of his family farm, Mount Vernon Farm, but his family’s acreage, family-operated for more than 100 years, likely won’t see his children atop tractors.
“My children loved this place, but aren’t particularly interested in farming,” said Miller, whose son, Cliff Miller IV, has built an extensive retail and restaurant complex — and a nine-hole golf course — at the family’s Sperryville Schoolhouse property.
Instead, the elder Miller decided to lease land to younger farmers, who may not have grown up in Rappahannock County but hope to make a living producing food.
“In Rappahannock County, you can’t hardly come here and buy land at the market rate and expect to make money farming it,” Miller said.
Miller had two operations sign leases to start their own agriculture-based businesses. One of them, Waterpenny Farm, has 25 years left of their 40-year lease, which gives them access to 30 acres of Miller’s land.
“The next generation is starting to take over and that’s exciting to me to see that happen,” Miller said.
For Miller, that next generation is also represented by Mike and Molly Peterson, who operate their business, Heritage Hollow Farms, on about 250 leased acres of Miller’s land, at $30 per acre per year.
In 2008, the farming duo moved to Rappahannock County, where Mike worked as a chef and a butcher and Molly worked as a professional photographer. On his way to work every day, Mike said he would pass by Cliff Miller’s farm.
“Here was this farm [working] every day and he was getting kind of . . . ‘burnout’ is not the right word, but close,” Molly said.
Molly Peterson tends to livestock at Heritage Hollow Farms.
After quitting his job as a butcher at the Inn at Little Washington, Mike took an internship as a farm manager with Miller, which led to a year of negotiations, planning out the five-year lease for him and Molly to open their business in 2013.
As Mike and Molly started raising grass-fed cattle, pasture-raised pigs and lambs, Molly said, Rappahannock community members often told them how glad they were to have a young couple around.
“The problem is, it’s not cost-effective for young people to live here,” Molly said. “If young people want to live here, they have to get creative, or they have to commute.”
Molly added that at one point, she and Mike were making a take-home pay of less than $1,000 a month. But, she said, since this type of food is important to them, they figured it out.
They have a mix of private and government loans, she said, including one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which allowed them to buy some of their own breeding stock.
Mike and Molly aren’t the only ones taking advantage of USDA loans. In the past three years, seven home loans have been granted in Rappahannock County from the USDA ranging from about $130,000 to about $280,000, according to records from the Farm Service Agency.
“We love it here and that’s why we try to make it happen,” Molly said.
More young farmers are coming out to the county, Molly said, and if they hadn’t come here, there might not be as many farms in county.
Rappahannock County is home to 397 farms that range in size from one acre to 1,000 acres, according to the USDA’s 2012 census. The majority of farms in 2012 made less than $1,000 in sales and only one made $500,000 or more, according to the same census.
“Generations of families have kept it going and going and that’s so important and vital to the culture here.” Molly said. “Then we have the newer farming generation and are trying to make a go of it, usually on rented land.”
Some landowners in the county are coming around to the idea of renting land and benefiting from their land improving, Mike said, which gives them more land to raise cattle on.
“We need to be able to have the land we have here working and profitable to keep the next generation of farmers in the county,” he said.
The conservation crop
To keep farms profitable, many farmers turn for advice to David Massie, conservation specialist at the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District, which includes Rappahannock in its five-county area.
“It’s definitely a struggle for the younger generation if it’s not handed to you and you’re not in line to take over the operation,” said Massie, who also serves on the board of the Foothills Forum.
About 75 percent of Rappahannock’s farmers have reached out to Massie for help, he said. The advice he gives ranges from affordable fencing, water resources and how to utilize existing infrastructure.
“There’s a business-mentality end of a family farm that has to stay profitable,” he said. “So if they can make it more profitable, there’s a better chance that it’s going to survive down the line.”
As Massie helps local farmers make their businesses more profitable, they’ve developed deep relationships leading to other forms of advice.
“Some of the people I’m closer to . . . we talk about what’s the plan for the future,” Massie said.
Those conversations have lead to facilitating more land-lease agreements for other farmers, he said, similar to the agreement the Petersons worked out with Miller.
Sometimes those conversations lead to what farmers might need to build in order to sign into a conservation easement program, a tool to preserve farmland, and costs surrounding it.
“A lot of our work would come out of [the easement’s] requirements to build a buffer on the stream if it was in a pasture situation,” Massie said.
A conservation easement is put into place when a landowner signs away the rights for development on the land in order to conserve the land as it is, untouched, forever, no matter who owns the land in the future.
When landowners do that, they can deduct up to 50 percent of their adjusted gross income, according to Carolyn Sedgwick, Rappahannock & Clarke County land conservation officer at the Piedmont Environmental Council.
“That’s essentially allowing a family farm to stay in place because you are getting a financial incentive to invest in the farm and the future,” Sedgwick said.
In Rappahannock County, she said, 30,000 acres are in conservation easement programs, the majority meant to preserve farmland. According to the national conservation easement database, there are 191 easements in Rappahannock County.
Easements are one of several tools in a conservation toolkit for preserving family farms, Sedgwick said. She added that they’re probably the method of preserving land that most community members are familiar with.
“It’s a big draw for the public,” Sedgwick said. “Just having these mountainsides or streams [and] farms preserved, and knowing that pressure to develop them is not ever going to arise.”
Whether it’s people born and raised in Rappahannock County or people flocking to area, they all have the opportunity to figure out a way to preserve farms and the way of life in the county, she said.
“These communities are not stagnant, they are constantly evolving,” Sedgwick said. “Some of this push is trying to figure out, where is the next generation of — not people, farmers, but of local food — where is that going to be coming from?”
Reporter Julia Fair’s internship is underwritten by Foothills Forum.
Before Kaitlin Struckmann started making them, there were no video records of local Rappahannock County government meetings.
After seeing the need, Struckmann started the Rappahannock Record, a public-service effort to record videos of public meetings for those who are unable to attend the meetings. Struckmann, 34, records all of the videos herself, all on a volunteer basis.
After a discussion of government transparency made its way through RappNet, a local email group list that connects community members with opinions and discussions, Struckmann took on the task of recording the meetings.
“I thought it was a simple thing to step up and do,” she said.
Kaitlin Struckmann, shown here behind the camera at Monday’s supervisors meeting, hopes to “show the whole truth” playing out at public meetings in Rappahannock. Photo | Julia Fair
Then, Struckmann looked to the community to help fund her mission. In the first month, $1,300 was donated to her gofundme.com campaign. With those funds, Struckmann has recorded 10 local meetings over the past two months. She hopes to raise $2,200 more, according to her gofundme page.
Donations are used toward gas money, vehicle maintenance, equipment upgrades and other costs associated with Struckmann’s project, she said. She commutes from her Flint Hill home to record each government meeting.
Meetings she’s recorded include Rappahannock County School Board and Board of Supervisors meetings, a planning commission meeting and a board of zoning appeals meeting.
So far, Struckmann says she has spent about 63 hours recording and editing videos and traveling 152 miles in the first month of the Rappahannock Record’s production. Struckmann’s first video has about 90 views, with more recent uploads reaching 30 to 90 views on her Youtube channel.
“I’ve gobbled up all of the meetings I can find out about,” Struckmann said. “It’s just a matter of me learning which meetings are being held but anytime I hear of one I try to go to it.”
Before coming to Rappahannock, Struckman was a deputy clerk at the Warren County Circuit Court. For five years, she saw how essential keeping correct records are for a courtroom.
“They don’t allow cameras in the courtroom usually, so I always felt like there was a little part of the record missing,” Struckmann said. “It’s different now, it’s the same concept but I’m actually able to show the whole truth of [meetings].”
Struckmann added that sometimes “nuances” are left out of written records such as body language and the tone in some individual’s voices.
“That’s the part that’s missing if you’re not there and you can’t watch a video,” she said.
Some individuals in the county would miss local school board meetings because they needed to stay home and watch their kids, said J. Wesley Mills, the board’s Jackson district member and chair.
“Initially, someone wanted the school to take videos . . . we had to make sure we were smart about it,” he said.
Members of the board thought about recording audio at the meetings to verify the written minutes taken with the clerk, Mills said, but that option wouldn’t serve the community.
“I wanted to do it economically, and [Kaitlin] does that,” Mills said.
Chris Parrish of Stonewall-Hawthorne district, vice chairman of the supervisors, sees multiple benefits to the Rappahannock Record as well.
“Not everything is covered in the newspaper,” Parrish said. “If someone wants to sit two or three hours to see what happened at least they have the option to do that.”
Sometimes, community members attend the supervisors’ meetings to gain approval for a permit, Parrish said. On the chance that it’s denied, they can go back, review what happened and reapply later in the year, he added.
Following the added support from RappNet, private emails and Facebook, Stuckmann plans to continue the service for Rappahannock.
“As long as the county needs it done, sure, I’d love to stay and do this,” Struckmann said.
What started as a joke between Lindsey Wangsgard, 36, and Donna Comer, 44 — the joke being that if no one else showed up, it would be just two moms and a boombox — has evolved into a group fitness class frequented by about 15 other moms and community members.
While the young sons and daughters of the class participants make their way around the dirt-covered bases at Stuart Field in Amissville, Wangsgard and Comer lead the classes inside a nearby shelter, calling their group Rappfit.
“We saw what we felt like was a basic need in the county,” Comer said.
The class meets every Monday and Wednesday at the Ruritan Community Building in Amissville. Photo | Julia Fair
She added that there’s a variety of specialized group fitness classes available in the county, but there wasn’t a general group fitness option. When the group first started meeting, they used the local elementary school, but had to take a break from holding classes due to scheduling conflicts with the space, Comer said.
“A participant who had been taking the classes at the school contacted us and said, ‘Let’s do it again,’ ” Comer said.
That conversation led them to their new location — rent free — at the baseball field’s Ruritan Community Building, where the fitness participants can be found every Monday and Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
“We try to teach a basic fitness class, we don’t want people to feel like they have to come with a lot of equipment,” Wangsgard said. “We want you to feel like you can come even if you don’t have three dollars in your pocket.”
There is a suggested donation of $3 in exchange for participating in the class, Comer added. The donations then go back to the Culpeper Rappahannock Baseball League’s community outreach program.
In the program’s year and a half of operation, it’s raised about $3,000, Wangsgard said,
Christine Allen, vice president of the league, who also participates in the Rappfit classes, helps oversee the donation funds.
“Donna and Lindsey do wonders providing their services here for us so we’ve decided to, in turn, pay it forward and use it as our community outreach,” Allen said.
Allen added that the class is their own “little team of moms,” encouraging and supporting each other throughout the workout.
At a recent class in Amissville, Rappfit participants — including one who just had to be there with mom on her exercise mat — get their workout time in. Photo | Julia Fair
“We just want to live a healthy lifestyle,” she said.
The class activities vary week by week, Wangsgard said, recounting past class activities that have focused on cardio, strength, core exercises and back exercises.
One’s personal fitness level shouldn’t deter anyone from joining the class sessions, she added.
“We modify for people who might not be jumping as high as others,” Wangsgard said.
In the future, Wangsgard said they hope to raise enough money to buy weights for the group, as well as foam mats to lay across the concrete flooring.
“We want the program to better things for everyone,” she said.
Julia Fair - Journalist 