The George Place

We always called it “the George Place.”

It was a parcel next to our family land on the southeast flanks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Amherst County, Virginia.  The George Place stretched from a small valley cleared for pasture up to crest of Turkey Mountain.  In the valley bottom was a small stream, with huge poplars clinging to its banks, where we used to catch minnows and occasionally find momentos from an earlier time: a stirrup, a plowshare, horseshoes.

Next to the stream was a pile of rocks with the base of the chimney still recognizable where this "George" had lived.  Just up the hill was another house site, with a chimney and a well.

In the 1980s my uncle, Donald Selvage Jr. of Amherst, bought the George Place.  When he died it came to me.  I built a house on it, and for my chimney I had the mason include several large rocks from the old chimneys, as a reminder of my predecessors here.

The problem was that I knew almost nothing about those predecessors.  All I knew about George was that he was a Eubank; Eubanks had owned most of the land where we are.  So I began to piece together a story of the people who had lived in these houses, and I found a story worth telling.