By Hannah Miller, Photos by James J. Shaffer, February 2008

• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Davidson Farm
• 3: Today's Working Farm
• Download the full article as a

Today's Working Farm

Rural Hill is a working 21st century farm as well. McLean points out the fields of hay and corn that the society’s farm manager, Eddie Ferguson, tends with the help of volunteers. With history in mind, they use farm equipment from the 1940s and ‘50s, including a Ford tractor, Allis Chalmers tractor, hay baler and corn picker. Keets Taylor, who preceded McLean as director, says that volunteers have loaded “hundreds and hundreds of bales of hay” over the years.
“We feed ‘em good, we treat ‘em good,” she says. “We give them respect, and lots of chocolate.” (EnergyUnited supplies electricity to the farmhouse, where she and others cook for the volunteers.)

The hay feeds more than two dozen Highlands cattle—“Scottish coos” if you were in Scotland—that regard pasture visitors placidly from beneath extra-shaggy brows. (Photo, this page.) After some 17,000 October visitors finish tramping through the Amazing Maize Maze (the farm’s cornfield), the corn is stored for the farm’s chickens.

Eventually, McLean says, they’ll have Durham cattle like the Davidsons raised. “We will have a selection of animals that will be historically correct both to the Scots and to the Davidsons who would have been on this farm.”

A corn crib, chicken coop and pole barn are already up. A root cellar is being dug, a blacksmith shop with forge is being created, an herb garden with historic plants is being planned for spring, and another cow barn will be readied for the hoped-for Durham cattle. Long-range plans call for the expansion of the Davidson family museum, now in one room of the farmhouse, into a freestanding cultural center. Last on the plan’s wish list is a re-creation of the plantation house.

Volunteers swinging old-fashioned broad axes spent hundreds of hours the last three years building a two-room log cabin typical of those of the 1700s. (Photo, page 18.) “There’s not one nail in the walls,” proudly says volunteer Roy Pickett. Built in Appalachian, half-dovetail style, it was finished last year. The cabin’s chimney and hearth were fashioned from rocks collected at the farm, and those left over wait nearby for the next project. “They don’t say ‘thrifty Scots’ for nothing,” observes Pickett.

The cabin’s walls were chinked with native mud by children attending a Rural Hill event. “We made a formula out of the mud,” McLean recalls. “Just like the olden days.”

The cabin was inaugurated Jan. 1 during a traditional Scottish “walkabout” by society members and the public. Scottish farm communities once a year checked their towns’ boundaries to make sure they remained intact, McLean explains. At Rural Hill, the three-mile walk, called First Footin’, wound past the fieldstone-enclosed Davidson burial ground and a restored one-room school that served the Davidson children. Another school, the circa-1898 Bethesda School for African American children, is awaiting restoration. It was moved to Rural Hill from another Mecklenburg site where it was threatened by development.

The farm, so isolated that you can still hear birdsong and smell new-mown hay there, is an anomaly in fast-growing Mecklenburg. A recent report says that the Charlotte metro area lost one-third of its farmland in the 20 years between 1987 and 2007.

Asked what value Rural Hill represents to an area where so many residents are newcomers, Keets Taylor says, “Where you’ve been determines who you are. It is the collective memory of a community that creates the richness of living in a community.”

Rural Hill could extend the richness of that heritage for generations to come. “We hope to add to that colorful pageantry by working with the school systems and the people of the community,” Taylor says, “to showcase some of those great people who helped get us where we are.”

To learn more: Rural Hill Farm, 4431 Neck Rd., Huntersville, NC, 28078, Phone: (704) 875-3113, Web: www.ruralhill.net

Hannah Miller is a Carolina Country contributing writer who lives in Mecklenburg County