Charlie Self wrote:

Duane Bozarth responds:

Those flatland farmers will never understand hill country Charlie.

Flatland farmers understand "A developer wants to buy your land" quite
well.

Certainly and issue around the larger cities/towns, not nearly as much
so in more rural areas...see my other post on demographics...our little
town is no farther to the south or east towards us now than it was when
I was in high school in the 60s. It has moved north by about 1 mile in
that time. The big expansion is the flood of trailers before there was
any county-wide zoning at all...

Consider yourself exceptionally fortunate. In the past 28 years, Bedford County
has almost doubled in population, and is one of Virginia's fastest growing
areas west of Charlottesville. I'm not at all sure there are many areas east of
C'ville that are gobbling farm space as rapidly.


That's too bad...I haven't been back to Lynchburg for almost 15 years
now...we lived in southwest end of Anderson County close to what was
(then) the new golf course. Love Beford County as well...tried to buy a
Civil War-vintage old plantation house just east of the Peak but the
owner had cut off all the land except for a teeny-tiny triangle right up
to the back porch and wouldn't negotiate 10 or so acres off in order to
be able to make something of the place...I've forgotten the number of
the road it was on, but was prime area. B&W was bought out by McDermott
and internal R&D didn't look too promising and my former boss called
from Oak Ridge starting a new consulting firm office at about that time
so never did negotiate anything rural of our own while in VA...

It's a mixed bag...the farm economy plus oil/gas reserves are almost
depleted here now have been so depressed that local economy is not at
all healthy. If we didn't have the community college we'd be one of the
80% of counties I was speaking of earlier. I do like not having a high
population density, I would like to see a more vibrant local economy
such as we had during the post war era through about the mid-70s...