Research Catalog

Title

The last days of Big Grassy Fork / Hunter James.

Author

James, Hunter.

Publication

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

214 p., [8] p. of plates : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork recounts newspaperman Hunter James's attempts to save his one-hundred-year-old family farm and homestead from extinction. Wise, irreverent, and pugnacious, James fights back against the galloping urbanization of his beloved North Carolina piedmont."
• "Interweaving current affairs and family history, James details the growth of the Winston-Salem area as a center of Moravian piety and later as the world's largest tobacco manufacturing center. His family's trouble in the Piedmont began early, and Hunter James is not alone in having a difficult time fitting in with today's idea of progress. His grandfather was flooded out of a brothel in his birthday suit in 1904 and scandalized the local Baptist church with drunken exposes delivered from the pulpit."
• "James's unique sense of the absurd and his willingness to play the fool make for hilarious reading as each of his efforts at preservation fail miserably. He accidentally torches a neighbor's barn in an attempt to burn off his best pastureland, as was always done in the past; he squanders enormous amounts of money vainly trying to save his farm by becoming the Piedmont's preeminent lord of the manor, vintner, wine snob, and horseman; and James finally seals his own doom when in alliance with his neighbors he inadvertently creates what he describes as the world's largest garbage pit."
• "James ends by pondering the future of the South, asking why we cling to a memory of an "Old South" that might never have existed. He wonders how to create a true spirit of Agrarianism in the modern South, one that is workable in a society that has embraced manufacturing and rural development, even as he longs for a pristine Grassy Fork and rare summer fields, alive with honeysuckle, aster, and goldenrod."--Jacket.

Subject

• Hunter, James
• Hunter family
• James, Hunter
• James family
• Farms > Conservation and restoration > Winston-Salem Region
• Landscape protection > Winston-Salem Region
• Agriculture and state > Winston-Salem Region
• Urbanization > Winston-Salem Region
• Journalists > Winston-Salem Region > Biography
• Winston-Salem Region (N.C.) > Biography
• Winston-Salem Region (N.C.) > Rural conditions
• Winston-Salem Region (N.C.) > Economic conditions

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

0813122155

LCCN

^^2001003410

OCLC

• 47142093
• SCSB-11034222

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library