Wendell Berry died at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on August 31st. The poet, novelist, essayist, and Mad Farmer lived along the Kentucky River. He was 92.

Wendell Berry, Henry County in the early 1970s. James Baker Hall photo. Courtesy of the James Baker Hall Photographic Archive. All rights reserved.

His daughter Mary, in an interview, said her father was, “…unfailingly gentlemanly and kind. He said the things we needed to hear. And he said some things that we all ought to live by, and that it’ll never be so bad that we can’t do the right thing that’s right in front of us.”

 

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts”

Noble Boswell, a native of Battle, in Washington County, moved to Mercer County in the mid-1980s. Noble is a good man and a talented woodsman. I’ve walked the Salvisa spring woods with him. He can spot 20 morels to my one. The day before Wendell died, Noble came down to our farm to fish along the Salt River with his grandson.

Wendell and Noble never met, but they shared a lot in common— a deep-rooted sense of family, place, neighbors, storytelling, laughter, and burley tobacco.

North Central Kentucky has a long history of burley

Wendell and Noble, at different times and places, cut tobacco stalks and housed crops for curing in their respective tall black barns.

Berry grew up as part of a multigenerational clan whose roots in Henry County went back five generations. His father, John M. Berry, created the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Op, which created price parities that allowed small farmers to profit from their crops starting in 1941. That model, which lasted until 2004, provided Berry a model of cooperative, small farming that rebuked big agribusiness for decades as farmers stayed on their land.

-Linda Blackford, Lexington Herald-Leader

Mercer County 

Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture, during a 1973 surge in grain exports and farm prices, confidently said. “Get big or get out.” Butz encouraged farmers to expand production from “fencerow to fencerow.”

Berry’s book, Unsettling of America, published in 1977, was foretelling. Large farms became burdened with increased debt, overproduction, and boom and bust commodity prices.

The number of large and marginal farms across America declined.

Hollowing out of small rural towns followed.

The average age of an American farmer, based on the 2022 census, was 58 years old. The number of Kentucky farms in 2022 was 69,245, a decline of 8.6% from 2017.

Noble saw a few decent small mouth bass that Sunday

None took the bait. He reeled in a few small sunfish and creek shad.

A hundred yards up the hill, past a sinkhole, Noble pointed toward a corner of a field now in rotation with organic corn and soybeans. He told me he had once cut tobacco here on a two-acre fertile piece with Poochie Bobbit, a friend from Tatum Springs. Poochie was joined by brother Danny, and cousins Tony and Bobby. It was hard, sweaty work accompanied by a lot of needling and laughing.

Noble Boswell holding a honey locust thorn

Tobacco cutters were paid a nickel a stick in the 1980s. Sticks consisting of six tobacco stalks were dried in the field and then brought to the barn the next day. They were handed off from the tobacco wagon, one stick at a time, up four to as many as eight ascending horizontal rails, each person, handing off one to the next. Sticks were hung and stalks spread to cure for a few months.

Noble warrants his name

Good tobacco field hands could cut a thousand or more sticks a day. Noble made an astounding $999.00—close to 20,000 sticks in one long week. Bending over near ground level, cutting the bottom of each stalk with a tobacco knife, he speared each one onto a four-foot stick. Poochie and his brothers and cousins were good cutters too.

The Bobbits, before driving the half-hour back to Tatum Springs, liked to sit in the shade at day’s end with a few cold beers.

Every now and then I find a rusting beer can along the tree line near the sinkhole. Possible evidence of the Bobbits. “Nobody from Tatum Springs turned down a beer,” Noble said.

Burley Coulter, a good-hearted, hard-working rascal of Berry’s novels, would have been impressed with Noble’s strength, humility, and good humor.

I can picture the laughs, the lies, and the easy back-and-forth that Wendell, Noble, Burley Coulter, and the Bobbits might have shared working side by side.

Wendell and Den Berry in the late 1960s. James Baker Hall photo. Courtesy of the James Baker Hall Photographic Archive. All rights reserved.

The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky continues the work and aspirations of Wendell Berry.