The Ellet Valley near Blacksburg Virginia has been called one of the most beautiful you’ll ever see. It’s where the late, former president of Virginia Tech, Marshall Hahn and his family lived for decades. His grown children still live there, carrying out their parents’ legacy and creating their own.
“Doug and I and the rest of my family decided, especially given how much this valley has grown up in the years since we’ve had these properties, that we wanted to preserve them and not let them turn into more development.” It’s been several years now, since they put a conservation easement on their property to ensure that wouldn’t happen. Though no one quite recalls exactly who’s idea it was.”“I think we might have put a bug in my dad’s ear, but he liked for things to be his idea,” she laughs.
If Marshall Hahn was a force of nature, Betty is a chip off the old block. He considered himself a fiscal conservative and a social democrat,” says Chancey. “A progressive,” adds Hahn.
The couple has taken that last one further left. Supporters of several progressive causes, they’re dedicated environmentalists, strongly against gas pipelines, they’re growing hemp on their farm instead of raising cattle as her folks did.
Last spring, they took part in a Virginia Tech student run event called The Big Plant, adding dozens of native Appalachian trees like those that would have been here decades ago. “They recreated an Appalachian forest with the same mix of trees you might find in the woods here,” White Pines, Tulip Poplar, American Chestnut… Chancey says, “the idea is to plant things close together so they compete” and it causes them to grow faster.
Hahn and Chancey are involved in several projects at any one time, one of the latest; they built a large, fenced in pollinator garden to help the birds and bees do their thing. And slowly the place is changing, moving forward but also looking back to an earlier time.“My parents called this ‘Hickory Hill Farm’ says Betty. We now call it Paris Mountain Farm we just haven’t changed the sign yet.”
Paris Mountain looms large on the landscape and in their work and music, it’s the namesake of their folk band, Paris Mountain Blue Birds. A song, Betty wrote, “The Blue Hills and the Green Hills, “is an homage to Appalachia, a place she had to leave in order to see more clearly. During the couples’ years living in southern California, the stereotypes people used when she told them where she was from, shocked her. And something else surprised her; how badly she wanted to get back home, to Appalachia. “I just didn’t know I’d miss these mountains so much. I don’t’ know there’s something about them that gets in your system at least for me it did, and I also found myself becoming very aware of the whole myth of Appalachia.”
She says, “There’s a long, long, long and painful and hideous tradition of outside interests coming in to plunder and take all the wealth away. The reason for that is that (this region) is so incredibly rich and diverse in resources and trees and minerals trees. So, it’ s just another piece of a long line of the extraction industry’s targeting Appalachia as a sacrifice zone.
Lately, Betty Hahn has been researching the history of the land she inherited, a former plantation, that dates back to the 1750s and once included 20 enslaved people. Betty and Doug are renovating the building to turn it into a gathering space, for community events, meetings, music and more.
“My parents ran a very beautiful farm. It was gorgeous and they did it well and we just want to build on what they started ,and take it farther and make it as sustainable as possible.” Recently, a neighbor asked if they were going to keep the place as pristine and tidy as her parents did. Here's what she said, “The thing is, the kind of farming we’re going to be doing –it doesn’t look as pristine- because you let a lot of things grow. I basically told them, well,' I wouldn’t really count on it.'”
