The Last Man at Sunny Ridge: William Wiley and the World of J. Russell Smith
The Poor Prole’s AlmanacShow Notes
At ninety-two, William Wiley is one of the last people who can tell it first-hand. Born in 1933, he grew up on the mountain farms of J. Russell Smith — the geographer whose 1929 classic Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture helped seed the entire agroforestry movement — and spent his boyhood grafting, budding, and shipping trainloads of chestnut, persimmon, hickory, and honey locust out of Smith's Sunny Ridge Nursery near Round Hill, Virginia.
In this conversation, recorded at the Taylor farm alongside Zach Elfers of Future Forest Plants and William's son Rob, we go after the things the history books can't hold: how the old balled-and-burlapped nurseries actually ran, the lost honey locust cultivars and the contests that named them, the Chinese chestnuts that replaced a blighted forest, prescribed fire and the Appalachian frost line, the Quaker communities that tied it all together, and the quiet lessons in generosity and honesty that a boy absorbed from a professor who once turned down a seat in FDR's cabinet. It's a firsthand look at a man, a place, and a way of working that's nearly slipped out of living memory — and a reminder of how much we lose the moment we stop asking.
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