A place at the table

Edward Reames makes Cousins Handmade Soaps at his family homeplace, a brick house built in the 1840s in the Cherokee National Forest. Reames started the business with his cousin (hence the name), and likes working in the kitchen there, thinking about all the other people who over the decades made soap in the same spot. They, however, probably didn’t have his mischievous sense of humor when it came to picking names. 

There’s “New Chick in Cousinville,” scented with coconut lemongrass and made in honor of his cousin’s new daughter. “Lawnmower Cotillion,” which smells like freshly cut grass, reflects his love for trimming the yard. The sandalwood and teak “Fairhaired Shadow” is named for the cat who is never far from his side. And “Suds Junkie Vacation” speaks directly to the job at hand—an enjoyable bathing experience.

“I’m very poor, so I can always use the extra money,” said Reames, a loquacious man whose devilment is apparent in his voice. If it weren’t for the Meadowview Farmers’ Guild General Store, he likely wouldn’t be in the soap business. He’s not much for marketing. “Not only am I poor and honest, but I’m very lazy,” he said, laughing at himself. 

Before the shop opened, he and his cousin tried selling their soap at a festival in town. Not much happened. They tried online, but their site on Etsy was so obscure, even Reames had a hard time finding it. “Salesmanship is not my strong suit at all,” he said. “There would be no Cousins brand of soap if it were not for Catie Coulthard and her crew doing the marketing.”

Coulthard, a bubbly brunette with long curls, bright eyes, and a warm smile, is manager of Meadowview Farmers’ Guild General Store thus a driving force in the community’s microeconomics. She’s a tour guide and spokeswoman. 

“There’s so much talent and skill in this area,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because we were so geographically isolated for so many years that we developed skills that people with access to shops didn’t have to have. We’ve kept a lot of the tradition of hand-making things. Now we can do it with a little more creativity than we did when we did it for survival, but the skills are still here, still being passed down.”

In the far back corner of the general store is a collection of books in which one famous name appears repeatedly—Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The book about Kingsolver’s family and their yearlong effort to subsist on food they themselves raised or procured locally is credited with helping introduce America to the locavore movement. 

“Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard,” Kingsolver wrote. 

Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and the couple’s two daughters were living in Arizona—where the food her family ate was trucked hundreds of miles from irrigated land, much of it not meant to grow crops—when they decided to seek out a better life.

“We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground,” she wrote. 

Located where the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains pinch Virginia to its narrowest point, Meadowview once was an agricultural center. The railroad’s arrival in 1856 opened the remote part of the state to commerce. Drovers moved livestock from stockyards onto trains’ cattle cars, supplying much of the East Coast with beef, produce, and other goods. Life was prosperous for more than a century.

The trains quit the town in the 1950s, but the Eisenhower Interstate System carved a freeway just outside of town, bringing in factories in search of cheap labor. Reames remembers the 1960s when the town square was full of people spending the wages they earned at area factories and tobacco and dairy farms. They got their hair cut at the barbershop and shopped at Maiden’s Variety Store. They used the local post office, where Reames’ grandfather sorted mail. People didn’t need—or want—to travel to nearby Abingdon, much less the big city of Bristol. 

“It was a thriving little town,” said Reames, who lives in the house his people built before the Civil War. But in the 1970s and the 1980s, Meadowview’s sense of community slowly died out, and emptiness was left behind.  

Kingsolver and Hopp moved to Meadowview in 2005, making their home on a farm Hopp had long owned. Kingsolver published Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in 2007. It went on to become a bestseller, and subsequently she and her husband sought an extension of the book’s major principle—food and goods made and sold locally can have a big impact on a small place. 

Drawing from the family’s experiences chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and his work as an environmental studies professor at Emory and Henry College, Hopp began to resurrect two 100-year-old buildings in the center of town. He and his fellow investors envisioned a community gathering place—a restaurant that served meats community members raised and vegetables they grew, as well as a shop that celebrated their craft work. As work progressed, crews used recycled and salvaged materials, including American chestnut trim from an old barn and bricks from an unusable chimney on site to build a restaurant oven. A woodstove that sat unused in somebody’s barn for years was brought in to heat what would become the general store. 

Meadowview Farmers’ Guild General Store and Harvest Table Restaurant opened in 2008. The operation bucked the cheap, easy, and mass-produced economic trend, and in a town desperate for jobs, some residents were angry when the county nixed plans for a truck stop out by the interstate the following year. But people like store manager Catie Coulthard believed in bringing the sense of community back to Meadowview—and thus the community grew.

“You can open a little gift shop and import your gifts from China and employ three people, and you’ll have a very small impact on the community,” Coulthard said. “Or you can have a place like this, with 170 craftspeople, 25 full-time employees, 80 farmers and a full-time farm manager, and have a major impact. That’s what’s going on with this place.”

Indeed, the restaurant’s demands are such that it has its own Harvest Table Farm now, and the farmer-artist-commerce collective depends on one another much like a three-legged stool, Coulthard said. Each would have a hard time standing without the others, but together, they created something solid.

“It has helped local people so much, both emotionally and economically,” Reames said. “It’s kind of a good feeling to know that stuff you make or grow, those are valid, wonderful skills.”

Reames has earned a few notable customers including one famous local politician—he won’t name names—who bought a couple of his bars of soap at the general store. “Things like that, it’s a big old ego booster,” he said. “Huge.” 

Local quilter Eleanor Thayer creates quilted purses that are better made than the Vera Bradley quilted purses so popular as of late, Coulthard said. Factory-made purses aren’t stitched by hand, she said, but Eleanor Thayer’s are. Even the nut butters are better here. Tim and Heather Henderson live in Meadowview and make creamy spreads including Organic Cashew, Dark Almond Moca, Hazelnut Buttercup and Virginia Honey Peanut, made with local honey and Virginia peanuts. “He went to culinary school, and he still works in a local factory, but he is getting to the point where he can do this full time,” Coultard said. “We’re really proud of him. He sells here, and he also ships worldwide.”

The shop strives to ensure that all its offerings are from Virginia. It’s even better if the artists and businesses share the shop’s ethos, Coulthard said. Route 11 Potato Chips is a good example. Creating a splashy display in the shop, the crisp bags of chips are made in a waste-free kitchen in Mount Jackson that uses the heat of the fryers to warm the building in winter. Scrap goes to feed local cattle that may later find their way onto a dinner plate at the Harvest Table Restaurant.

Server Ashley Gardner bustled out of the kitchen with a smile as she readied for the lunch crowd. She grew up in Meadowview, playing with her brothers and other kids in the town square. Now 27, she likes working at Harvest Table so much she bought a house right next door. She and her husband live there with her 4-year-old son. 

“I’m very proud to be here,” she said. “We do a lot for the community, and it’s my community.” 

In winter, when life slows to a crawl in Meadowview, servers like her could probably make more money at mainstream restaurants in the cities of Abingdon and Bristol, Coulthard said. But, like Ashley, Harvest Table’s servers stick around—servers make more than minimum wage, and everyone carries his or her load. Asked what she would be doing if the restaurant didn’t exist, Gardner was stumped. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Waiting tables someplace else, I guess. But I don’t think I’d be as happy.”

Harvest Table Restaurant is the epitome of the seasonal farm-to-table culinary movement. Head chef Philip Newton creates specials from food he receives from Harvest Table Farm and more than 50 area farmers, gardeners and ranchers. One pizza of the day featured chicken sausage, leeks, kale and goat cheese—all local—and the locally-sourced hamburger was topped with homemade pimento cheese. 

Nothing in the restaurant is deep-fried. All meats are from animals raised or “finished” in pastures. The seafood is wild and sustainably harvested from the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina. The beer, wine, cider and mead are all made regionally. By committing itself to local and sustainable foods, the restaurant reduces its carbon footprint, protects local land and helps preserve family farms. It has on-demand hot water heaters and uses compact fluorescent bulbs. It recycles packaging, uses environmentally friendly cleaning products and composts food wastes at a local farm. Its takeout containers are compostable. 

It buys so much meat and produce that farmers have had to hire help, which sends local dollars out in concentric rings throughout the community. Abingdon Organics has supplied Harvest Table with lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squashes, leeks and other vegetables for years. 

“They don’t try to lowball on price,” Laurel Flaccavento, who runs Abingdon Organics with her husband, said. “There are plenty of restaurants around here that say they’d love to buy from you as long as you can match Sysco’s price. We can’t do that. Organic methods are harder.” The difference between Abingdon Organic and Sysco’s produce is the difference between a store-bought tomato and a homegrown one, Flaccavento said. The produce her farm sells is picked the day or day before it’s delivered. “You should see the chefs’ faces when they open a crate (of our vegetables) and gasp,” she said. “It’s delightful. Good chefs appreciate good food.”

Laughing Waters Farm in nearby Marion, Va., is a big supplier. The attention and care they give their cattle is apparent in the taste of the hamburgers the restaurant serves. It may seem odd that you can taste the love in your lunch, but it’s true. “I can say to anyone who comes in that I know a happy cow makes great hamburgers,” Coulthard said. 

Wolf Hills Brewery, a seven-barrel system in Abingdon, supplies some of the local beer on tap. Occupying a 1880s icehouse conveniently near the Virginia Creeper Trail, the brewery subscribes to the restaurant’s commitment to freshness, head brewer Drake Scott said. Fresh means as much to beer as it does to food, and Harvest Table’s emphasis on freshness means it needs local growers and brewers. Wolf Hills has a similar philosophy, having bought bacon, honey and peanut butter from area providers to flavor its beer. “It’s satisfying to have a more personable relationship with the people you buy from and sell to,” Scott said. “People want to be in touch with the person making what they drink and eat.”

The Harvest Table restaurant and farm along with the Meadowview Farmers’ Guild has given community members an opportunity to reconnect with one another and make a living not by giving up their history but by reclaiming it—a miracle in and of its own right. 

“I really didn’t think this would happen in my lifetime,” Reames said.