As The Northern Neck Land Conservancy finishes commemorating its 20-year anniversary of preserving the region’s farmland, forests and open spaces this month, it’s important to honor those who started the grassroots effort.
People like Mary Louisa Pollard, who led the nonprofit’s creation in 2004 and was its tireless leader for the first six years.
And other stalwarts, like Lancaster County’s Page Henley, who like so many others throughout the Northern Neck have given time, effort and knowledge to find a way to preserve what he believes is unique about the region’s history and nature.
A lawyer by trade, with family roots that go back to the 1600s on the Neck, Henley brought a unique perspective to the job of finding a way to preserve what makes it special.
That’s because he split his formative years between the mountains and hollows around Charleston in West Virginia, where he was born and grew up; and a waterside farm at Nuttsville in Lancaster County, where he spent long stretches visiting his grandparents.
Henley’s “three-time-great grandfather” had come to the spot in 1832, “marrying into a family that owned a big farm called Oakley.” His grandfather was “an old-style country doctor” named Chichester Tapscott Peirce.
Henley noted that it was the fear of the arriving polio epidemic in his youth that moved his parents to send him for extended stretches to the less populated Northern Neck.
“There, I saw a world I loved but no longer exists today,” said Henley, “a world of fields that stretched out forever, of horses drawing all the farm equipment. We’d go down to Deep Creek and watch watermen maneuver out under sail because they couldn’t get gasoline to power their boats tonging oysters.”
Life sent Henley in many different directions through the years, from Woodberry Forest to the University of Virginia for undergraduate and law school. He and his wife Jane did stints back to West Virginia, Philadelphia, Colorado and Charlottesville as he served as counsel and an executive of a large coal and steel company.
For all those years, family and his love for the land kept the Henleys coming back to the Neck. They moved “home” for good in 2008 to a spot on Carter’s Creek and now live in a cozy home in Westminster Canterbury near Irvington.
“When we moved back here, I realized I could stand on my family’s property at Nuttsville and see the rural farm scenario spread out before me exactly the way someone here 200 years earlier saw it,” said Henley. “I came to appreciate that, knowing frankly that if we didn’t protect it, it was going to disappear.”
He noted that before World War II, the people who lived in the Northern Neck here were mainly those born here,” said Henley. “But after World War II and the arrival of Tide’s Inn, people from Richmond and beyond discovered the beautiful rivers and creeks here and wanted their piece of it all.”
Because he and his forebears were known for that appreciation of history—“my great-grandfather was an Episcopal minister who came here in 1902, found cattle walking in and out of historic Christ Church and started to raise money to restore it”—eventually Henley was approached by folks who shared his feelings about saving what makes it special.
“I went down to hear about this group that was starting and became a devoted follower of Mary Louisa Pollard and the others who organized and created the Conservancy,” he said. “Our first office was a little shed in their backyard. We’re talking rudimentary. We’d meet at Mary Louisa’s house and sometimes at the Chinn House in Warsaw. It became something I was very much a part of.”
Henley said early on, the group was sort of “winging it,” learning how to use legal documents called conservation easements to prevent development on a piece of property in perpetuity.
He said the appeal of those easements dramatically improved when Delegate William Howell of Stafford County “put forth a provision that allowed tax credits from those easements to be sold. It meant you could go to property owners, especially farmers, and say that they could design the contract or gift of their development rights in a way that was acceptable to them.”
Secondly, he said, “You could go to John Q. Citizen and say that yes, what you’re giving up is development rights, but what you can get is money for that, cash, right then, not something off in the future. And if you need the credits, you can use them.”
Henley said he lost count of the number of wine and cheese sessions the group had to spread word of the cause, and to bring in people to join the effort. The founders knew that it would be important to have members from across the Northern Neck. (The Land Conservancy expanded to serve Essex County after Henley’s time with the group.)
He noted that the problem the group faced early on, like all other nonprofits, was coming up with the money needed to fund the effort to move forward.
“A huge break for us was when a young staff member organized us to become the beneficiary of a specialty license tag, something that got us $15 a year for each, and still does,” he said.
He noted that he believes it was also critical when the group got support from the owners of the historic homes of Sabine Hall and Mount Airy in Richmond County and others.
“That’s where our big annual event, Boots & BBQ got its name,” he noted. “Our first event was at Sabine Hall, and we were to walk a certain distance to a little garden the Wellfords had built. They said everyone should wear hiking shoes, so the event became known as Boots and BBQ.”
Today, new board members are navigating the road forward that Henley and his co-founders mapped out. According to Executive Director Lisa Biever, a new strategic plan has been developed that will protect even more of the region’s valuable open space land while educating and empowering people to take action for the good of our region.
As the region’s local land trust, the Land Conservancy is committed to preserving working farms, forests, historical sites, scenic views and healthy watersheds. The Conservancy supports landowners and is steward to conservation easements in all five counties of the Northern Neck and Essex County.
Everyone can join the conservation community. Visit the Northern Neck Land Conservancy’s website at nnconserve.org or call 804-250-2334 to become involved as a supporter or volunteer and to learn more.
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