John Humphrey

Partial Transcript: Hello, I'm John Humphrey. I'm over—I'm 101 years old; 102 next month. I've been living in this valley since 1968 in—started in a single-family home on the other side of the road, on the other side of the valley, built a house up on that side on the mountain where I raised my kids. Finally decided this time to go downsize, so we built this one over here and sold the other one.

Partial Transcript: Well, I was transferred here in my work. I was with a company called Taylor Instrument Company, and they built a branch plant down near the airport and moved one of their departments down there, and transferred me to head up their industrial sales division. So, I had to move from Illinois where I had been assigned. And my wife and I always wanted to live outside of town. We had ten acres outside Chicago. When I moved down here, we found this—all this mountain property.

And I was commuting from Rochester, which was their home office to Asheville for several months because they didn’t have a full-time replacement up there. And on my weekends, I would look at the property. I looked at some—like, sixty-three properties. Finally decided there were two or three that pleased my wife, had her come down, and this is the one she decided she liked. And mainly she liked it because the countryside reminded her of central Pennsylvania where she had enjoyed living in that over there. And so that’s how we ended up here.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, we didn’t have any interest in doing that. We wanted a place to live. We wanted to have it as much away from civilization as possible, but still commute to a job. And this was the area that we decided we would like to live here, and it was largely wooded. It still is, but there's been a lot of development in the meanwhile, but we're right next to a national forest. I have almost a mile from the boundary with the Pisgah National Forest. And that’s been maintained, and we are trying to improve the land we owned and keep it in natural condition as much as possible.

Partial Transcript: Well, there were a number of things. There was one section, which apparently had been planted in white pines back in the forties when the government had a program for farmers to reclaim worn-out agricultural land and planted in forest trees. And mostly in this area, they planted white pines.

Well, this ten-acre area over in the southeastern end of the property had a lot of—at that time, this was the sixties—they bought twenty-five, thirty-year-old white pines, which were almost harvestable for sawlogs. So, that's the first thing that we did within a year or two, was go ahead and arrange to have that cut and have it replanted in smaller saplings and indigenous plants. And that's what we've taken care of ever since and kept it thinned and tried to encourage the large tree regrowth, and it's now a nice forested piece of land.

Partial Transcript: Well, it's not—the problem is that it's not exactly a native tree right here. It's a native tree for North America, but it seems to think that this is a good situation for it, so it takes hold and does very well. As a matter of fact, in that ten acres, the natural regrowth was poplar—the yellow poplar because that seed had been in the ground for several years, and after the shade was removed, then the seedlings took root and grew, and grew faster than anything else. There're lots of new white pine seedlings that have come in meanwhile. So it's a mixed wood, but the larger trees now are white or yellow poplar trees.

Partial Transcript: Well, to be good with, they start off with unpretentious little seedlings. They look like much of anything. They will become vines, and they will reach out into the lower branches of the young trees and take hold and grow as vines with the trees, and keep their new growth up at the top where they produce flowers, which produce seeds, which gets spread all over the countryside by birds and squirrels. And eventually, the forest will be so dense that it will kill a lot of native growth along the ground, and be used to be even strong enough and heavy enough to pull down large trees.

So it's—once the invasive—have a plant start, it's almost impossible to get rid of them unless you work at it year by year. It's a multiyear project and there're a lot of different species that are involved. The multiflora roses—the privet of the plant was used to be sold widely for landscaping hedges. They make a million seeds. This native snake here is not a snake. It's a piece of—one of these native plants has become a vine and grown up forty feet in the air on top of a bigger tree of some kind, and now that's what is left off after we cut it down.

Partial Transcript: Well, the occasional thinning of mature trees in various parts of the place. When they—when the growth was beginning to be too thick and too—shut off the shade too much and use the available moisture too much, we would try to remove very selective cut of larger trees. Hopefully, that would be worth something to pay for the expense, but the main objective was to get back toward a mixed forest if it's healthy overall.

Partial Transcript: Well, not quite, but it was rather sparsely used in most areas. We began to see—this was late sixties-early seventies, which was when the first major spurt of development growth in this area, and we began to see developments cropping up all over the place. There was only one housing development between here and Hendersonville at that time. Now, there's a dozen. And they range in size from 10 acres to 100 acres or more. And we began to see that coming up closer and relocated not up at the top of the mountain, but higher than the rest of the valley where we began to see visions of a sea of houses on roofs and below us and we had liked that idea.

So, somehow or the other, we heard about the concept of the conservation easement, which could protect land, and move to do it further and decided that there was something that was worth doing. We contacted one conservancy that was in the area, and they seemed interested, but then we never heard any more from them. We somehow or the other heard about the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy based in Hendersonville and talked with them and they were glad to encourage us, and we ended up going ahead with their first conservation easement. They were relatively new organization.
On our—of our land? Well, all of our—about 180 acres. We had our house on it, where there was a tenant house. Those were accepted. They were removed from it, and we had five children. We thought that maybe had—when they grow up and had families, they might want to move back here or have vacation homes or whatever. So, we reserved an additional five home sites—three-acre home sites that would be for future use by them if they wanted it.

Partial Transcript: Well, essentially, the conservation easement either prevents subdivision of the conserved land or regulation closely to keep the land in as close—natural condition as possible. And the principle requirement is that it not be changed for residential or commercial use. There are some possible tax advantages in doing it or some tax savings. They're not necessary advantages, but they're modest, and they only consider the giving up of the possible increase in value if it was developed.
Well, because I like to see this place kept in the same kind of condition or continue to be managed in a situation that's friendly to natural growth. And a major consideration is water protection. A substantial part of the headwaters of North Mills River is on this property, and by the same token Foster Creek, which is a major tributary of North Mills. And that's the water supply for most of Henderson County and part of Buncombe County. And the more natural the drains—the drains into the watershed, the purer the water is, and less contamination it has.

Partial Transcript: When we—we had forty acres of land that's relatively less steep, and some of them have been in agricultural use. I think it's leased out to pole bean grower when we bought the place. And we leased some of that out later to a local farmer for corn, but as we learned more about the nature of the land and the agricultural situation of the area, it seemed to us that probably the best use of that land rather than trying to reforest the whole thing and take care of—nurse it along while other young trees grew for years that if we put it into a permanent grass pasture and manage it for hay, it could be kept in that condition and return a little income that would be helpful. And it actually improves the nature of the ground if it's managed properly, and not just drained of nutrients and then left to—whatever.

That’s what had happened originally in this property before we had it. They farmed it until they took all the nourishment out of the soil, didn’t replenish it, and turned it over to where the government said, "Well, look, y'all have to plant trees there and we'll help you do it." They had one solution, but it didn’t really take good care of the land.

Partial Transcript: Well, yes, we—for instance, in several of the hay fields, there were wet spots, and the wet spots were due to groundwater that was working its way up from the drainage above the property. So we put in drains that were designed by the soil conservation specialist in the county to reduce that at the drainage that was getting out on the fields; the problem being that a mud hole which would spread made it difficult for the farmer to make hay and not lose his equipment down the mud. And so, we did that and it worked very well. It still continues to work.

And we did another thing; we found it—one of the small streams, the branches of the main creek had been ditched by our previous owner into a straight line and it used to wander through a boggy area, and they didn’t like that because their cattle got mired down in the bog, but anyway, it also reduced the condition of the bog from its natural state to where it was mostly weeds and trees starting to try to grow in the swamp. And so we—the soil and water people helped us and we were able to do reduce some of the drains that had been broken into that bog area and put up a berm to divert some of the flow back into its previous meander instead of a straight line. And that worked quite well, and the bog has come back and actually be more of a natural state than it was when we came here.

Partial Transcript: Well, the two consequences; one is that they erode more readily from the flow of water rather than it trickle. And the other is that they reduce the supply of moisture to a natural bog, and that hinders the natural bog vegetation from being healthy. And so you get varieties in there like—for instance, your white pines will sort to grow in the boggy land. They don’t do well for years eventually, but they'll get a start.

Partial Transcript: Well, the main effort that we're making is the control of invasive species of plants. When—there're almost no areas here that are free from invasion of non-native plants, and those come from years of neglect and poor management. For instance, landscaping, nurseries used to sell what we now consider a non-native invasive species, which are very difficult to deal with. And so, we're dealing with the consequences.

We're finding—for instance, we have one area of about two acres over here—a little way that had had a house, years ago. It's all gone now. We found some of the remains of the underpinning, but it had a whole bunch of big privet trees, which were forty years old, the privets being originally just non-native hedge plants, Japanese and Chinese privet. And when that's not taken care of and it now begins to grow and it grows the seeds and the seeds get in the ground and they live for several years. And eventually, they grow and they, in turn, will have more growth and more seeds and the original trees might have three-four inch-six-inch strokes by that time.

So you've got to get rid of those and then you got to get rid of the undergrowth and then you got to begin to deal with the several crops of seedlings that will continue to mature and grow before you freeze it, so the area of viable seeds. And of course, the birds and the squirrels work very hard to spread those seeds all over the place. So it's a very difficult problem and there's no way out of it except to struggle with it.

Partial Transcript: Well, the planting that's being done is a limited effort around the bog, around the branch streams that are feeding the bog. And we're working in there to begin the process of removing the invasives over there, and it's a step-by-step process, which is funded—it's not funded indefinitely.

We were fortunate to get a grant of money, which enables us to do a certain amount of planting of desirable species that should grow in those areas and get them started. And to do a certain amount of manually removing small plants of the undesirable species and spraying with chemicals at the appropriate times in the growth cycle when more of them have foliage that will absorb the chemicals. And you got to protect everything else while you're doing it because you don’t want to kill the good things you've planted and the good things that belong there. So, it's all very specific.

Partial Transcript: Well, I really don’t care a whole lot how I'll be remembered. It would be nice if essentially it can be—what I've been trying to do is be carried on, and I think it's possible that that will happen. I have—one of my sons is now living on the property that seems to take an interest in what I'm leaving with him.