TENNIS ANYONE? Ripe Corn May Bring Crowd to Lee County Farmers Market

What I like most about the westernmost section of Virginia – in Lee County – must be the open land.
With the rolling hills and rocky cliffs, scenic pastures and meandering streams, it’s kind of like the feel of the Wild West.
But, now factor in legends of Indian graves and Daniel Boone and the tales of oil strikes at Rose Hill.
Add on a place called Ewing.
Look at all the sprawling ranches and mansions.
And you begin to think this place is a little like Texas.
Even so, the oil industry, in Lee County, has appeared to have seen its better days – with many oil wells now having been shut down.
A couple of years ago, I caught up with a man, Dennis Allen, who used to work Lee County’s small but steady oil wells, producing Pennsylvania-based crude. The oil here, Allen said, “looked like Mello Yello in a jar. It’s green.”
What’s also green? All the farms of Lee County.
And today, like so many other places in Southwest Virginia, that’s a big deal.
Marion boasts a farmer’s market.
So does Abingdon.
Now, too, so does Lee County, way out west – about 90 miles west of Bristol, in fact – at the front entrance to the Wilderness Road State Park along U.S. Highway 58.
Here, in the footsteps of Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail, you could not find a more scenic spot for a gathering. Behind the state park, Cumberland Mountain rises from the rounded ground of western Lee County’s foothills. Between that mountain and the field hosting the farmer’s market stands Martin’s Station, a fort built to look like one used in the 1770s by Joseph Martin, a pioneer settler.
At this place, Lee County’s farmers market got its start on June 6.
“And the second weekend? We had a whole row of farmers,” said Kathleen Bost, who helps run the market with her husband, Bob, the director of the Lee County Chamber of Commerce.
By the last weekend in June, however, the market remained, oh, so quiet – with just a handful of vendors manning tents.
As it turned out, the ones who did show up on that Saturday spent most of the morning just looking at each other.
One woman here sat at a table loaded with squash and zucchini.
One man – Roy Adams of nearby Ewing, Va. – spent the morning waiting to demonstrate handcrafted dulcimers to a crowd that just never materialized.
“The corn is what bring people to farmer’s markets,” Kathleen Bost figured. “And the corn isn’t in yet.”
And now?
Corn is ripening. Hopefully, too, Bost said, as the weeks roll on, there will be more of a crowd and this market will continue.
“We’ll keep coming,” Bost added. “I’m seeing many business take three years to come up and get going.”