Robyn Thirkill

This interview was recorded in Robyn Thirkill’s living room on unceded Monacan territory in Prospect, Virginia on September 3, 2016.

Interviewer:  Rae Garringer Transcription :  rev.com

My name is Robyn: Thirkill. I'm 41. I live in Prospect, Virginia, which is between Richmond and Lynchburg, just outside of Farmville, Virginia.

It's rural, but it's not the desert. It's not the most rural it could be, but it's pretty rural. It's a lot of one-horse towns. The town of Prospect does not even have one stoplight. There's probably 15 churches, but no stoplights, so it's one of those kind of towns. There's a post office and two stores here. That's it. It's pretty small. It's pretty small.

There's a lot of farmland. Farming is not as big as it was once, but there's a lot of farmland here, and there are a lot of people that still farm here for their livelihood. A lot of people are growing hay right now, just growing grass. This used to be a very big tobacco area. Now soybeans are the thing, because they're the most profitable. A lot of people grow soybeans. There's very many cattle farmers. A lot of people are still doing tobacco. Corn, the field corn for biodiesel I guess is pretty big now, so that's ... Wheat. People grow wheat.

Yeah. My great-grandparents moved here from West Virginia and bought 40 acres of land. It was in the turn of the century. Actually, if you think about it, my great-grandfather would have then been a Black man traveling from West Virginia. Just wrap your head around that. He came here, and him and my great-grandmother bought the land on credit. There was some back and forth. I think he came here first, then he had to work, and then he went back to get her. Out of the original 40 acres, 35 are still here. My grandmother and her, I don't know, 14 brothers and sisters were born here. My mom and her five brothers and sisters were born here.

That wooden structure up there, the porch is the porch to the original farmhouse. Yeah. It's important to me. There's a lot of history here. My mom ... This is Prince Edward County, Virginia. When they passed a law, Brown versus Board of Education to integrate the school systems, Prince Edward County closed all the public schools.

Because they didn't want to integrate. At the time, my mom was in grade school, probably. Her and her brothers had to go to Baltimore to go to school, and they went to stay with family, if you can imagine that as an elementary schooler. Plus the fact that they farmed here. Sending your children away is sending your laborers away, you know what I mean?

That's a big piece of history for Prince Edward county. My mom was at the march on Washington, the civil rights movement, stuff like that. That was a big part of her upbringing. Yeah. Then over there, my grandmother's house was there, and then my aunt lived over there, and our property goes back to that tree line back there, and then out to this road over there.

If you stand up in the gazebo there, because I said that was the porch to the original house, that's the same view that every ... Those two trees, that's the same view that every person in my family that's lived here over the years has had. When we first moved here, it was raining and I went up and sat in the gazebo, and I was like, "Yeah, this is it. This is the ticket here." Yeah. I'm happiest just being right here.

I want to be here. I feel a very strong heritage to this property that's been in my family for over 100 years. I want to respect my heritage, and I want to preserve this land. That became more important to me than living in a city.