Why Crozet? is a long-running feature examining the many reasons we love Crozet and the surrounding villages and countryside. This month, we look at the difficulty of preserving the modest homes and commercial buildings that are rapidly disappearing, and the memories that disappear with them and the generation that valued them. Richard Brown, 89, is a lifelong resident of Freetown. The Gazette talked with him about the landmarks of his daily life as a schoolchild in the 1950s, and with Joseph Lahendro, a preservation architect and Crozet resident, about some ideas for preserving modest architectural treasures.
Breakfast was cornmeal mush, lunch was a baloney sandwich, and dinner was brown beans or macaroni and cheese, with vegetables from the garden. Sunday was for fried chicken, and when Grandma made fresh cornbread, you hurried over. That’s how it was in a typical week in Freetown, when Richard Brown was growing up there with his parents, his three sisters and his brother.
The baloney and bread came from Patterson’s Store, a nearby country store. The building, on the north side of U.S. 250 between Brownsville and Yancey Mills, is gone, but Brown remembers the owners very well. “They were Christians, I mean real Christians, not like some today,” he said. “If anyone needed anything, the owners would make sure they got fed. White or Black, it didn’t matter.” In particular, John Patterson—who also taught Sunday school at Hillsboro Baptist Church for decades—was beloved by the community. The Pattersons owned a mill as well as the grocery store and service station, so hungry shoppers in need could pay their store bill by shucking corn…