Ten years after his tragic death, Sam Beall’s farm-to-table vision and gospel of Southern hospitality continue to resound across—and beyond—the resort, now celebrating fifty years of family ownership
EGGS 4 SALE, reads the handmade sign tacked to a guardrail at the turn onto West Millers Cove Road, a narrow blacktop that winds toward the 4,200-acre Relais & Châteaux resort known as Blackberry Farm. A mile deeper into the oak- and poplar-steepled cove, past a Missionary Baptist church, before a Primitive Baptist church, the woodstove from a tin-roofed house pumps soft gray smoke into a hard winter sky.
Get Due South
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That drive through real-life Appalachia has grounded visitors to this place of unreal beauty since 1941, when Florida and Dave Lasier, who made their money in Chicago making doorstops, opened a stone-and-clapboard guesthouse thirty miles south of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a ridgeline at the edge of a blackberry thicket reached by a gravel road…