The last days of the Big Grassy Fork

"The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork recounts newspaperman Hunter James's attempts to save his one-hundred-year-old family farm and homestead from extinction. Wise, irreverent, and pugnacious, James fights back against the galloping urbanization of his beloved North Carolina piedmont." "Interweaving current affairs and family history, James details the growth of the Winston-Salem area as a center of Moravian piety and later as the world's largest tobacco manufacturing center. His family's trouble in the Piedmont began early, and Hunter James is not alone in having a difficult time fitting in with today's idea of progress. His grandfather was flooded out of a brothel in his birthday suit in 1904 and scandalized the local Baptist church with drunken exposes delivered from the pulpit." "James's unique sense of the absurd and his willingness to play the fool make for hilarious reading as each of his efforts at preservation fail miserably. He accidentally torches a neighbor's barn in an attempt to burn off his best pastureland, as was always done in the past; he squanders enormous amounts of money vainly trying to save his farm by becoming the Piedmont's preeminent lord of the manor, vintner, wine snob, and horseman; and James finally seals his own doom when in alliance with his neighbors he inadvertently creates what he describes as the world's largest garbage pit." "James ends by pondering the future of the South, asking why we cling to a memory of an "Old South" that might never have existed. He wonders how to create a true spirit of Agrarianism in the modern South, one that is workable in a society that has embraced manufacturing and rural development, even as he longs for a pristine Grassy Fork and rare summer fields, alive with honeysuckle, aster, and goldenrod."--Jacket.