THE HISTORY OF OAKNOLL FARM
Oaknoll Farm sits on a ridge surrounded by 90 acres of pastures and hayfields, looking out at the Blue Ridge Mountains in the very midst of busy Blacksburg, VA, home to Virginia Tech, Virginia’s largest state university.
When Dr. Samuel S. Obenshain and his wife, Josephine, bought the farm for $100 an acre in 1936, the farm seemed in a different rural world from the small college town. Dr. Sam, as he was known on the Virginia Tech campus, had to have a farm to feel truly rooted in Blacksburg, despite his demanding job as a soils scientist and professor of agronomy. Jo’s sister expressed her dismay that her sister, a former college librarian, was going to be isolated on a farm miles from town and from her friends. Fortunately, Jo loved the farm with the constant in-and-out of their four children and the blue rise of mountains just beyond her kitchen window.
For us children, the farm was a different world from town – we had cows, horses and dogs, and acres of rolling hills for our adventures and for our chores as we grew up. To our childhood friends, visiting the farm felt as foreign as going to Texas as they tried their hand at milking a cow or riding Spot, the meanest pony in Southwest Virginia.
Oaknoll Farm was a typical family farm in those years. We had a small herd of dairy cows that required milking before and after school, beef cattle, chickens, and a few hogs. A saddle horse, fat pony, and Shockley the dog made up the rest of our livestock.
Prices Fork Road in the ’40s-’60s was a winding country lane lined with farms. Huge oak trees, some over 200 years old, marched along our fence line. Gradually over the years, the farms, including the oak forest across the road, gave way to subdivisions. Then three large schools – an elementary school and the town’s middle school and high school – took shape just beyond the farm, and Prices Fork Road turned into a four-lane divided highway carrying many of the 17,000 workers who commute into Blacksburg every day. The widening of the road was an especially sad day for the family, as it necessitated the cutting down of the line of oak trees that gave the farm its name, including one in the front yard believed to be over 350 years old.