THE HISTORY OF THE THOMPSON PLACE FARM
The Thompson Place Farm is entered off of Keisters Branch Road near the Montgomery County community of Prices Fork on land settled as early as the mid-1700s by German immigrants including the Preis [Price] Family. The indigenous inhabitants were the Tutelo/Monacan people, who were present in the area from the early 1000s. The French and Indian War led to raiding parties in the area, but by the 1790s the Shawnee raids had subsided, and the local community continued to grow.
Descendants of John Michael Preis [Price] spread out through the rolling valley between Brush Mountain and Price Mountain. They settled in an area that extended from the current Prices Fork community to the New River, acquiring a number of farms and woodland tracts including our Thompson Place. This plateau region has some of the richest soil for farming in all of Montgomery County and Southwest Virginia. The Thompson Place Farm includes much of original Price family farms.
By the 1850’s coal mining had begun to take root in the region, including along the southern lower slopes of Brush and Price Mountains. Mining became a major source of employment and also wealth for local mine owners in the McCoy and Merrimac areas of the county.
The Obenshain family acquired the approximately 200 acres of the Thompson Place Farm on Keisters Branch Road in the early 1950s. Joe Obenshain’s first memory of the farm was as a young boy in 1952. He and his brother, Scott, were making hay on the farm when they heard on a truck radio that the Republican National Convention in Chicago had nominated General Dwight Eisenhower for president. Their eldest brother, Dick Obenshain, and his best friend, Rod Layman from Blacksburg, were on the floor of this convention as guests of State Senator Ted Dalton of Radford, Republican candidate for Governor in 1953 and 1957.
Over the years, family patriarch Dr. Samuel S. Obenshain, a soil science professor at Virginia Tech and past president of the Virginia Academy of Sciences, continued to buy small tracts and larger acreage anytime property adjacent to the Thompson Place Farm came on the market, eventually expanding the farm to its current approximately 500 acres. The Obenshains raised beef cattle and made hay on the farm – although much of the land remained forested, especially along the creek beds. In the ’50s, the Obenshain family would regularly drive cattle from their Oaknoll Farm on Prices Fork Road near Blacksburg five miles down that road and through the Prices Fork community to the Thompson Place Farm during the summer, stopping the occasional car on the once-sleepy road.
Adjacent to our Thompson Place Farm stream and wetlands banks stood a stately Price family two-story house with a handsome staircase, faux-painted floor boards and wood paneling sat on a slight rise overlooking the wetlands and creek, reflecting the Price family’s prosperous businesses in farming and coal mining. In addition to the old Price family home, a Price Family Cemetery is located on the farm atop a ridge overlooking Toms Creek and our wetlands, that is still used as a family burial site today.
After the Obenshain family bought the farm in the ’50s, Sam Obenshain employed a hired man and his wife to live in the tenant house and care for the cattle, but their suspicious activities led to their eviction. We never found a still on our farm – but one was found across the road in a neighbor’s hayloft not long afterwards.
Our tenant house sat empty for several yeas until in the mid-1970’s a Virginia Tech graduate student and his wife knocked on the Obenshains’ door at Oaknoll Farm and asked to rent the house for $25 a month, the only amount they could afford to pay if he was to finish his doctorate. They transformed the house into a charming cottage – although one without indoor plumbing other than cold water. They left in the late 1970’s with a doctorate and two babies for the University of Wyoming.
Subsequently, an architecture student offered to rebuild the tenant house, adding a bathroom and an upstairs bedroom, if he could live there for free. After he left with his degree, leaving behind a rebuilt cottage, a series of veterinary students and their wives lived in the house, helping care for the cattle and enjoying the farm’s scenic setting and wildlife.
After Sam Obenshain retired in 1969 from Virginia Tech, he spent almost every day with his faithful dog “Vonnie” down on this farm, checking the cattle, spraying stickweeds, and cutting down hundreds of cedars and invasive rose bushes to make the pastures an even more productive farm.
Our family’s tradition of caring for the land continues today with 13 Obenshain family members owning and overseeing the farm. In the past 15 years, the family has installed several conservation practices on the farm, fenced out its creeks and wetlands and placed a conservation easement with the New River Land Trust in 2015 on the farm’s 400 contiguous acres, including the current stream and wetland bank sites. The stream and wetland banks are the latest conservation project for the Obenshain family as it continues over 80 years of farm heritage in Montgomery County.