Page 37 - Discover SPRING 2022

Hugging the

FAMILY TREE

By Tim Ernandes

The shirtless young German soldier as well as combatants in the locally infamous

mopped his brow as he sweated in the Witcher-Clement feud. Lib was married for
49 years to local man-about-town Charlie
hot August sun. He was thousands of
Walker until her passing in 2017. Charlie
miles from home, in a foreign land
provided photos for this article.
where he didn’t speak the language.

He was thirsty, and managed to Their parents, William Emmett Jefferson
and Ida Mae Goodman Jefferson, eventually
communicate this to the young girl
inherited the farm along
sitting on the
with Emmett’s sister, and
farmhouse porch.
bought her out. Emmett had
She ran to get a always wanted a dairy farm,
bucket of water. so he converted it from a

subsistence farm into a dairy
Her grandmother
farm, calling it “Oak Grove
became apoplectic
Guernsey Farm”. To this day,
when she realized what
although renamed, it remains
her granddaughter
a 100-plus head dairy farm
meant to do, frightened
, spanning both sides of
at her own imaginings
Rt 40 about a mile west of
of what horrors this
Penhook.
young “heathen” might

visit upon the girl. The farm had been
established around 1850 by
The late Lib Walker
Joe and Lib’s great-great-
and her brother, Joe
grandfather, who was named
Jefferson, grew up in
Newbill, and remained in the family for the
Roanoke, but spent most weekends and
next 117 years or so. For the curious, the farm
summers on the family farm in Penhook.
is located about midway along a seven mile
They are direct descendants of a first cousin of
stretch of an arrow-straight stretch of Rt.
Thomas Jefferson, founding father and author
40, which was cut right through the farm. A
of the Declaration of Independence. Their
tunnel was built under the roadway so that
storied family history includes veterans of
the cows could travel back and forth between
the American Revolution and the Civil War,

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