Destination: Blackberry Farm
Tucked away in a misty hollow (called a cove thereabouts) in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, Blackberry Farm is a hidden treasure, a culinary mecca and all that the label “agritourism” would aspire to imply.
“And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven…” wrote Walt Whitman in his celebrated Leaves of Glass. A week spent at Blackberry Farm in Tennessee feels like time spent in a particularly American version of that heaven.
Blackberry Farm is a series of sublime adventures passionately provided by experts, from the regionally inspired food trademarked by the Farm as its own Foothill Cuisine® to the days spent touring the farm and the working gardens, taking to the mountain trails on an Earth Fit Endurance hike, casting with Orvis-endorsed guides in Hesse Creek or a float trip down the Clinch River. It’s a team of liveried servers delivering a homey grits and farm-cured bacon breakfast with sterling-silver cutlery wrapped in a Frette linen napkin. A former elephant trainer who now trains a rare 800-year-old breed of Italian water dogs to hunt prized Black Perigord truffles. An executive chef who wanted nothing more than a leaf blower (she was tired of raking!) and a mushroom-growing kit for her 10th birthday. A master gardener in dusty overalls who is a classically trained artist as well as one of the world’s foremost experts on heirloom bean varieties. Blackberry Farm is a distinctly American experience firmly rooted in the rolling foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The land where Blackberry Farm stands has provided for its inhabitants from the Cherokee to the first Appalachians to the current residents and guests of the Farm. And many of the staff are local folk bringing generations of regional Appalachian history and food lore to their pursuit of creating a culinary retreat, a bastion of Southern hospitality traditions and graciousness. A visit to Blackberry Farm is as much an unforgettable vacation as it is a workshop on how to live, with lessons that will stay with you as long as the memories you make. As Jim Stanford, Elephant-Trainer-Turned-Truffle-Dog-Trainer told me about the Farm, “Excellence is the lowest bar we have.
“And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven…” wrote Walt Whitman in his celebrated Leaves of Glass. A week spent at Blackberry Farm in Tennessee feels like time spent in a particularly American version of that heaven.
Blackberry Farm is a series of sublime adventures passionately provided by experts, from the regionally inspired food trademarked by the Farm as its own Foothill Cuisine® to the days spent touring the farm and the working gardens, taking to the mountain trails on an Earth Fit Endurance hike, casting with Orvis-endorsed guides in Hesse Creek or a float trip down the Clinch River. It’s a team of liveried servers delivering a homey grits and farm-cured bacon breakfast with sterling-silver cutlery wrapped in a Frette linen napkin. A former elephant trainer who now trains a rare 800-year-old breed of Italian water dogs to hunt prized Black Perigord truffles. An executive chef who wanted nothing more than a leaf blower (she was tired of raking!) and a mushroom-growing kit for her 10th birthday. A master gardener in dusty overalls who is a classically trained artist as well as one of the world’s foremost experts on heirloom bean varieties. Blackberry Farm is a distinctly American experience firmly rooted in the rolling foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The land where Blackberry Farm stands has provided for its inhabitants from the Cherokee to the first Appalachians to the current residents and guests of the Farm. And many of the staff are local folk bringing generations of regional Appalachian history and food lore to their pursuit of creating a culinary retreat, a bastion of Southern hospitality traditions and graciousness. A visit to Blackberry Farm is as much an unforgettable vacation as it is a workshop on how to live, with lessons that will stay with you as long as the memories you make. As Jim Stanford, Elephant-Trainer-Turned-Truffle-Dog-Trainer told me about the Farm, “Excellence is the lowest bar we have.
My experience at the Farm was one rich in storytelling. Every conversation was brimming with anecdotes about the place, about its unique culture, its time-honored traditions and the history of the Appalachian foothills. These narratives drew a sketch of an Eden with a passionate dream-team of artisans who guide the spirit and sensibility of life in this American utopia.
Executive chef of the renowned The Barn restaurant at Blackberry Farm, Cassidee Dabney revels in the rich colors and bright flavors that fall affords her culinary creations. She gets especially excited about the seasonal menu she designs around the three acres of gardens that are a veritable living museum of Appalachian foodstuffs. Dabney starts her day with a ramble through the gardens to see what will appear on dinner plates that evening. Her green eyes glow as she describes her childhood growing up with a wildlife biologist dad who made a series of National Parks home to the family. When not playing in the woods, she spent her time in the family gardens and discovered firsthand the home arts of canning, preserving and cooking. Learning to cook using only fresh and readily available produce and meats formed the backbone of her take on what a culinary experience should be. “I get really excited about how many menu ideas fall gives me. It’s a colorful time of year, and if it’s in the garden, it’s going on the menu. I love the gardens here, everything we plant has a story.”
Dabney teams with Farm preservationist and beekeeper Shannon Walker to incorporate his pickles, chutneys and jams into her daily fare. Walker, whose family has lived in the region since the 1700s, takes great pride in his heritage. He considers his role as a preservationist to be two-fold. “The way I see it is, it’s my duty to preserve the food, yes, but also to bring all the old things I know to the table and to preserve the traditions.” The traditions he speaks of so reverently he learned in the kitchen of his Granny Walker. She taught him the regional methods and flavors of preserving and cooking and was a dominant influence on his love of the food culture of the Smoky Mountains and eastern Tennessee. His grandfather instilled in him a love of gardening and of foraging the woods for wild foods. Walker expresses genuine delight when he talks about seasonal harvesting, what he refers to as “capturing a distinctive place in time on the Farm.” “It’s what keeps me going,” he says with a grin. His years of art school and love of science combined in creating what he credits to be his calling, “an artistic pursuit of food and plant science.”
On a sunny afternoon, I wandered down to the gardens to meet up with Master Gardener John Coykendall. A master in his fields and a master raconteur, Coykendall holds court in the FarmStead, a dirt-floor outbuilding complete with a potbelly stove and a couple of well-worn rocking chairs. Vintage handtools hang on the walls and strands of drying leather-britches beans are suspended from the rafters, along with sinuous dipper gourds. We settled back into the rockers as he described his love for the region and its agricultural heritage. “Don’t forget, I’m 73 years old,” he said. “So, when I was a boy, I was talking to folks born in the 1800s who still had the old knowledge. Knowledge that is far more practical than modern agriculture. I wanted to be around the old people and learn from them. They knew how to take care of the soil, how to save seeds, and I wanted to learn that. Wanting to preserve this rich history, Coykendall set out to save the seeds of the food that defined the region. To date, he has saved more than 500 varieties of seeds, making him a hero to the American heirloom seed community. He led me to a weathered wood-plank table and showed me a selection of beans separated into colorful piles. “See these? These are red calico beans from right here in Tennessee and they date back to around 1794.” He pushed some gorgeously hued pink beans with a splash of white around the “eye” toward me. “These are called Sow on the Mountain—see how they look like a snow-capped mountain with that white there? They’re a rare variety of the Lima family, go back to about 1840 or so.” He gestured to another rather lumpy, dull reddish-brown bean. “These are from the Thomas Jackson farm down in Georgia and they’re from around 1894 or so. They’re a butter bean, which is another name for a Lima bean, but mostly we call it a butter bean around here.” He went on to chronicle the start of his life’s work preserving heirloom vegetables. “In 1959, I was exploring the abandoned Ebenezer Train Station in west Knoxville and came across a dusty old stack of train timetables and schedules and in that stack was an old copy of a 1913 Wm. Henry Maule Seed Catalog. I was struck by the drawings and the descriptions of the seeds.” He went on to tell me about his favorite variety from that tattered catalog, the Tennessee Sweet Potato Pumpkin. “It doesn’t look much like a pumpkin at all! It’s kinda bell shaped and has a big long neck on it, and is green-and-white sort of striped.” He spent decades tracking down this particular variety, finally finding it in 1991 through a network of seed savers and heirloom gardeners. “I couldn’t wait to get those seeds in the mail!” he says with a glint in his eye. “I had the feeling it would make a heckuva pie, and I’ll tell you, it does!”
Originally published in The Orvis News Fall 2015. All photos ®The Orvis Company.
