Local Luminaries

From farmers to musicians, an eclectic mix makes Charlottesville home

by Cathy Harding

Time and again, people in this town cite Charlottesville’s inspiring blend of rich countryside and edgy urbanity. The question: Is it a small city or a big town, traditional or progressive? The answer: Yes. Here are a handful of leading lights who keep the beautiful contradiction alive.

1. The Farmer

STEVE MURRAY

One night in 1995, Steve Murray went to bed a troubled livestock farmer facing a financially precarious marketplace newly skittish about beef safety. The next day he woke up a visionary: “I said, let’s start looking at these eight hundred and thirty acres as a resource instead of a farm. What can you do with that resource?”

Given that the property includes a mile of reservoir frontage and glorious views, for many people the answer would be “Build on it.” But Murray is not among them. “I was prompted by a love of the land—and a distaste for development,” he says.

And so began the transformation of Panorama Farms—where Murray was raised in a large family—from a working farm to a premier composting operation. It now manages some four thousand tons of city leaves annually and keeps scores of area gardeners and landscapers happy with its top-grade compost and mulch. Besides that, Panorama, host to eight annual cross-country meets, is outfitted with running trails that serve UVA and high school athletes all season long. Murray leases hay-making and hunting rights on the property, too. And he goes to sleep nowadays secure about Panorama Farms’ future.

2. The Wine Grower

FELICIA WARBURG ROGAN

“Living in New York, the South meant nothing to me. There was New York, California, and Japan,” says Felicia Warburg Rogan, referencing Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker map. Nevertheless, after her third marriage—to a Virginian—brought her to Charlottesville thirty-two years ago, she imprinted her new home with a unique brand of assertiveness and style. In 1983 she opened Oakencroft Vineyard and Winery, leading the way for an industry that nowadays is a major tourist draw to Charlottesville and an important factor in local agricultural preservation.

Rogan says she’s never shied from a challenge, and in the 1980s Virginia wine certainly fit the bill, with winery owners themselves mixing what she calls “garage wine.” Rogan helped establish the Jeffersonian Wine Grape Growers Society, ushering in much-needed expertise. For her tireless promotion of Monticello as an American Viticultural Area, now with about two dozen wineries, and other industry initiatives, she was recognized as Virginia’s First Lady of Wine.

3. The Novelist

JOHN GRISHAM

John Grisham and his wife, Renee, originally packed up for Charlottesville from Oxford, Mississippi, looking for a place to hide out. Besides the appeal of not knowing anyone here, they were drawn by climate, natural beauty, and culture (“It’s as far north as I could possibly go,” Grisham says). Fifteen years later, the best-selling novelist is one of the town’s best-known residents, mingling among townsfolk he describes as “very warm but also very respectful of each other’s space.”

But privacy does not mean anonymity. Grisham sustains things like Cove Creek Park, the Little League field he built into a true field of dreams, and he and his wife put a couple thousand rural acres into a conservation easement, and donated big bucks to renovate the flapper-era Paramount Theater into a downtown performing arts jewel. And those are but a few of his local credits.

These days the Grishams spend half their time in Italy, but Charlottesville still stands up next to even the brightest lights of Europe. “We live in a very remote part of the county where it’s very peaceful and there’s no traffic, and especially when I go off to a city and enjoy the electricity…and the chaos and all that a big city has to offer—man, I can’t wait to get back home to see some cows and trees and stuff like that.”

4. The Preservationist

WILLIAM JAMES

In a town replete with statuary—great presidents, great explorers, great generals—novelist and playwright William James’s concern is the history that’s not captured in marble. Vinegar Hill, a dense, mostly African American neighborhood originally settled by Irish immigrants, was razed forty-some years ago, scattering its residents and leaving behind the predictable scars of urban renewal. “If you walk to the downtown area, you’ll see signs that you’re entering the Downtown Historic District. If you go to Lee Park, you’ll see a monument. At UVA, you’ll see statues of Thomas Jefferson,” he says. “In the African American community, we don’t have this to identify with.”

In his play Vinegar Hill Revisited, now in preproduction for a run in Charlottesville, and in his books, James tries to preserve the people, places, and things so recently gone. He worries about Starr Hill and Fifeville, other historically black neighborhoods that are starting to look good to developers. But it’s not change he opposes; it’s careless change. “If you went back to your neighborhood, you’d expect to see change, but if you go back and everything is razed to the ground—not just renovated—and they tell you it’s progress, could you accept that?”

5. The Fiddler

BOYD TINSLEY

As a platinum-selling rock star, Boyd Tinsley is used to strangers approaching him to talk. But when he’s home in Charlottesville, the violinist for the Dave Matthews Band gets a different kind of greeting: “It’s great to have people come up to me on the street and say, thanks so much. My son, or my daughter, is in the music program and they’re doing well and it helps with their interest in school in general.” In the past five years, the Boyd Tinsley Fund has donated more than 0,000 to programs that serve the city’s public schools, including scholarships for young musicians for everything from music camp to instruments and private tutoring.

Tinsley says it’s simply a matter of joining the chorus, so to speak. As a middle-school kid growing up in Charlottesville, he was loaned a violin to play in the then-new strings program. Eventually, he won a scholarship for private instruction, too, thanks to a boosters group. The rest is rock history.

“People rally around to help each other here,” says Tinsley, forty-four. “Charlottesville has grown quite a bit, but it still has a small-town vibe. So many people around me when I was growing up who have given back—they’ve been examples to me.”

His career takes him around the globe, but Tinsley says he “breathes a sigh of relief” when that landscape comes in to view through the airplane window. “Everything that I am as a person, as a musician—my character—all that comes from Charlottesville.”