Joe Stewart died having done little in the way of estate planning for his 4,000 acres.

 

It's hard to imagine what Joe Stewart would say about his final resting place.

The body of the former Montgomery County supervisor who owned more than 4,000 acres in Montgomery and Floyd counties lies in a small plot with a large headstone in Christiansburg's Sunset Cemetery.

The roar and whine of interstate traffic is constant. The view to the southeast is a line of back doors -- the rear end of a row of townhouses. But to the north and the west, mountains mark the horizon -- a view Stewart might have liked. He liked land. He collected it the way some people collect cut glass or old coins.

Stewart wasn't overly concerned about creature comforts, his daughter Julia Milton said. As long as he had his land and a good pickup truck, her daddy was happy.

Milton and her nephew, Jamie Weddle, have made sure that nearly 1,600 acres of the land Stewart left behind will remain the open space and farmland he loved. Milton has protected about 1,100 acres of Montgomery County land through conservation easements. Weddle put 452 Floyd County acres under easement.

"I seen too many of them sold and broken up," Weddle said of the big farms that used to account for most of the land in this region. "One of these days, it's not going to be any more big tracts."

With a conservation easement, landowners agree to limits on development and sometimes to environmental protection measures in exchange for tax credits. If the land generates more tax credits than a landowner can use, those credits can be sold, generating ready cash. The development limits reduce a property's value, which reduces taxes on the land into the future.

In most cases, the arrangement essentially pays landowners to do what they want to do anyway. In Weddle's case, that means farming.

"I was born into it," he said. "I love it. It was in my blood."

Weddle didn't surrender all his development rights. The farm can be cut into three pieces, he said. And up to eight houses can be built on the land. And he agreed to keep his cattle from the mile-long stretch of the Little River that runs along his farm.

Milton put three farms under easement: Mill Creek Farm near Riner, White Sulfur Springs at Den Hill and Big Spring in Elliston. Big Spring, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1989, was among the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation's 2005 list of endangered sites.

"For years I'd worried about what was going to happen to all of Joe Stewart's land," said Beth Obenshain, executive director of the New River Land Trust. "We're just thrilled that Joe Stewart collected and loved this land and that Julia has continued his tradition and preserved all this wonderful land."

But Stewart didn't make it easy to do that. He did virtually nothing in the way of estate planning and he resisted suggestions that he put some land in easements when he was alive.

Her father was a product of his time, Milton said. Stewart was independent, suspicious of government, loathe to let anyone tell him what to do with his land. Those are not necessarily bad qualities, but they did make things difficult for his heirs. The estate tax bill ran into millions of dollars and much of the land would have been sold to pay that off if not for the easements.

There were other complications, too. Milton's sister filed suit, trying to get more of their father's estate than his will allotted her. That stopped the auction of a Floyd County farm, costing the estate more than $50,000. The legal wrangling lasted two days short of nine months before the issues were settled this past February. Court records don't explain the settlement and Milton doesn't want to talk about it.

"Can't you just say it was settled and let it go at that?" she said.

Some of the land Stewart owned will still be sold -- a lot of land by most people's standards, but not a whole lot by Joe Stewart's measure. And much of the rest will be preserved, including Big Spring, where Stewart's funeral was held on the porch.

"I think that was the first place Daddy said he ever saw electric lights," Milton said. "They had a generator.

"Daddy, I guess he'd worked on it some when he was a boy. He always remembered the lights and he'd always loved it."

According to its nomination for the National Register, Big Spring -- some call it the Barnett House -- was built in 1808 by David Barnett, whose father had come to the area in 1767. The Barnetts owned the house until 1855, the year the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad came through. In 1890, the Pittsburg Development Co. bought the house, the farm that went with it and much of the community that was then known as Big Spring Depot. The company's plan to create Carnegie City went bust and much of the land, including Big Spring farm, was repossessed.

In 1907, David Barger, owner of Walnut Grove, a few miles away in Shawsville, bought the farm for his daughter and son-in-law, Olin Moomaw. Moomaw made a lot of changes to the house and created water cress ponds, whose remnants still stand beside U.S. 460 in front of the house. It was once a thriving operation that shipped cress from the Elliston railroad depot for use in salads on ocean liners.

Stewart bought Big Spring at auction from Moomaw's estate. That was 1963, Milton said. Her family lived in Salem then, but all of them except her father were vacationing with relatives in Michigan. Stewart had wanted to move back to Montgomery County for some time, but his wife didn't want to move from Salem. He bought Mill Creek trying to entice her to move. It didn't work. He bought White Sulfur Springs. That didn't work, either. But Big Spring was close enough to Salem to suit her. So the family moved into the old Barnett house.

It's where Stewart was living when he died at 91 in 2006.

Big Spring is important for its history and its views. Mill Creek protects land in perhaps the fastest-developing part of Montgomery County. Much of the history of White Sulfur Springs is long gone -- a previous owner "was probably pretty good with heavy equipment," Milton said. But there are endangered species there that are so rare neither Milton nor the folks who helped her fashion the easements want to mention their names.

There's also a right of way for the Smart Road.

"That's actually an unsettled issue with the smart highway," Milton said. "Daddy never did finish -- he was very much against the smart highway. He fought it as hard as he could. So he never did finish settling with them. So that's sort of an issue right now. I'm not too interested in settling with them, either."

The marker on Stewart's grave has a lot of pictures. There are images of him as an auctioneer and as a 1939 graduate of auctioneering school. There are pictures of him with animals and images of the house and land at Big Spring.

There's an inscription, too: "May the work I've done speak for me."