Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019 - 66

GUEST COLUMN

By PE MARSHALL

GREEN PASTURES, VIRGINIA

Gone, but Not Forgotten
PE Marshall is a part-time staff writer for the Virginian Review in Covington, Virginia. After a 32year career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., she retired and returned to
her hometown of Clifton Forge, where she serves in local government on Town Council.

Pam
Marshall
stands with
walking
companion
Scruffy
near the
former site
of Green
Pastures.

fter a career in federal service, I
returned to my hometown of Clifton Forge, Virginia, and one of the
first places I visited was a place I
knew as Green Pastures-a cutout in the landscape of Alleghany
County, full of lushness, greenery,
cool waters and white sand. Today, the park
is overgrown with weeds, the cooling waters
are stagnant and discolored by algae and
pollen, and snakes burrow under the white
sand beyond a locked gate.
Due to budgetary restraints, the United
States Forest Service has closed and locked
the gate on this place and some of my earliest childhood memories. Now, I park my car
at the gate and walk my dog into the park.
As we enter the front of the park, I remember standing up on the seat in the back of
my father's car and leaning into the sounds
of squeals and giggles of children that greeted
us as we entered the open field at the front of the park.
Today, there is only an eerie silence and the rustle of leftover leaves.
As Scruffy and I walk further into the park, I'm saddened by the overgrowth, by the pungent smell of stagnant water that assaults my nostrils, and weeds growing
through snake-infested white sand where I once buried
my toes. This is a place where families from Clifton Forge
and surrounding areas would spend joy-filled Sunday afternoons and holidays.

The moment my dad's car stopped, I would pop that
lock, open the door, and my feet would hit the ground
running. Dashing toward the water, I'd stop and take my
seat among groups of other children sitting in the sand
as my mother secured a place for our supper in the handmade picnic shelter. I would sit with my toes in the cooling white sand and watch my father become a kid again
as he dived off the hand-made dam and dropped into the
deep end of the water from a rope.
When mom placed her blanket on the grassy area,
among a sea of other moms, just above the sand, I knew it
was then safe for me to wade into the shallow end of the
lake's cooling water. But first, the race with other children
to the now locked, hand-made bathhouse, to shower and
change into my swimsuit.
What I didn't know in the mid-to-late '60s was that in
the 1950s this place was the only public park in the state
of Virginia where African American families could go
for recreation. In the 1940s, at the request of the Clifton
Forge NAACP, the all-black Camp Dolly Ann Company
of the Civilian Conservation Corps was commissioned to
construct this cut-out, and they built the picnic shelter,
bathhouse and dam by hand.
I call for Scruffy so we can make our way back to the
car on the other side of the locked gate. I stop at the gate
and offer up a prayer. A prayer that fate will allow the
gates on these memories to one day be re-opened, that
future generations be given an opportunity to create and
share their memories of this once-beautiful place, and
that Green Pastures at Longdale be restored, maintained
and given its well-deserved place in history.

As Scruffy and I walk further into the park, I'm saddened by
the overgrowth, by the pungent smell of stagnant water.
66

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Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019

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