Welcome to Hillyrock Farm

Hillyrock Farm is located in the Greenbrier Valley, the high, lush grass valley in the eastern Alleghany Mountains of the Appalachian chain.  Set in the “savannah” that was hunting grounds, then farmland for early Scot-Irish settlers, the farm has been in continuous operation for over two hundred years.  The Price, McClung, McLaughlin, and then after World War II, the Browning Family, have been tending the rich soil fed with bountiful spring water that flows through the karst limestone.

 

The farm is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed by the first courthouse records as the “McClung’s Price Place”; it was named Hillyrock by Jane Owen Browning after she and her husband William McNeel Browning acquired the farm in the 1940’s. 

 

Hillyrock is the last line of a stanza from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1921 poem, “Pastoral”

IF it were only still! --
With far away the shrill
Crying of a cock;
Or the shaken bell
From a cow's throat
Moving through the bushes;
Or the soft shock
Of wizened apples falling
From an old tree
In a forgotten orchard
Upon the hilly rock!

 

Inspired by Jane and Bill’s abiding commitment to cultivating the land and farm preservation Bob and Diane Lynch Browning now operate the farm,
raising grass-finished steers, pigs, chickens and cut flowers.