Hillyrock Farm, Savannah Lane, Lewisburg, West Virginia
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, and 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.
In 2007, we placed the farm in a Farmland Protection Easement, the first in
Greenbrier County, insuring that the land would remain farmland forever.
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