A Second Career in Christmas Trees
The cut-your-own Christmas tree has been with us since time immemorial, but before the 1960s it was the isolated evergreen in a wood owned by someone you knew, or maybe didn't know. Property boundaries of mountain forestland were often vague.
But as the historically stable Loudoun County population of 21,000 nearly doubled with refugees from city and suburb in the 1960s, no-trespassing signs grew in number. And a few people realized that there was a market to tap by planting acres of evergreens.
  Marian Czarnecki, one of the first Christmas tree farmers in Loudoun, sold mainly white pines for more than two decades on his farm, Oaksworth, until retiring in 2005. White-pine needles must be protected from deer, which like to eat them. (Photos By Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post) |
One of the first half-dozen Christmas tree farmers in Loudoun was Marian Czarnecki, who had grown up on a large cattle and wheat farm near Poznan, Poland. His family emigrated when the Germans occupied the area after they invaded Poland in 1939.
Czarnecki was a Georgetown University graduate student when he and his wife, Joan, choosing the "mountains rather than the seashore," as he put it in a recent interview, settled near Bluemont in 1954.
Over the next 25 years, he rose from student to chief of staff of what then was called the House Foreign Affairs Committee and adviser to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Nearing retirement, Czarnecki decided upon a second career and purchased 25 Hogback Mountain acres north of Oatlands. "Why would you want to buy that?" his wife asked when she first saw the dilapidated spread. "Why, the oaks alone are worth it," Czarnecki replied. The farm became known as Oaksworth.
He sought advice from Bill Harrison, Loudoun's agricultural extension agent, on soils and types of farming to try and from county forester Dana Malone on what to plant and where to plant it. He didn't want to raise cattle. "Everybody was doing that," he told me.
Harrison initially recommended breeding thoroughbred horses, Czarnecki recalled, but "I didn't have a million dollars."
He tried pumpkins one season. He planted 5,000. "The bees refused to work [pollinate], and there was too much rain. I harvested eight."
So he settled on three tree crops that needed a minimum outlay of cash: a peach and apple orchard -- he named the apples "Virginia Specials" -- a vineyard of cabernet, chardonnay and Riesling grapes, and 10,000 evergreen seedlings on 15 acres. In about seven years, he could expect a return on his investment that would coincide with his retirement in 1987.
In farming terminology, these ventures are called "alternative agriculture," as they are not standard practice such as growing grain or raising cattle. He remembered one of the county's prominent farmers calling him and others like him "carpetbaggers" -- a nickname for Northerners who came to the South for political or economic gain after the Civil War.
Czarnecki's pluck caught the eye of George Barton, then chairman of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, and Barton asked him to join Loudoun's Agricultural Advisory Committee. He soon became its chairman. A main task of the committee was to recommend enterprises to people who wanted to farm a nominal number of acres.
