Where the Seeds of Change for Farmers Took Root

Harvey "Buddy" Carpenter Jr. has spent his 84 years living in Mitchells in Culpeper County, except for three years in the Air Force during World War II.

He wanted to enroll at Virginia Tech under the GI Bill after the war, but the school's admissions office said he lacked communications skills and turned him down.

That was a mistake, and a serendipitous one. Within a few years, Carpenter became one of the greatest communicators among farmers in Northern Virginia. He visited hundreds of spreads in the agricultural heartland north of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, persuading farmers to send their seed to his seed-cleaning plant to rid it of impurities.

From the mid-1950s to early 1980s, the Carpenter Seed Cleaning Plant at Mitchells -- founded by his father, Harvey Carpenter Sr., in 1934 -- was, in Carpenter's words, "the largest custom seed cleaner in Virginia."

"I knew the farmers in western Loudoun and upper Fauquier County as well or better than I knew the farmers in Culpeper," Carpenter said during the course of several recent conversations at his home in Mitchells, a village of 150 people.

Each year during that quarter-century, his company processed some 4 million pounds of seed. That included 2 1/2 million pounds of barley, oats and wheat cleaned during summer and 1 1/2 million pounds of orchard grass, soybeans and rye during winter.

Twelve storage bins at the plant held up to 3 million pounds of grains, grasses and soybeans. Some bins dated from Great Depression, when farmers didn't have ready cash. They paid for the cleaning by giving a percentage of the seed, known as a toll.

Carpenter Sr. had loved to tinker with cars and had started the first garage in Mitchells in the early 1920s. But an allergy forced him to quit welding and find another job. His father-in-law had a threshing machine, and Carpenter had a tractor to run it. So they began cutting and harvesting grains for local farmers.

Carpenter's truck hauled the cut crops across the Blue Ridge to the Wetsel seed-cleaning plant in Harrisonburg, the nearest custom cleaning company. His son, who sat in the cab beside his father, recalled the steady grade up to Swift Run Gap.

"The mountain was quite a pull for an old truck," Carpenter Jr. said. "It would get hot, steam up, and we had to find spring water to cool the engine down. I'd say the trip took 2 1/2 hours. We got tired of going back and forth."

After carefully observing how the Wetsel plant sifted seed through screens to rid it of foreign matter, Carpenter Sr. picked out a $935 cleaning machine from Brockton, N.Y. It cost as much money as he could hope to make in a year.

In summer 1934, at the height of the Depression, he opened his custom seed-cleaning concern in an 18-by-24-foot metal-clad frame building he had just built.