WARSAW—As The Northern Neck Land Conservancy finishes commemorating its 20-year anniversary of preserving the region’s farmland, forests and open spaces this month, it’s important to honor those who started the grassroots effort.
People like Mary Louisa Pollard, who led the nonprofit’s creation in 2004 and was its tireless leader for the first six years.
And other stalwarts, like Lancaster County’s Page Henley, who like so many others throughout the Northern Neck have given time, effort and knowledge to find a way to preserve what he believes is unique about the region’s history and nature.
A lawyer by trade, with family roots that go back to the 1600s in the Northern Neck, Henley brought a perspective to the job of finding a way to preserve what makes it special.
That’s because he split his formative years between the mountains and hollows around Charleston, West Virginia, where he was born and grew up; and a waterside farm at Nuttsville, where he spent long stretches visiting his grandparents.
Henley’s “three time great-grandfather” had come to the spot in 1832, “marrying into a family that owned a big farm called Oakley.” His grandfather was “an old-style country doctor” named Chichester Tapscott Peirce.
Henley noted that it was the fear of the arriving polio epidemic in his youth that moved his parents to send him for extended stretches to the less populated Northern Neck.
“There, I saw a world I loved but no longer exists today….
