Wolf Pen and the World

Years ago, when I rode my horse there—without the permission of Eva Lee Cooper, the formidable owner—or even earlier when I went along on a family picnic—also without permission—and we ran back to the car after hearing what seemed to be the bellowing of a bull in the woods, I’ve thought of Wolf Pen Mill Farm and its creek and waterfalls as being separate from the modern world. It’s only ten miles east of Louisville, Kentucky, and is now surrounded on all sides by upscale subdivisions, strip malls and throughways, yet until recently I’ve been able to imagine, on my rare visits, that it is a world apart. We all seek such places, corners or pockets where the noise and confusion of modern life don’t penetrate; even now in the blessed relative silence brought on by the pandemic, we search desperately for places apart.

But I can no longer imagine that Wolf Pen Farm is separate in its own blessed reality. The first blow came with the construction of a throughway overpass and exits about half a mile away; the constant noise, and the night-disrupting beams from high powered lights on tall poles had to be tolerated if not accepted.

Then came the construction about a quarter a mile away of an enormous, ever-expanding “community”—the new model, with houses built close together and shared green space, and a sort of village center with upscale boutiques and a café. No drugstore, no gas station or supermarket; these places are also meant to be separate from the commercial world to which all the inhabitants who work have to drive many miles every day.

But the newest blow is the construction of three hospitals at the headwaters of Wolf Pen Creek, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. This follows by a couple of years the construction of two cancer hospitals whose vast parking lots empty their waste into the creek, a problem we have wrestled with but not solved. This effluent, doubtless poisoned, is part of the increase in water rushing over my dam.

The old stone mill and its big, meticulously rebuilt waterwheel, are threatened by these outpourings. The new hospitals, if they are built as they almost surely will be, will add volume and pollutants. At some point, the old stones of the mill may be undermined, the structure and its wheel may tumble into the creek, and another piece of our history as a formerly agrarian state will be lost and forgotten.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Wolf Pen Mill ground corn into flour for all the neighboring farms. The farmers, arriving with their wagons of corn, stopped to visit while the gears, turned by the water wheel, noisily and laboriously ground their corn. These visits glued the neighborhood together during the many years when there were few other places for farm people to congregate. Some carved their initials into the mill’s stone walls, asserting a kind of ownership.

And of course some of the men who built the mill or worked its gears were slaves. Kentucky was not a vast slave state like the cotton-growing states to the south, but its small farms depended on slave labor. Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved is set on a plantation less than two hundred miles to the North, in Ohio. Eliza, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, escaped slavery by running across the Ohio River on slabs of ice somewhere near my farm.

So we never escape our past or our responsibility for our past, as we never escape the future we have agreed to create. The old slave graveyard across the road and up the hill is still overgrown, neglected and unvisited, as it probably always will be. So is it worth preserving another relic of that past as it is threatened by the future we call progress?

Wolf Pen Mill and its 200 plus acres seem doomed. Noise and pollution may overwhelm it in a few more years. And already sensible people are talking about re-writing the conservation easements that preclude development to allow for tasteful houses set far apart and so forth—the compromise that to my mind is not a compromise but a defeat. I don’t want to own this old open land if it becomes backyards for million-dollar mansions.

So I’m holding on.

A fortunate intervention by my talented farm manager has shored up the walls of the sluice leading to the waterwheel, and although this was in violation of certain specifics of the conservation easement, it may have saved the mill, this time, from the deluge of water and poisons pouring over the falls.

As to the future…

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