Joe Coffey: A Man Of The Land

By Jerry Sena

Joe Coffey doesn’t make it back to the farm as much as he’d like, but he walks past the old farm house, across the yard, and unlatches the gate like he knows his way around pretty well.

“I miss it. I sure do,” Coffey says as he leads the way up an old dirt track, up the hill where several outbuildings and a barn stand.

Joe Coffey stands in front of his childhood home on old Hwy 421 in Deep Gap. Photo by Marie Freeman

“I’ve not worked the farm since ’95, ’96,” he says, “when my first wife died. We’d been married 47 years and I haven’t been able to do much else, then. I keep a few cattle and stuff, but I’ve been living up in town now for nine years.”

Following the death of his first wife, Gaye, he married for a second time, about nine years ago, Coffey says. He and his current wife, Geraldine, have a house off Howards Creek Road now, just about a mile and a half from New Market Center.

He’s back on the land right now, though, pointing out landmarks and conjuring up stories of Grampa Watson and how he came to possess the farm and its 120 or so acres between Ashe County and the Blue Ridge Parkway.

He leans on his cane and uses a crooked finger at the tip of his outstretched arm to trace the property lines that have been in his family off and on now for right around 150 years. The exact time, Coffey says, has slipped his memory, though.

“It’s been in the family, oh, since way back in the 1800s, when my grandfather owned it and then he let my aunt have it. Then she sold it to someone else, and then they sold it and I had a chance to buy it,” he says.

“So, it’s my grampa’s old place,” he says, before turning toward the far end of a hilly pasture that crests before descending toward the new four-lane highway known as U.S. 421.

“I had a hundred, hundred fifteen-twenty acres when I started on it. The new highway got 32 acres of it when it come through there,” he recalls.

Standing on the shoulder of the old U.S. 421, Coffey looks up at the tall gables on his Grampa Watson’s old homestead.

“Well, the house, the old house, big house on the left there, that was built in 1900,” he says. “That’s where I grew up at. Talkin’ about the old Grampa Watson home place, and it’s been in the family for many years. My daughter owns it now.”

His grampa built the house after returning from an ill-fated adventure out west. Coffey says he’d been seeking fortune, but returned instead with little more than a worn out pair of shoes.

“Back in 18-something he went to Wyoming when they had all that gold rush and everything,” Coffey says. “He went back there and he didn’t do no good at panning, like the rest of ‘em. And, he walked back – said he wore out three pair of shoes walkin’ from Wyoming back home. And he walked back here, and they built this house here in 1900 and the old barn there in 1901.”

It’s at another house, not far down the road, where his old shop sits mostly unused. He walks past an empty doghouse, and Coffey takes a moment to remember his old dog.

“I always like my dog,” he says. “Always kept me a dog. I kept my dog about two or three years after we (Geraldine and he) was married, and then Rusty got old and died.”

He takes obvious pleasure from the tale about the time his pit bull mix, Rusty, chased off an obnoxious tax assessor who’d come to question him about some yet-to-be-surveyed land near the edge of his farm.

“I was back there working and I had Rusty with me,” he recalls with a wry smile. “So, I saw somebody coming down through my field, a whole bunch of SUVs – here come a bunch of ‘em – and they all jumped out and started talkin’ to me.

“And (the tax assessor) jumped out, too,” Coffey continues. “and Rusty decided none of ‘em didn’t have no business there. He put ‘em all back in their cars.”

Coffey, now 84, leans on his cane and laughs.

As for the notorious tax assessor, Coffey says Rusty wasn’t content to simply run him off. Instead he grabbed hold of the tax man’s trousers and began to pull them down around his legs.

“He’d pretty near took his pants off ‘im when I called on him,” Coffey says. He still gets a hearty laugh out of that memory.

“That dog was some dog,” he says. “He’s a good’n. I guess I kept him eight, 10, 12 years. He was gettin’ pretty old when he died.”

Coffey takes his cane and walks back toward the old farm road which leads up the hill to the livestock barn. The big doors swing open to reveal a wide open space with a manger at the center, several stalls to the back, and a stairway leading up to the loft.

Sunlight slashes through the loosely spaced chestnut slats that make up the barn walls. The air is cool and smells of hay and dried manure.

Coffey stands before the manger – a great v-shaped trough with wide slots to keep the cows separated as they fed.

“I used to feed the cattle, keep ‘em in here,” he says. He sweeps his cane through the dim air like a long finger as he points. “I had a trap door here – you can’t see it – and put hay down in there, in that manger. And them new calves, I’d have about a dozen of ‘em, and ain’t that about the prettiest music you ever listened at, them eatin’ that hay, a chompin’. It could make you some good music, it could do it.”

Back at his shop, Coffey recalls the tools he used for half a century before passing them to the Southern Appalachian History Association and their living history museum at Horn in the West, in Boone.

Thieves took the tools in February and police have yet to recover them. Coffey thinks he acquired the blacksmithing tools sometime in the 1950s, but can’t remember for sure.

“I bought ‘em off a neighbor of mine. He’s dead now, been dead some time,” Coffey says. “But I was talking to him one day...he had the old bellows type blower then, you know? And he said, ‘I’ll sell you them tools.’ Said, ‘I can’t use ‘em no more.’ And he said, ‘They’re all good except the bellows.’ He said, ‘The leather’s dried on it.’ He says, ‘It won’t work.’ He says ‘The rest of ‘em’s A-1 shape.’

“And I bought ‘em. Bought ‘em as they were, the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel. And you guess what I paid for ‘em...I gave him a whole $25 for the whole shop.”