The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photo above: Rustic decorative elements and stunning mountain views abound in this home.
Photos Courtesy of Taylor Reschka
An Eagle Rock home blends Native American heritage with reclaimed materials, creating a serene retreat that harmonizes with nature and honors tradition.
A Native American proverb warns us of this: Man’s heart grows hard when it’s away from nature. The owners of a special home in Eagle Rock have ensured their hearts will never harden. Barb and Dick Woodard have furnished a recreational home that brings the outside in and honors Barb’s Native American ancestry.
As a Monacan Native American, Barb’s ancestors are indigenous to the United States. Her great-grandfather was Cherokee. He was welcomed by the Monacan Tribe in Virginia, which gave sanctuary to the Cherokee, in the 1800s. Barb’s great-grandfather then married her great-grandmother, whose ancestry traces back hundreds of years in Virginia.
This family history is ever present with Barb because she grew up on the land that their home overlooks. The Woodards live on the south end of a 350-acre farm known as the “Old McNamara” farm. The recreational home they have recently completed sits on the north end of the same property. The land in between the north and south end contains the Eagle Rock Limestone Quarry and the reservoir that once provided water for the town.
As a child, Barb canned tomatoes for sale with her grandfather, who owned a 75-acre Y-shaped farm visible from their kitchen window. While the elementary school she actually attended has been torn down and since rebuilt, they can see where her original elementary school was. The CSX railroad train she heard clank along its tracks still snakes around the mountains.
Barb also looks out on the land where her father taught her to hunt and to interact with the earth mindfully. Thanks to his influence, she “would rather sit in a tree stand than anywhere else” because what she observes there has a meditative quality. Barb says, “Hunting is seeing things that other people don’t see, and hearing things that nobody else will ever hear.”
The quiet mystery of gazing out of a tree stand has found its parallel in this home. It’s a sort of enlarged tree stand where Barb and Dick see things others don’t see, and hear things nobody else will ever hear.
On cool, overcast days, fog rises up parallel to the house and floats downstream in the same direction as the James River. When raindrops hit the tin roof, the rhythm relaxes visitors like a soft Native American drumbeat. And if the sun peeks out after the rain, Barb and Dick actually enjoy a view from on top of the rainbow while sitting on their porch. At 1,500 feet, they enjoy a downward-facing view of the rainbow and the town below.
Even people accustomed to extraordinary views agree. This home was featured on Season 12, Episode 4 of the show Barnwood Builders and will appear again in the summer or fall of 2024. The host of the show, Mark Bowe, describes their view as “one of the prettiest he’s seen.”
So how did Barb and Dick end up on Barnwood Builders?
While watching the show one evening, they realized they could accommodate the Native American philosophy of utilizing what the earth provides and build the recreational home they desired by using a reclaimed home frame. Barb mused, “I just wonder if we could have a home like one of the homes on that show.”
Dick was hesitant because he thought their recreational home would be “small potatoes” and not worth the host, Mark Bowe’s time.
Fortunately, Barb followed her instincts and bought a historical dogtrot cabin from Barnwood Builders. A dogtrot cabin is two cabins, one used for cooking and the other used as a living space such as a bedroom. These are joined by a breezeway or “dogtrot”- a space that was designed to permit airflow to cool the home off in the hot American south during pioneer times. The cabin was built in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1857 and is primarily cedar.
Having a reclaimed frame for the home is just the beginning though. Ninety percent of the wood, stone and tin used to decorate the home is also reclaimed. The tin roof was reclaimed from an old tobacco barn, called the Jim Pullen farm, from ten miles up the road. Barb and Dick cleaned the tin, but otherwise left it as it was. They “didn’t try to make it pretty or change it from its natural state.”
Barb and Dick also salvaged barn wood from the Old McNamara farm to turn into a door leading from the dogtrot to the kitchen/living area. They salvaged the remaining doors of the home from a property they own in Buchanan.
The trim on the windows is old fence boards that they repurposed from around their main home. Barb and Dick left the moss on them rather than scrape it off to fit the aesthetic.
The primary decorative elements all come directly from nature. The head of an elk hangs on one wall of the dogtrot area, a deer antler lamp sits atop an end table and a wild turkey stands proudly on an armoire. Pine cones that Barb gathered from outside dot surfaces throughout the home.
Barb honors a family motto, “You can borrow from the land, but never steal” by harvesting sassafras each fall, when the sap is most concentrated. She scrapes dark soil away with a hand trowel to reveal the roots, like a miner searching for treasured ore, then clips them with a hand pruning saw. Sassafras provides a wide range of medicinal benefits from respiratory ailments to arthritis and even cancer prevention.
Barb boils the sassafras to make tea and places it in bowls as a decoration. She has borrowed, not stolen from the land, because the tree is unharmed by this harvest.
To maximize one of nature’s most precious resources — the sun — Barb punched out the panels of the doors leading to their bedroom and between the bedroom and bathroom. She replaced them with frosted glass that affords them privacy but also allows more light to stream through. Light also pours through the floor to ceiling windows that lead out to the porch through the dogtrot.
The home is toasty, even in winter, thanks to a Jack and Jill fireplace. One warms the kitchen, and the corresponding fireplace faces outside to warm the porch. When the fire fades, Barb and Dick throw a log on from downed trees on the property. As it crackles, the fragrance of cedar and wood suffuses the space.
In addition to bringing the outside in, Barb and Dick bring the inside out. When Barb cooks, she passes food out the window to the back porch, where they eat most of their meals and do their entertaining. In the summer months, they point a telescope at the sky. With no light pollution, they enjoy observing “about a meteor a minute” during an annual meteor shower.
Barb comes from a centuries’ old tradition of revering the land and its flora and the animals that roamed it. This home allows her to live life in a way that would make her ancestors proud and respects the tribal blood that ties her to the mountains.
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
