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The Village Place™©

A Community For Sustainable Living

 

The origin of The Village Place began in 1918 when Ben Jamison and wife Samantha Brown-Sparks-Jamison purchased 240 acres of timber and farmland in a small settlement near Haughton, Louisiana.  Ben, the son of a slave’s daughter and a traveling school teacher was born in the neighboring state of Texas in 1893.

 

With his wife and twelve children, they farmed the land for more than forty years, raising live stock, sugar cane, cotton, peanuts, fruits and vegetables of many kinds.  They prospered, grew strong and helped their neighbors to do likewise – lending a hand, advising and sharing information on crop production, a bushel of food, a free ride to town or whatever a Good Samaritan would do.

 

In 1945 after all of the children had grown up and left the farm, Ben retired from his job as a forester and he and Samantha retired from tilling the land and sold all but 100 acres of the original farmland to their children.

 

The Village Place will be built on the 20 acres of land my Grandfather Ben sold to my mother and father in 1946.  Nothing has been built or grown on the land since Grandfather Ben and family farmed it in 1945.

 

The idea of developing a sustainable farming community in the manner which Grandfather Ben and family originally farmed the land occurred in 1999 during a trip to the old farmstead in order to complete the succession and division of the last 100 acres of the estate to relatives.  The 20 acres, being separate from the estate’s 100, was our family legacy with nothing planned for its future.  From that inspiring trip and opportune situation, the idea of The Village Place was born.

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