Schill to retire in Amish country
Carteret News-Times; Morehead City, NC; March 4, 2005By Brad Rich
NEWS-TIMES
NEW BERN – Jerry Schill has bought the farm, but don’t look for his name in the obituaries, ‘cause this grazing and cropland is literal, not figurative. And it’s Amish.
That’s right, Mr. Schill, who for the past 18 years has earned the respect of both friend and foe as the friendly but tenacious and never-short-on-words president of the N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial watermen, has bought a real Amish spread in Pennsylvania, and plans to be there sometime this summer, fulfilling a dream.
He and his wife, Pam, who has been in the insurance business in their adopted home town of New Bern, closed on the 105 acres last week, and plan to turn it into a vocation that will give others a vacation.
The huge farmhouse with “something like nine bedrooms” – Mr. Schill said he hasn’t really counted yet – will be renovated (bathrooms and electricity will be added) and turned into a Christian family retreat, a place where folks from all walks of life can come to spend a week or two away from the workaday rat race.
At the Joshua Christian Family Center – the name derives from Joshua 24:15, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” – on Schill Farm, guests will be able to milk cows, maybe plant or harvest some crops, do the other farm chores and experience life anew. But mostly, Mr. Schill said in an interview last Friday, he hopes they’ll be able to get in touch with each other and with their or their ancestors’ agrarian roots.
“I’d been thinking of doing this for some time … and had always liked the idea of having a Christian family setting where people could come and stay for a vacation, kind of like renting a house on the beach but on a farm instead,” he said.
“I thought it would be great if they could come to a place and learn how to milk the cows, feed the sheep, work with the Belgian draft horses and do all the farm chores that have to be done every day.
“We sold a piece of commercial property we had owned for a while, and we knew that would give us the assets we needed to look at the idea more seriously,” Mr. Schill continued.
“I talked to a young Amishman who had bought my grandfather’s farm and thought we had a deal to buy that farm, but he didn’t run it by the other Amish and so it didn’t work out.
“We looked at some farm land in western North Carolina , but the price of land there was just too high. So we went back to Pennsylvania, and the Amishman who had bought my granddad’s farm took us around to see his brothers’ farms and eventually we came to an agreement on one of them.
“It’s got 45 acres of hardwood timber (which could be sold if needed) and a two-seater Amish horse buggy, and a real one-horse open sleigh. It’s got a sawmill, although I’m not sue whether we’ll keep the equipment.There’s no plumbing in the house, of course, and no electricity.
“We’ve got to get busy, but I’m looking forward to it. We’ll convert one or two of the bedrooms to bathrooms, and eventually we plan to build a small log cabin somewhere else on the property just for us.”
Mr. Schill and his wife are devout Catholics, but he said he doesn’t plan for the Joshua Christian Family Center to be a “pushy kind of religious thing,” with potential guests screened on the basis of their spiritual beliefs.
“What we want is for it to be a place where people get to learn about and experience their agricultural heritage and learn about living from the land,” he said. As for the name of the center, ‘Joshua,’ – well, we just want to let the guests know where the Schills are coming from.”
He also is exploring the idea of allowing active military personnel who have returned to the U.S. from overseas tours of duty to bring their families to the farm for free visits.
“It’s very hard for military families when they are separated,” he said. “The divorce rate is very high.
“This could be a place where, upon their return from overseas, they could come with their families and just do whatever they need and want to do to, to learn about each other again and to love each other.
“If they wanted to milk the cows and do chores, fine. If they don’t want to do those kinds of things – if they just want to walk in the 45 acres of woods or play in the streams, that would be fine, too.
It really isn’t that much of a stretch for Mr. and Mrs. Schill to go from working with fishermen to operating a working farm that caters to guests looking for their agricultural roots or looking to explore a lifestyle totally new to them.
Fishermen and farmers, Mr. Schill has long said, are really brothers of a type, folks who, like miners and foresters, do real work and provide real products.
In an interview several years ago, he explained that he saw himself and his more than 50-year-old association partly as advocates for and protectors of some of the last of a dwindling breed: the fiercely independent men and women who, since the founding of the nation, have used their hands, their muscles, their courage and their wits to provide the food that goes on tables and to extract the natural resources that are used to build homes, factories and, well, lives.
In that interview, he decried the disappearing connection between Americans and the way essential products are produced.
“Because of the changing demographics in the country, you find that students and even some of the teachers no longer have much of an idea about how things are produced, how food is grown and gets to the table, how people on farms and in the mines and on the commercial fishing boats make their livings and how hard it is for them to do that,” he said. “Kids just aren’t getting a well-rounded education without that, and you can see it.”
The lack of knowledge, he said then, manifests itself in attitudes that can show up in fisheries regulations and in lack of concern about the never-ending parade of regulations that make life and livelihoods difficult for fishermen and other producers.
“There are just a tremendous number of similarities between fishermen and farmers,” he said last Friday.
“I’ll certainly miss the people in the fishing industry, those people who’ve allowed our family to share their lives.
“But doing this, we’ll have the opportunity to let them come up and visit us and share our lives.”
He’ll even miss the fisheries politics, he conceded.
“I’ve always been quick to say that although I’m not an elected politician, politics has been a necessary part of the (fisheries association) job, and it has been interesting.”
With that said, Mr. Schill emphasized that although the association is actively searching for his replacement, and the board of directors interviewed one candidate for his job Thursday, he won’t leave the organization high and dry.
“I’ve told the board that we’ll be flexible about when we have to go, but as of Feb. 25 at 11 a.m. , when we put the last signature on the property transfer papers, well, the reality is that we can’t be totally flexible,” he said. “There’s a lot to be done.
“But the General Assembly is in session in Raleigh , and I’ll be keeping up with anything that is going to affect the commercial fishing industry.” |
