My family has deep roots in Virginia, but more specifically, my grandparents and mother are from Jarratt, a small town that has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons.
Jarratt was the location of the Boar’s Head plant where a deadly Listeria strain originated, and the facility was shut down permanently after nine deaths were linked to a liverwurst product processed there.
Jarratt has become the center of nationwide coverage due to the outbreak.
When I read about the potential impact on the small town, my heart aches for all those who call Jarratt home today.
My ancestral roots don’t just run through Jarratt. My maternal grandparents were Jarratts.
They had the namesake of the town, which was incorporated in 1938 by R.E. Jarratt, T.F. Jarratt and Susie F. Jarratt, among others.
While most people with the same last name spelled it with an “e,” my grandfather’s family was part of the generations of Jarratts who spelled their last name with an “a” instead.
The small town has a population of 637, according to the U.S. Census, and is situated in both Greenville and Sussex counties. Today, it has a post office, bank, gas station and a hardware store.
My grandparents lived on Mayes Street, the closest home to the railroad tracks that run through the town. Jarratt’s Station, as it was known, was a stop on the Petersburg Railroad.
Jarratt was also a stop off Route 301 in Virginia where travelers could shop for a few supplies, grab a bite to eat or fuel up their vehicles. Once Interstate 95 was constructed, however, less traffic found its way to the small town.
Many locals found work at the Greensville Correctional Center, which was home to Virginia’s execution chamber, until 2021 when the practice was discontinued in Virginia.
Other townspeople worked at Johns Manville, Georgia Pacific or R.D. Bracken, and later, many found work at Boar’s Head.
My grandmother, Betty, was a manager for more than three decades at Edward’s Supermarket until it burned down, and the decision was made not to rebuild.
My grandfather, Arthur, worked as a night guard at Johns Manville, my mother told me, until he broke his back. He later opened an antique/used furniture store on Jarratt Avenue in the heart of downtown. Like their home, the store also was situated as the first building directly off the railroad tracks. I remember sharpening my pool skills there, and even once, looking under floorboards and in walls for stacks of cash because the previous owner had supposedly stashed their savings somewhere in the building.
My mother, Peggy, graduated from Greenville County High School in Emporia. She married my dad, who served in the Air Force, the Saturday after she graduated from high school, pushing her planned wedding up a couple of months because Dad received orders to go to Vietnam. As an 18-year-old, my mom was desperate to get out of the small town and wanted to move somewhere that had more opportunities for her to do clerical work.
Looking back, however, she said she has many fond memories of growing up in Jarratt. My mom, though admittedly eager to leave the railroad town, enjoyed many of the aspects of small-town living. Her sister, Kay, and her would ride their bikes everywhere, and everyone knew them as Betty and Arthur’s daughters.
Grandpa rented land from five farms in the area, and my mom spent her summers working in the family’s peanut, cotton and tobacco fields. Grandpa would take his wares to nearby Roanoke Rapids, N.C., to sell them. They spent every Sunday at the family homestead, a farm with chickens, cows and pigs, where they would often ride the tractor to pick a fresh watermelon from the field.
While my immediate family moved to Minnesota and later Augusta County, we traveled three hours on Easter and Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holidays to my grandmother’s three-bedroom, two-bathroom one-story brick home with pull-down steps to the attic. I’m not sure how she did it, but we arrived, she had the kitchen bar full of food: turkey and ham, deviled eggs, potato salad and pumpkin pie.
As a young child, when we visited, we often went with my grandfather to the dump, where he’d dig for items he could clean up and sell in his store. He’d occasionally find a toy that he would give to us as treasure, but Grandma always made sure she cleaned it up for us. I remember waking up once, likely from a train roaring by, and going to the bathroom, to see myself in the mirror covered from head to toe in chicken pox. (We never got used to the loud whistle and sounds from the trains that rolled by, but they didn’t seem to bother my grandparents very much.)
When my grandmother was out of a job due to the fire at the town supermarket, my grandparents invested their life savings into fixing up the store on Jarratt Avenue and opened it up as A&B’s Market, named with their initials, Arthur and Betty. They replaced the pool tables with a walk-in freezer and spent their days and nights keeping the shelves stocked and running the day-to-day operations. The grocery store was smaller than what Jarratt townspeople were used to, but it had a niche – serving as a quick stop when someone needed a few items for lunch or dinner and didn’t want to drive 10 miles to neighboring Emporia.
The business model, unfortunately, didn’t prove fruitful, and despite my grandparents’ hard work, A&B’s Market eventually failed. Like many of the industries once in town and the supermarket, A&B’s Market also closed.
In my mind, my grandparents were the definition of working class, but looking back, they were likely some of the most successful residents of Jarratt back then. Today, their home, which my grandmother lived in until after my grandfather died in 2002, is valued at $225,000. It’s worth almost double the average home nearby despite its proximity to the railroad tracks.
The back of my grandmother’s home had large pine trees, and she was known to kill snakes who loved the pine needles back there.
My cousins and sisters and I would put pennies on the railroad tracks and recovered them flattened after a train roared by. Grandma had a fish pond in her yard that she treasured, and she always had beautiful flowers planted. We would often sit in the carport with Grandma on hot summer days and help her snap green beans. She even had a small plastic pool for us to cool off when we finished.
Grandma eventually moved away from Jarratt and split her time between Richmond and Augusta County with her two daughters. She even remarried a few years before she died.
No matter where she lived later in life, Jarratt was always her home. Her eternal resting place, the place where she was buried, was in Jarratt at the High Hills Baptist Church cemetery.
While Grandma’s house still stands and has new owners, the building that once housed A&B’s Market is empty, and weeds and vines climb up the building’s exterior walls. In coverage this month about the impact of the Boar’s Head plant’s closure on the townspeople of Jarratt, the building that once held their store is prominent in almost all of the photos and videos.
Headlines and coverage surrounding the small town question if the closure of Boar’s Head could signal the end of the town of Jarratt.
The plant, after all, employed more than 500 people – some from Jarratt, some from Emporia, some from other nearby towns and counties. News reports say that employees were given eight weeks of severance pay and should be eligible for unemployment. Some of the employees were offered jobs at a Boar’s Head plant in neighboring Petersburg, I’m told, which is about a 30-minute drive from Jarratt.
Extended family members who still live in the small town describe the closure as “devastating,” but no one is throwing in the towel on the town where everyone knows everyone.
Beyond the impact on families in Jarratt, many who are below federal poverty guidelines, it is estimated the county will also lose nearly $1 million in annual tax revenue with the closure.
“Greensville County residents are resilient,” Dr. Charlette Woolridge, Greensville County administrator told WTVR. “This community will bounce back; this community will survive.”
While I’ve had to say goodbye to the Jarratts that I knew and loved, it would be heartbreaking to also see the demise of a town that holds so many of my childhood memories.
I, for one, am rooting for Woolridge to be right.
Related coverage
Search “listeria” on Augusta Free Press.
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Crystal Graham
