Peninsula In Passage

orchards that produced 20,000 bushels of peaches a year. At one time their Bennett’s Creek Farm included 100 acres of peaches that were sold all over the East Coast and to the military, 400 acres of corn, 400 acres of soybeans and 1200 acres of small grain and pasture for 100 Guernsey cows. Jodie Mathews’ father, J. C. Matthews, Jr., also raised poultry, 50,000 layers, and hogs. When farm hands became hard to find, J.C. Matthews turned away from labor-intensive poultry to raising hogs in a confinement-growing program, known as pig parlors, while his father and uncle ran a hog farrowing operation with Hamp-York-Duroc crossbred pigs. Phyllis Matthews, a native of Bluefield, West Virginia, grew up in Portsmouth and graduated from Wilson High School in 1947. A cousin introduced her to J. C. Matthews. The two married in 1950 and moved into the circa 1865 family farmhouse where she learned to make biscuits every morning of her life. She remembers - There weren’t very many houses around Bennett’s Creek then but I didn’t mind the isolation. I kept busy with the four kids we had in five years - Pam, Wendy, Jodie and Phillip. I helped grade and pack eggs and the kids helped too. The restaurant opened in 1957 and I worked over there a couple of years and then the farm market opened in 1963 and I tended to its finances.

Jodie Matthews, 57, remembers – My Granddad Jodie liked to do everything by hand – he’d hoe and seed the fields, all by hand. He died when I was a senior in high school. He had a green thumb that could grow anything. He grew the prettiest tomatoes. I did all the work, the weeding, watering, etc. but when I tried it without him it was never the same – I just don’t have his touch. But he knew he was destined to farm. I grew up on the farm and all I ever did was farm. In 1973 when I graduated from John Yeates on a Sunday night I was put in charge of everything on the farm on Monday morning. I remember it as lots of fun, a lot of good people, good times and lots of hard work. Daddy could have given me anything I wanted but I had to learn to work and I don’t regret a minute of it. My mom and dad worked hard, struggled but came out O.K. I learned to do a lot of horse-trading – lots of bartering back then. Jack Griffin had a place now where McDonald’s is in Harbour View. If you had any kind of mechanical problem, you’d call Jack and he’d fix it. Griffin bartered for the land with my Grandfather Jodie and the Matthews got free mechanical work in exchange for the land. Our first farm stand was in an old gas station and we sold eggs as well as produce. Then we built around the stand to create a market in 1967 -68 when Route 17 was four-laned. The family had already sold the Bennett’s Creek Restaurant and moved the fiberglass cow that stood on the brick sign there to the market.

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