One of the largest remaining family farms in Hamilton County, within the city limits of Chattanooga, will be protected from development and remain a landmark.

The children of Inez Hartman and Samuel Perry McConnell entered a lease agreement with the non-profit St. Andrews Center of Highland Park to provide stewardship and cultural/agricultural programming.

A private dedication ceremony will be held at 10 a.m. Friday featuring remarks by poet and farmer Wendell Berry of Kentucky and a dedication poem read by local writer Laurie Perry Vaughen.

The Hartnell Farm was named by Sandra McConnell Burnett of Paducah, Ky., in memory of her parents, Inez Hartman McConnell and Sam McConnell. Mrs. McConnell's family (the Hartmans) owned the farm for a nearly a century. The 60 acres was a former dairy and sits adjacent to lands previously protected by the North Chickamauga Creek Conservancy and now managed by the state of Tennessee.

The McConnells were both educators in the Hamilton County Schools for over 20 years. Sam served as superintendent of Hamilton County Schools from 1955 to 1974. After retirement, he was director of Orange Grove Center. Mrs. McConnell taught Spanish and was active in the United Methodist Church, so the partnership with the St. Andrews Center, a cultural center operating in a century-old United Methodist church that serves Hispanic children and their families, is very intentional, it was stated.

The conservation efforts for Hartnell Farm are significant since it is located in one of the fastest growing suburbs of Hamilton County, officials said. The partnership with the St. Andrews Center was modeled after Crabtree Farms of Chattanooga that operates as a sustainable agricultural education center in conjunction with the city of Chattanooga.

The St. Andrews Center will lease the Hartnell Farm property for $1 per year and use portions of the property to grow food to feed the hungry families that live within walking distance of their urban location in downtown Chattanooga. Cultural programming including a writers conference, educational workshops for faith-based groups, growers and artists, and day camps for young children are all planned opportunities for the farm. An advisory group and land-use plan will soon be developed.

The McConnell children chose the St. Andrews Center to steward the land and provide cultural programming because their mother was a Spanish language teacher, and St. Andrews Center is the largest social service, educational and cultural center serving Chattanooga's growing Hispanic children and their families. Highland Park, one of the original planned neighborhoods of downtown Chattanooga where the St. Andrews Center is located at 1918 Union Ave., includes many low-income and new immigrant residents who have little or inconsistent access to healthy, fresh market stands or neighborhood grocery stores with produce aisles. Public transportation is very limited in the area. A recent survey conducted by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga named Highland Park and nearby East Lake as "food deserts" for this reason.

"The farm will have a group of advisors from the local community and will become a place to inspire, educate and feed the hungry," said Rev. Michael Feely, executive director of the St. Andrews Center. "We will respect the viewsheds enjoyed by area residents and guests to the farm, while using portions to grow fresh vegetables and teach sustainable agricultural practices. The St. Andrews Center already has a great partnership with Crabtree Farms of Chattanooga through our campus community garden in Highland Park, and we will look to those experts as well as other regional advisors to explore opportunities.

"Most importantly, we will honor the family's wishes that the farm be a distinct historic place where artists and educators and growers gather for fellowship and collaboration. It is an exciting opportunity for our community that we immediately knew we were called to act upon in faith, since family farms are rapidly disappearing due to commercial and residential development. The community may not have another opportunity such as this to secure the legacy of a family farm of this size and quality within the city limits of Chattanooga."

"The connection between an urban cultural center and a large rural farm setting is significant," said Rev. Feely, who has worked for many years in both urban and rural ministry in Tennessee. "The farm provides great educational opportunities for the children we serve at St. Andrews, most who come from a farming heritage in Guatemala and Mexico, but now live in urban neighborhoods. We want children to be able to understand the value of fresh vegetables and where food comes from, but also admire the beauty of the woodlands that surround the farm. I've often read that children can recognize and name more corporate logos than the names of native birds, trees and wildflowers. But that may be true today for adults as well. We all need to be reminded of the critical interdependence our urban centers have on our more rural regions and vice-versa. Both have a cultural contribution to make that keeps our city healthy, prosperous and prepared for the future."

McConnell family members will travel back to Chattanooga for a rare reunion and dedication ceremony planned for Friday morning. The poet Wendell Berry, who will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers that same day at their biennial gathering in Chattanooga, will share remarks. He will be introduced by Vanessa Mercer, Executive Director of Crabtree Farms of Chattanooga. Chattanooga poet Laurie Perry Vaughen will read a dedication poem commissioned by the St. Andrews Center. Rev. Al Bowles, Chattanooga District Superintendent of the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church will hold the opening prayer and two children of the McConnells, Sandra Burnett and Maxwell McConnell of Virginia (namesake of his grandfather Max Hartman who operated the dairy farm) are expected to speak. Rev. Feely will speak and deliver the benediction.

Hartnell Farm - A History

Inez Rebecca Hartman McConnell grew up on this 60-acre farm in Hixson before marrying a young school teacher, Sam Perry McConnell. Sam would eventually serve for nearly two decades as the Superintendent of Hamilton County Schools, his name scripted on every child's report card. His tenure as Superintendent followed a distinguished career as a teacher at various local schools and principal at Red Bank High.

Inez McConnell shared her husband's calling to be an educator and taught for over two decades at Hixson High. The Spanish language was her love, though she also taught mathematics, while raising three children, Sandra, Maxwell and Jack. A love for teaching and the value of education was instilled in each McConnell generation to follow, as many family members have worked as public school teachers and librarians and remain actively engaged as lay leaders in the United Methodist Church.

Inez Hartman's mother was an Adams, a family name recorded as one of the earliest settlers in the Hixson community of Hamilton County. Mamie Rebecca Adams Hartman was raised on these lands and was an avid quilter in the evenings, when her many farm chores were completed. Her traditional quilts, created from scraps of fabric to be both artful and utilitarian, is a metaphor for the sustainable nature of this farm, where nothing was let go to waste.

A typical workday for the Hartman family included milking cows, and gathering eggs or vegetables to feed family and neighbors. Over the years, the farm was used by the family as a dairy and Inez's father, Max Hartman, delivered milk, eggs and fresh churned butter to his neighbors. The family never used a tractor, preferring the collaboration of a beloved team of mules for plowing their large fields for vegetables. They also raised beef cattle and chickens on the property. At some point, fig trees were a new immigrant to this place, becoming a family favorite.

Remaining on the farm are five original rustic barn structures.

More about Wendell Berry

Known for his poetry and prose that has led to a renewed interest in the use of small-scale farmland to sustain families and communities, Wendell Berry is also a full-time farmer in his native Kentucky. His poems, essays and novels include the seminal collections, The Unsettling of America and What are People For, two books that have reshaped the national discussion on land use, the pleasures of good food, faith and technology. An unapologetic agrarian, he has been an outspoken critic against industrial farming or agribusiness and has written extensively and persuasively about the impact of economies of large scale on individual, home and community life. He has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations among his many accolades. Berry is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington where he received a B.A. in English in 1956 and an M.A. in 1957.

His collections of poetry include: Given (Shoemaker Hoard, 2005), A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1997), Entries: Poems (1994), Traveling at Home (1989), The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1988), Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985), Clearing (1977), There Is Singing Around Me (1976), and The Broken Ground (1964). His novels include A World Lost (1996), Remembering (1988), and The Memory of Old Jack.

Berry is also the author of prose collections including The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Counterpoint, 2004), Another Turn of the Crank (1995), Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (1993), Standing on Earth: Selected Essays (1991), and A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1972).

About his work, a reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor wrote: "Berry's poems shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life."

Wendell Berry lives on a farm that has been in his family for over a century in Port Royal, Kentucky.

More about poet Laurie Perry Vaughen

Laurie Perry Vaughen was invited by the St. Andrews Center to write a poem inspired by Hartnell Farm that will be shared at the dedication. A native of Chattanooga, she was awarded the James Dickey Poetry Award, by Emory University's Lullwater Review and the Amon Liner Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Last year she was selected by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to participate in an international writers exchange in Switzerland and Eastern Europe, taking her to the rural villages and urban centers of Slovenia, for three weeks of readings and workshops with her mentor and teacher Dr. Richard Jackson. She holds a B.S. in sociology and anthropology from UTC and works as a poet-in-residence in area schools and cultural centers. She has worked at the Hunter Museum of American Art, The Chattanooga Times, Summerville News in northwest Georgia, as well as the nonprofit North Chickamauga Creek Conservancy, Chattanooga Food Bank assisting with their capital campaign strategies. She is the former editor of Envirolink Southeast and Chattanooga magazine and has been a contributing writer to Snail, The Journal of Slow Food USA, Southern Theater and other publications. Vaughen's poems have appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, The Other Side, Cold Mountain Review, Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art, Chattahoochee Review, Poetry Miscellany, Minnesota Review and Carolina Quarterly. She comes from a long line of quilters, growers, barn menders and writers of songs.

More about St. Andrews Center

The St. Andrews Center was founded in 2005 as a cultural center closely associated with the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church. Located in an architecturally significant 100-year-old church, St. Andrews welcomes more than 1,200 participants on average each week for its various programs.

Perhaps the city's most culturally diverse setting, St. Andrews shelters the state's largest English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) adult literacy program in addition to its broader GED program that serves three counties. These programs are offered through a partnership with Chattanooga State Technical Community College. The ESOL program, La Plaza Comunitaria (The Community Plaza), recently published a bi-lingual (Spanish-English) collection of student essays and stories and has hosted writer Wendell Berry in a workshop that encouraged former Guatemalan and Mexican farmers now living in urban Chattanooga to share their distinct stories and Hispanic folk tales.

St. Andrews enables the work of other non-profit community building organizations such as La Paz de Dios (The Peace of God) and art organizations such as the Chattanooga Girls Choir by helping offset operational costs. A growing group of working artists have studio space in the building. The result is a more effective synergy of service to Hispanic neighbors and the broader community as people live out the experience of collaborating and sharing resources.

The cornerstone of St. Andrews Center is its outreach to Hispanic children and their families, with the goal of being a faith-based community that consistently lives out the advocacy of tolerance and encourages the celebration of cultural diversity. More than 50 K-5 grade ESOL students from nearby East Side Elementary attend a summer day camp and afterschool tutoring and art enrichment program. Their families also have access on-site to a free pediatric clinic, a community garden, immigration legal clinics and civic engagement activities such as voting registration, forums, library card services and access to a variety of cultural programming and guest performances.

Within four years, the Center has developed long term partnerships with area foundations including the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, Maclellan, Benwood, Lyndhurst, and city and county government, area public schools, arts organizations including Allied Arts, Chattanooga Theatre Centre and Arts and Education Council, community gardening initiatives, the Downtown YMCA, Chattanooga Area Urban League, Crabtree Farms, Chattanooga Food Bank, area universities and numerous social service referral agencies to address emerging challenges immigration brings to the community. St. Andrews Center programs provide a field school for Sewanee School of Theology seminarians interested in urban ministry, the UTC School of Social Work interns and a new program in conjunction with the Chattanooga State paralegal program that will assist with immigration clinics. In 2008, as a further extension of the work at St. Andrews, the director was appointed by the mayor's office to be his liaison to the broader Hispanic community to better address urgent needs and public policy.

St. Andrews Center programs include:

K-5 after school program for new immigrant children, mainly from Guatemala and Mexico
High school Opportunity Club for enrichment activities for older ESOL students from more than five different countries
Chattanooga State's downtown campus offering ESOL and GED adult education classes
an on-site full-service credit union and financial planning workshops
La Paz de Dios, a holistic, culturally sensitive social service agency for the Hispanic community
Circle theater offering original works by area playwrights
300-seat sanctuary and 100-seat chapel used at present for two bi-lingual worship services (Spanish and Portuguese)
translation service for civic events
community vegetable garden and food pantry
on-site free pediatric clinic
on-site free legal aid clinic specializing in immigration policy
on-site lending library and computer lab
artist-in-residence studios