University of Kentucky Press, 2002.

Hunter James is a journalist who has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other newspapers, as well as the author of books on subjects ranging from the civil rights struggle in Alabama to the rise and fall of Jim Bakker. A native of Winston-Salem and a descendant of its early Moravians, he decided in the late 1980s—when he was in his fifties—to leave behind big city journalism and life on the road in order to return to the old and somewhat dilapidated family farm he had inherited on the outskirts of his native city. The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork is his record—partly serious, often comic—of his attempt to restore that farm, all the while battling encroaching progress as the city of Winston-Salem grows closer year by year.