Intriguing life journeys for the Yates family
The Rappahannock roots of James E. “Jim” Yates III run generations deep between Huntly and Sperryville, that much is fact. What Jim Yates can’t figure out is how his shoe-mending greatgrandfather James E. “Bull” Yates suddenly became so rich — and under mysterious circumstances to boot.
“Bull Yates was the son of a cobbler in Sperryville, and Bull was a cobbler, too. The 1840 Census shows both were cobblers,” the 80-year-old Jim recalls during an interview at his Huntly cattle farm.
“This is what is a mystery: How does a cobbler’s son become so wealthy?”
As in owning “thousands of acres” and “thousands of cows” at a time in American history when the South was smoldering.
“The Civil War comes along,” Jim begins one chapter of his family’s tree, “and after the Civil War this fellow [Bull] ends up with quite a bit of wealth. Now if you’re familiar with the South after the Civil War it cost a hundred dollars to buy a chicken. They were destitute. They were burned out. Everything. They had nothing.
“Did he [Bull] ride with Mosby? I don’t know,” laughs his great-grandson, referring to the famous Confederate cavalry battalion commander John S. Mosby, known as the “Gray Ghost” for his relentless, stealth-like haunting of Union troops in this northern pocket of Virginia.
“Did they hit a gold [wagon] train and bury it?” he wonders. “You know, Mosby split the proceeds with his riders. So maybe they did end up with some gold from one of the supplies”
One of the greatest stories of Civil War intrigue surrounds the dark and rainy night of March 9, 1863, when Mosby and 29 of his Rangers conducted a daring 2 a.m. raid near the Fairfax County Courthouse, surrounded though it was by numerous Union camps. Not only did Mosby capture a snoring Union general and several dozen of his soldiers, legend has it he and his carefully chosen guerilla force carried away $350,000 in gold, silver, as well as other precious heirlooms the North swiped from Southern homes.
“So maybe he ended up with some of the gold,” Jim surmises. “I don’t know what else it could be. The basement in [Bull’s] manor house [now the Marriott Ranch east of Huntly] — you can go into that basement today and you can see it’s all covered in concrete that was poured in there because people would go in there looking for the gold. That’s fact, not rumor.”
What is also fact is that Bull quite suddenly became a rich man during and following the Civil War, subsequently building homes for family members on his plentiful land straddling the Rappahannock and Fauquier county border.
Jim has traveled to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg (still referring to it as VPI) that somehow houses “a tremendous amount of [his great-grandfather’s] financial records. I’ve been down there and I saw all the records they have and all the financial stuff that he kept. It is exhaustive. I mean hundreds of pages of stuff.”
How Tech came to possess Bull’s financial records is another mystery his great-grandson can’t explain. Still, from those records Jim deduces that his cobbling great-grandfather fell upon much land, acquiring cattle and selling the meat to both the Confederate and Union armies during the war.
By the latter 1880s, says his greatgrandson, Bull “acquired over ten thousand acres,” becoming “the largest cattle producer in the counties of Rappahannock and Fauquier.”
Rappahannock round ups
Jim Yates was hardly different than other boys his age growing up in Rappahannock County during the 1940s and 50s.
“I was doing all the rounding up and corralling of cows. Right here in Rappahannock. Oh, it was fun!” he remembers. “Our farm was just over the hill here. More Huntly than Flint Hill. But I went to school in Flint Hill and graduated from [today’s] Blue Door restaurant there. And my
“Did they hit a gold [wagon] train and bury it?”
father went to that school as well. Kindergarten through 7th... Then I graduated from Rappahannock High.”
Prior to World War II, beginning in 1939 and for subsequent decades beyond, James E. Yates II, Jim’s father, helped organize the Annual Rappahannock Angus Breeders’ Feeder Calf Sale, so unique that it caught the attention of the Richmond TimesDispatch. Quoted in a 1953 article about James’ devotion to annually rounding up the “top animals” in the county, Rappahannock Extension Agent W. H. Lyne boasted “this one has led all the feeder calf sales in the State every year in quality of animals sold.’
“No black magic about it, he said. Just a matter of ‘good cattlemen, good cows, and good bulls.’ … 20 to 25 herds in Rappahannock have been started from [the] sale,” observed Lyne, not to mention countless herds in other states originating from Rappahannock County Angus lines.
“They would have the sale in Front Royal,” Jim recalls, “and people from Ohio or wherever would come to buy the feeder calves. It was the highest producing feeder calf sale in the state of Virginia for years and years and years. It was very popular.”
Jim eventually studied at Emory & Henry College near Abingdon, and with his degree in hand “I ended up teaching school in Annapolis. PE. I wanted to be a coach,” he says. “It was a junior high school. I did that for one year and I retired.”
His mind, after all, had turned to the “transportation business,” which Jim suddenly realized was far more lucrative than pursuing a career in coaching.
“I was visiting a friend of mine, we had played ball [baseball and football] together in Rappahannock — he was renting a room from my uncle while he was going to school — and I was in his room,” Jim says, “and I looked into an open drawer and it was full of money. Cash!
“I said, ‘Bobby, what in the heck is that?’ And he said, ‘They’re my tips.’ ‘Tips from what?’ And he said, ‘Driving a cab.’ He was working his way through school driving a cab to make money. And I said, ‘Well, how much are you making?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m making about sixty-five dollars a day.’ Well, I was making sixty-five dollars a week teaching school. And I said, ‘Well, I got to have some of that.’
“I drove a cab for a number of years,” Jim continues, “and then I bought the company for whom I drove. Then I sold that company and bought another company. And I bought more companies and ended up being one of the larger taxi cab operators in Alexandria and Arlington. I owned Alexandria Diamond Cab, I owned Alexandria Yellow Cab, I owned five or six cab companies.”
The last company he sold “not long ago.”
“Uber came along or I’d still own it,” he says. “There’s about five thousand licensed taxi cabs in the state of Virginia. You know how many Uber drivers there are? Ninety thousand. So several hundred drivers left the company. I had over four hundred drivers at one time. But I sold it. Gone.
Uber is the way to go, I hate to say it. I got out just barely. Doing farming now.”
Speaking of transportation, he adds: “Driverless cars are coming. Electric. It is ‘The Thing.’ Be ready for it. It’s happening, guarantee it… Take it from an old man.” Angus to Wagyu
Jim bought the 375-acre “River Jordan Farm” in Huntly in 1986, calling it “the first organic farm in the state of Virginia. There’s been no chemicals on the fields since 1971, I think.” Still, when buying the farm his mind wasn’t on farming. He was in the taxi cab business, after all, and between he and his wife they had seven daughters (the couple has 13 grandchildren).
“I swore when I left the farm that I would never, ever, ever, ever get back into farming,” he reflects. “I hated it. But I’m not doing farming. That was hard work. Being a small general farmer was hard work. My dad [who died in 1978] didn’t want me to be a farmer. There wasn’t any money in it. Pasture cattle is totally different from plowing, planting, seeding, harvesting. ”
In other words, Jim all these years later has successfully picked up where his father left off.
“I was raised with Angus. I’m an Angus man,” he stresses. “I had a neighbor up here, his father-in-law [was mired] in drought in Texas, and he knew I had this place here and asked me if I could graze some of his cattle. He said they were ‘Wagyu.’ I’d never heard of them. I didn’t know anything about them.
“He said, ‘You’ve heard of ‘Kobe?’ I really didn’t, I wasn’t informed. But I put up fences and we grazed cattle and I started eating some of the meat. And I said, ‘Hey, this stuff is different. It’s unique!’ They say that its fat is high in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, so it’s supposed to be a little more healthy for you, like fish and salmon oil and stuff like that.”
Jim claims once he started eating Wagyu meat — cuts from any of the four Japanese breeds of beef cattle known for their tender fat marbling — his cholesterol dropped about forty points. “I haven't done anything different. I haven't changed anything in my eating behaviors other than eating Wagyu beef. It’s the lowest it's ever been,” he says.
Jim’s father, who had spent decades scouting out the finest Angus in Rappahannock, would certainly be intrigued by his son’s migration into Wagyu (“Japanese cow” in English), albeit his Wagyu cattle are crossbred with the Angus breed to produce an “exceptional” flavor.
Wagyu cattle were originally imported to the USA from Japan in the 1970s, he educates, however Japan declared its Kobe a national treasure and banned the exportation of the Wagyu breed.
“I have close to 200 head,” Jim says. “That’s counting cows, calves, weaned and unweaned, and feeder steers.”
“Full blood certified and registered Wagyu bulls mixed with Angus and ‘pure blood’ Wagyu cattle,” reads a promotional sheet for River Jordan Farm.
So you’re now a Wagyu man? “I’m partial to it,” Jim admits.
For more information about River Jordan Farm: riverjordanfarm.com; info@riverjordanfarm.com; (540) 570-8001
In other words, Jim all these years later has successfully picked up where his father left off.