JOHNS CREEK VALLEY, Va. (AP) - Bruce Ingram maintained for three long years an ardent crush on Elaine Adams before finally snagging a date with her in late spring 1977.
For their fourth date, Ingram, who grew up in Salem, persuaded Adams, a native of Clifton Forge, to go camping and fishing along a section of Johns Creek in Craig County where he had the landowners’ permission to visit. Ingram, a skilled angler, caught smallmouth bass and chain pickerel.
But he netted something much more significant during that outing to the bucolic Johns Creek Valley - Elaine Adams’ heart. On their very next date, they decided to become engaged. The couple married in June 1978.
In 1984, the Ingrams, who live in Botetourt County, purchased 30 acres along the very stretch of Johns Creek that helped establish the fundamental bond that remains.
Then, late last year, the couple opted to help protect the land, theoretically in perpetuity, by establishing a conservation easement on the property with the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy.
The Roanoke-based nonprofit celebrated in 2016 both its 20th anniversary and a banner year, when the land trust signed conservation agreements with four landowners in the region to protect their rural properties from intensive development.
The agreements will help protect the Johns Creek acreage, along with 57 acres adjacent to the North Fork of the Roanoke River in Montgomery County, a 226-acre cattle farm along the Little Otter River in Bedford County and another 100-acre farm in Bedford County.
David Perry, 45, has been executive director of the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy for five years. The organization traces its roots to 1996, when it was founded as the Western Virginia Land Trust.
The conservancy has two full-time employees - Perry, a native of Blacksburg, and project manager Meagan Cupka, a native of Roanoke - and two part-time workers.
“Our core mission is saving land from intensive development,” Perry said - protecting the rural landscape from such things as subdivisions or strip malls or the sort of development that threatens water quality, agriculture or viewsheds.
The conservancy works with landowners to protect farms, forests, mountainsides, waterways and wildlife habitat, he said. Such places have often become sacred to landowners, and their neighbors, through generations of family ownership and were previously cherished by Native Americans.
The land trust’s smallest conservation agreement helps protect about 10 acres along the Little River in Floyd County and its largest helps preserve more than 11,000 acres at Carvins Cove.
In total, the land trust’s current conservation easements help protect more than 17,000 acres of land and about 44 miles of streams in the region. The conservancy’s core territory includes the counties of Roanoke, Montgomery, Floyd, Craig, Franklin, Botetourt and Bedford but it also works with landowners elsewhere in the region.
The Blue Ridge Land Conservancy had worked before with the Ingrams, who had previously established a conservation agreement on about 140 acres they own on Sinking Creek Mountain in Craig County.
“That organization has had wonderful directors and board members and they have been great to work with,” Bruce Ingram said.
Bruce Ingram, 65, teaches English and creative writing at Lord Botetourt High School. He is also a prolific freelance writer whose primary focus is the outdoors - conservation, fishing and hunting. He said he has penned about 2,300 magazine articles, written five books about river fishing and is venturing now into young adult fiction.
He and Elaine, 63, a retired elementary school teacher, also co-wrote “Living the Locavore Lifestyle.”
The two school teachers have used the money earned from writing to buy rural land in Craig and Botetourt counties and in Monroe County, West Virginia. All told, they own about 644 acres, and about 442 acres total are protected by conservation easements from intensive development. The Virginia Outdoors Foundation holds an easement on about 272 acres of the Ingrams’ property on Potts Mountain.
Both the Ingrams and Perry said people sometimes harbor misconceptions about conservation easements, believing, wrongly, that they routinely restrict any and all development or transfer the property’s ownership from the landowner to the land trust.
The Ingrams have strategically cut timber from their properties to enhance wildlife habitat. And their conservation agreements do not prohibit, for example, building a house.
Conservation easements can yield financial benefits for landowners, including tax breaks and tax credits. Perry said many rural landowners who are land rich and cash poor can garner income by selling state tax credits.
Although conservation agreements with land trusts can help preserve rural properties from many types of development, they do not provide immunity from major infrastructure projects that can wield eminent domain.
One such example is the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline.
If the 42-inch diameter natural gas transmission pipeline is approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the 303-mile, $3.5 billion project will have access to eminent domain to acquire rights-of-way across private properties - even those protected by conservation easements.
Meanwhile, the Ingrams initially believed their 30 acres along Johns Creek would be too small to interest the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy.
It turned out that the property boasted true conservation bona fides.
For one thing, the land adjoins several hundred feet of Johns Creek, a tributary of Craig Creek. Johns Creek hosts populations of the endangered James spinymussel, a freshwater mussel. And the acreage hosts during most spring seasons an ephemeral vernal pool that provides habitat for frogs, toads and salamanders - amphibians vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Perry visited the Johns Creek property April 4. The subtle cadence of murmuring water, the whoosh of gusting winds that swayed the tall pines, the white and black oaks and shagbark hickories, the music of birdsong: These were the sole sounds accompanying his visit.
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