The Secret History of Shenandoah Chevre

(including a newscast from Channel 4 – Washington, DC)

Under an earlier name in North Carolina, it was the second licensed goat cheese creamery in United States, but in Virginia became the first federally-licensed goat cheese creamery, since I wanted to be able to sell to customers in Canada and Europe. Once in operation in Virginia, our sales exploded. Food editors from newspapers around the nation interviewed me. The Washington Post did feature articles with lots of color photos on Shenandoah Chevre in 1990, 1991 and 1992. NBC broadcast a program on the farm in late 1991.

In actuality, in 1980, I became the first person ever to apply for a goat cheese creamery license in the United States, The problem was that Congress had passed a law, which mandated that all cheese sold must come from licensed creameries, but the State of North Carolina had never adopted standards for cheese creameries, It was not until 1982 that North Carolina created standards and issued me a license, By then, Laura Chenel had been licensed by the State of California and gone into production. It would be another year or so, before I knew that she existed.

Press the arrow on the left to listen to their beautiful music.

“Mi Heimet” (My Home) – One of the yodel songs, sung by the Herbligan Jodlerklub, when they dedicated our old farmhouse and new cheese creamery in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia!

Yes! Really!

As I was moving to Habersham County, GA in May 2018, a local, politically-influential matron befriended me. She was checking me out, because Republican cops and officials were going around telling people that I was a homosexual male prostitute with AIDS.

She quickly discounted the prostitute part, but assumed that because I was not a Republican and therefore not a Real Man like the Messiah Donald . . . and didn’t have an ugly, loud-mouthed, bleached blond female at my side, wearing a red MAGA hat, I must be gay.

Nothing I said could convince her otherwise. I even showed her this tea cup of the last long term relationship I had – a lovely Sumatran lady in my Sunday School class. Julie just didn’t want to live in the mountains. I didn’t want to live in Atlanta. The matron didn’t believe me.

Maybe her black hair was a problem. I showed the matron mounted photos of my natural blonde girlfriend in Sweden, Britt-Louise Manson . . . plus the natural blond Swedish-American federal agent, Susan Karlson, who was my on again – off again friend with benefits from July 1991 to July 2006. Nope . . . the Party and its hired guns are always right.

She departed my new residence with a stern warning. “Richard, don’t tell people that you once worked in Sweden and had a Swedish girlfriend or that you once owned a famous goat cheese creamery or that Chef Julia Child once presented an award to you in person. Everybody here will think you are crazy.”

Glen Crannoc Farm, Weaverville, NC

Photo by Archaeologist George Stuart, later Senior Editor of National Geographic Magazine

We received excellent publicity from the Asheville Citizen-Times, when the cheese creamery opened in 1982, but very little cheese sales within a 200-mile (322 km) radius. The nearest cheese shop, selling our products, was in Chapel Hill, NC . . . 229 miles away. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an incredible two page full color spread on our creamery, but we never sold once ounce of cheese to anyone in Georgia afterward.

In addition, to the lack of local support, we discovered that the hay and fescue grass pastures in western North Carolina contained toxic levels of aluminum and were often infected with a fungus that stunted the growth of ruminants. That’s why the deer were so scrawny in our woods.

I started having weird health problems such as my hair turning temporarily red, the skin peeling off my feet and strange bruises appearing on my skin. I learned from doctors in late 1993 that “someone” had started feeding me arsenic by 1985.

In 1985 was also the Great Drought. We had no measurable precipitation in the Reems Creek Valley from February 11 till June 19. The leaves didn’t come on the trees until late June. We didn’t have enough milk to make much cheese, but I kept the goats alive and healthy by leading them up to a mountaintop pasture, filled with kudzu vines, fed by the moisture from low clouds. Six years later, many of the key scenes in the movie, “The Last of the Mohicans” were filmed in that same pasture.

There were too many architects in the Asheville Area anyway. I got some prestigious commissions, but there were starving times in between. We considered moving to the Georgia Mountains, which received much more rainfall that Western North Carolina . . . but that seemed risky, since nobody in Georgia was buying our cheese.

George Stuart came to our farm in 1983 to take photographs and interview me for a book on the Appalachian Mountains being published by National Geographic. He and his wife, Gene, owned a vacation farmhouse over the mountain in Burnsville, NC.

We became friends and eventually realized that we had first met in August 1970 in the courtyard of the palace at the Maya city of Palenque. Touring Palenque with me was Architect David Schele and his art student wife, Linda, from Mobile, Alabama. Linda went on to obtain a degree in Anthropology then partner with David Stuart (son of George and Gene) in finally cracking the Maya writing system.

In October 1986, while eating barbecue and drinking freshly squeezed apple cider with us, George and Gene convinced us that we should move to northern Virginia, close to our customers and in an affluent, sophisticated cultural environment, more supportive of architects. My wife said that she had always wanted to live in Virginia. Our North Carolina farm sold in July 1987. My wife moved to Shenandoah County to teach school in early August. I moved with the furniture, farm equipment and livestock on October 21, 1987.

Immediately after full sunset, our rental house was surrounded by dozens of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances. The body of 17 year old Tim Conner had been found in the brush on the west side of our rental house. Three hours earlier, I had been at that same spot as my dogs peed. The body was perfectly preserved, even though he had been shot nine times (probably in the barn of our new farm) two weeks earlier. We later learned that it had been kept in a deer meat locker, waiting for my arrival in Virginia.

That murder affects my life to this day. The same Brazilian assassins, who killed his parents 13 years later, next came after me.

The Tipton-Thornton House under reconstruction in Dec. 1987

The house was finished enough to move into in October 1988. My wife immediately demanded that we put the house and farm up for sale and move to another state, or else she was getting a divorce. Actually, according to her diary, she wanted to cash out on the marriage with our real estate assets liquidated.

She subsequently agreed to going ahead with the dairy and creamery, but warned me that I would be sorry that I did. From then on, she forced me to sleep in the Guest Bedroom and never touched me. My health began to deteriorate with both the old arsenic symptoms and some sort of bacterial infection that my family doctor couldn’t identify or eradicate.

Shenandoah Chevre, Inc. began making cheese in April 1990, but we didn’t hold the grand opening until there were plenty of aged cheeses in the cooler to sell to visitors. However, by late July, I was getting extremely ill. I had little feeling in the left side of my body and had 24 tumors under my skin. Sometimes, I would lose control of my muscles and just drop to the ground. I had severe short term memory problems and could not do any adding or subtraction!

When the chief infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia Hospital refused to even do blood tests on me, my Irish family doctor became furious. He ran a blood sample and found that I had a 16,500 white cell count and 75% blood chemistry shift. 100% means that you are dead. He sent me to an insect disease specialist, who had recently arrived from North Carolina.

Dr. Mullen told me not to tell my wife where I was going. She had called the doctor at University hospital prior to my arrival and told him that I was not sick, but suffering from depression, because we didn’t have any children.

Actually, we had started several children, but I learned from her psychologist in 1993, that she had aborted them. Now I know that I have many biological children. A fertility clinic in Asheville sold my semen for eight years . . . labeling the donor a Cherokee architect in Charlotte with 8 years of college! Some of those test tube offspring have contacted me.

The new doctor gave me two weeks to live. I had several lethal diseases that are carried by ticks, living on the Russian Steppes. He put me on intravenous rocephen for 30 days. I could walk normally in three days. All of my memory was back within two weeks.

As soon as my brain was working again, Gene Stuart began introducing me to her friends and acquaintances, who needed the services of an architect. Thus, began the “Golden Era” of my architectural career.

Vivi singing to me in my house on December 19, 1990. I had just baptized her in the Master shower stall with microwaved water from Toms Brook. She is wearing a fancy French-style robe. At the end of the video, you will see this room as it looked in 1993.

By the time I met Vivi at the Smithsonian Senior Staff Christmas party on December 15, 1990 I was fit as a fiddle. I was able to prevent Vivi from committing suicide that night. She had been intentionally prescribed the three “suicide drugs” by an evil doctor in France.

Vivi’s unconditional love saved me over the next two years . . . even though most of the time, it was just my daily fax message from France. There was no internet or email in 1991. As many of my friends recognized, I had been emotionally beaten to a pulp by the horrific situation in my house. There was no guilt. I had been faithful for throughout the marriage until then, while my supposed wife hadn’t.

The video that you are about to see was filmed three weeks before the Washington, DC gourmet food competition at Union Station across from the National Capitol. Vivi joined me at the sample table. She wore the big wedding ring from her former marriage. She told Chef Julia Child in French that we had gotten married on the night of December 15, 1990! LOL Yes, I did meet Julia Child in person.

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