CALLIE WALKER GREW up in central Virginia, where her father farmed cattle on land he’d purchased in the 1960s. Walker, 56, with bright blue eyes and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, doesn’t know how much land her father originally owned. “It was certainly hundreds of acres,” she said, “and it may have been thousands.”
He spent 30 years paying it off, Walker told me, and succeeded, largely, by selling off a parcel of land here or there to pay the bills. When Walker’s father died in 2014, at 91, he left his three children portions of the remaining acreage; Walker’s inheritance — green, rolling farmland unfurling on either side of a small country road — totaled 134 acres.
Walker attended Princeton Theological Seminary and spent years living communally and working for racial justice. She had known since the 1990s that she wanted to use the property she would one day inherit for some kind of intentional community.
By January 2020, Walker’s intentions for the land clarified: She wanted to give it away.
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