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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Rural workers are hit even worse, some are quitting jobs they can no 
> longer afford to drive to.

Real estate wisdom of the past told people to buy up a bit of rural land as 
quickly as possible because of the cliche 'ain't makin' any more land' and 
the 
number of Gentleman Country Dweller Esquires that were all flocking to the 
countryside in their retirement.

The principles in the articles forwarded by Don obtain as well.  With the 
true cost of motor fuel beginning to reveal itself, maintianing the modern 
lifestyle on a remote estate is rapidly becoming economically unfeasible for 
the 
GCDE's.

Prices haven't come down much yet, which I attribute mainly to denial.  But 
it's coming.

I'm down to the front of our place a lot now due to mowing the hay every 
early morning and the normal gardening bits, and I've just about quit keeping 
a  
vehicle count because most of the time I can spend three or more hours down 
there and see not a single vehicle.  Whenever there has been a serious lull 
in 
the gas prices in the past few years, the rate would go up to a vehicle every 
five minutes, most accounted for by the same vehicles going in an out every 
hour 
or two.  

There's a bit of real estate my father owns about five miles back from the 
road in very rural Russell Co. Va.  His grandparents lived there in the 20's 
and 
30's.  The property is marked by the still standing flue, vandals having 
stolen the hand hewn chestnut logs from the walls of the house sometime in 
the 
70's.  And they could get by with that because to visit the property one 
picks 
their way along the old wagon road now grown up with mature trees the entire 
five miles.

Yet, old photos and storied froms till living memory tell how this hollow, 
Hamblin Creek, was edge to edge farms the whole way to my great grandparents 
farm and beyond.  The road was maintained, the bottom land was all in crops, 
the 
hillsides were all in pasture, and it supported a population of more than a 
hundred (as many as two hundred).  

It's all forest now.  Why?  In the late 40's, with the Rural Electrification 
Act, electricity was run down Gravel Lick Road rather than through Hamlin 
Creek.  One by one as the geezers died off or moved, no one took up residence 
in 
the old farmsteads and they fell to ruin, then to forest.

Electricity then.  Gasoline now.  How will increasingly expensive gasoline 
affect where the population lives and what land is worth?   Can't say yet, 
but 
I'm thining a lot!      </HTML>