Sultry days and peach ice cream

Niggerfoot.

Even when I was a child the name of the crossroads was shocking.

Peach ice cream made me think about Niggerfoot today.

Bear with me.

Niggerfoot, not even much of a wide spot at the intersection of state routes 54 and 671, was between Ashland and Montpelier in Hanover County. When I was a child, if you wanted to get to the farm where my maternal grandmother lived, you turned right at Niggerfoot. Even in the late 1940s and early 50s, the crossroads was pretty much abandoned. The post office and what was probably a country store were empty and close to falling down.

When I first saw it, the Niggerfoot name was on a black-on-white state sign alongside the two-lane highway.

Once we made the turn to the right, my grandmother's farm was about a quarter mile down a tar-and-gravel road. If you drove a little farther along that road, you'd come to Scotchtown, a farm that dates back to 1717. Scotchtown was where Patrick Henry lived from 1771 to 1778 with his wife and six children, and it was his home during his most influential period in Virginia politics -- when he gave his famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech at St. John's Episcopal Church here in Richmond and when he was elected Governor of Virginia.

Nobody was living in Henry's old house in the early 1950s, and when we kids would go rambling through the woods around my grandmother's farm, a favorite destination was Scotchtown. (It was still privately owned when I was a kid. It was purchased in 1958 by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, restored, and turned into a tourist destination.)

But back to Niggerfoot.

As a kid, I always wondered about the origin of the name, but that wasn't something I pursued until today. The crossroads sign is long gone. If you Google the name you'll find mentions of both Niggerfoot and an alternate name, Negro Foot, mainly in family histories of people who lived nearby.

The Niggerfoot version of the name appears to go back at least 150 years. It pops up in a passing mention of Stonewall Jackson's well-known Stonewall Brigade, which is said to have marched down the Niggerfoot Road and attacked the Union Army's right flank at Mechanicsville during the Civil War.

But why that name?

Googling leads only to supposition. I found a handful of 18th- and 19th-century references to cockfighting. Some cocks with one black leg were referred to as "niggerfoot cocks." Perhaps somebody who owned fighting cocks once lived at the crossroads. Or maybe cockfights were held there long, long ago.

But what does all of this have to do with ice cream?

It's hot as Hades in Richmond today. On sultry Sunday afternoons more than a half-century ago, my grandmother's extended family would gather in the shade of a great walnut tree near the farm's modest peach orchard. We kids would have picked peaches from the trees in the morning, and after Sunday dinner, the adults supervised as my cousins and I took turns churning peach ice cream by hand. I remember it as being the best ice cream I ever had.

No, I didn't churn peach ice cream today. But I did buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's Peach Cobbler ice cream on my way home from fitness class this morning.

It won't be as good as what we made at my grandmother's farm. But it will be a pleasant treat this evening.

And that's why peach ice cream prompted memories of the little crossroads once called Niggerfoot.