One developer had offered $17 million, but the family reached a deal with the state, which agreed to the Whitlock provision, so long as the Wrights retained liability for the two acres on which his house sits. The Wrights were happy to do so. After Whitlock dies or leaves, the plot will revert to the state.
Whitlock is immensely grateful. The pale green wood-sided house is where he raised four children and nursed his wife, Elizabeth, before cancer and Alzheimer's took her life in July. The farm is where he worked his body to the breaking point, roamed all over and, year by year, came to see the Wright clan as family. Why would he want to go anywhere else?
"It just means home, that's it," he said.
Southern Cecil has always been his universe. He did visit New Jersey and travel south to Williamsburg, Va.; he has been across the bay to Baltimore a couple of times. That's about it.
Part of his inheritance is a thick, rich Eastern Shore drawl. Old corncobs get tossed in a "pahl." He fishes in Pond "Crick."
Whitlock was continuing tradition when, at age 20, he pitched up at Grove Farm in late 1945. His father, John, was a farmhand on this very spread, and his father worked on another farm.
He was hired at $99 a month by Dr. Arthur Wright, Don's grandfather, who wore a suit vest and New York sophistication. Wright bought the farm in 1936, partly, Don says, as a hideaway for himself and his mistress. By the time he retired 10 years later, he was head of surgery at New York University's medical school. The doctor had married well: His father-in-law, John B. Stanchfield, was lieutenant governor of New York and Mark Twain's lawyer.
When Dr. Wright, as people still refer to him, died in 1948, his son Stanchfield Wright took over the farm. His other son, Richard, became a lawyer in Baltimore. The Baltimore Wrights, including Don and his seven siblings, visited the farm on weekends and summers, which is how they grew so close to Joe Whitlock.
When Whitlock started in 1945, the last slave born on the property - known today only as Brad - had died just five years earlier. And horses still pulled the plows. A momentous change came in 1950 ("sumpin' like 'at") with the arrival of the first tractor, an Allis-Chalmers model. That made life easier, but farming remained grueling, especially at harvest.
