THE BIG HOUSE
After a career in veterinary medicine, beginning in 1945, that took Bill and June to places like Coral, Battle Creek. and Lakeview Michigan, Rapid City South Dakota, and Marion Indiana, Mom and Dad moved to Bethesda, MD in 1967. With two strapping teenage boys still at home, and not particularly enamored with urban, sedentary life, they began looking for yet another get away. June saw a small three-line advertisement for a farmette outside Staunton, Virginia and met the local realtor. The realtor had a list of properties to be looked at but Bill and June insisted on seeing "that run-down property" that had been advertised. It was "love at first sight". So in the fall of 1969, with money left them by June's mother, Hazel Maude (Shipman) Hudnut, who had passed away in the early spring, they purchased 37 acres of the John T. Shield's plantation.
Bill and June, along with Dick and John, would leave Friday evening and return late Sunday evening from the "farm". John became an expert "fence puller", Dick became adept at "fix-it" projects, and "Dad and Mom" cleaned, patched, painted, and cleaned some more. By the end of that first summer they had the slave quarters habitable and had finished replacing windows and closing in the "big house". By the time Bob was "discharged" from the Army and moved to the farm in the summer of 1970, the big house was well on its way to becoming "habitable". Dick and John continued there weekends "visits" with their folks as their schedules permitted.
Summers, weekends (long and short), and vacations centered around the farm for the parents and their boys. When Bill retired, he and June built a house on their lot on the Leelanaw Pennisula north of Traverse City, MI,. They lived in it one summer and then sold the property. They decided they would rather live in Florida for the winter and enjoy summer at the farm in the Valley. This they did until June's death in 2001.
Bill had always had an interest in family history. Following a serious heart attack, open-heart surgery, and beginning a convelescence that would take the rest of his life, Bill and June began to pursue finding out all they could about the family. Within three years they had discovered th farm they purchased is located 45 miles south of the original family homestead established in 1745. How fitting that as the nation celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976, the William and June L. (Hudnut) Rader clan was celebrating a return to their roots.
John had an idea of having the entire family commit to gathering once a year on the "fourth of July". Within a year or two, the "4th of July porch picture" became the signature of each family member's memory of the farm. There is now a record, from 1980 to present, of the family, how it grew, and who was able and not able to attend that year.
Bob and Dick would "open" the farm in mid April anticipating the folks' return and then "close" it up in mid to late October after the Bill and June had left for Florida. In between, there would be visits by all the family.