Today there stands a small museum in the town of Schuyler, Virginia, not far from Charlottesville. It occupies the old Schuyler Community Center, where Earl Hamner, Jr. attended school. After living in Virginia for forty years, I finally decided to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive south to Nelson County to see it for myself—a pilgrimage of sorts. As I’ve been researching my own family’s life during the 1930s, it seemed fitting to visit the place that inspired the novel Spencer’s Mountain and which eventually became The Walton’s.
I grew up in the 1970s when there were two television shows that held a special place in our family: The Waltons and M*A*S*H. Looking back fifty years, they seem to have had little in common, except perhaps for the close family bonds that developed over years of living together. The doctors and nurses of M*A*S*H, thrown together under the worst of circumstances, created a kind of family that viewers came to love over the show’s remarkable eleven-season run from 1972 to 1983—far longer than the actual three-year Korean War in which it was set.
Both shows were built more around relationships than events. Of the two, MASH was always my favorite, but The Waltons created something equally special. It centered on a family of eleven—seven children, their parents, and both grandparents—all living under one roof in what today we’d call a multigenerational home. Somehow, it worked.
The Waltons aired on CBS for nine seasons, from September 14, 1972, to June 4, 1981. It began with the holiday television movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, which premiered on December 19, 1971.
The show’s roots reach back even further. Earl Hamner Jr.’s 1961 novel inspired the 1963 film Spencer’s Mountain, starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara. Hamner, who also served as the off-screen narrator for The Waltons, based the story on his own childhood in Virginia. While the film relocated the Spencer family to Wyoming, the television series wisely returned them to the hills of central Virginia, where the story truly belonged.
Growing up in the 1970s, the Great Depression felt impossibly distant. Forty years earlier? It seemed like ancient history. As a teenager, it never really occurred to me that my own parents had lived through those years. Not as adults—that would have been my grandparents—but as children and adolescents. They would come of age during the 1940s, another era with its own unforgettable landmarks.
Writing this in 2026, that same forty-year span no longer feels so enormous. Looking back forty years today takes me not to the Depression, but to the mid-1980s. And I remember those years vividly. In fact, I loved that era.
Our own family had a version of the Waltons. My father’s sister and her family lived on a ranch in southern Oregon during the 1970s. Their property had towering fir trees, open meadows dotted with cattle, chickens wandering the yard, and a large vegetable garden—many of the same elements I admired on television each week. Their family was smaller, with five children instead of seven, and our grandparents spent summers there in a trailer rather than in the “Big House,” but the feeling was much the same. It was a place where family gathered, where everyone belonged, and where life seemed to move at a slower pace.
I’ve come to realize however, that I’m no longer John-Boy Walton, writing about his childhood. These days I’m closer to Will Geer, who was seventy years old when he played Grandpa Walton. My beard has turned whiter than I ever expected, although I’d like to think I spend considerably less time in a rocking chair on the front porch than he did. And while the original novel followed Clay Spencer, a mill worker in a small Virginia town who struggled to raise eight children while building a family home and helping his oldest son, Clay-Boy—the inspiration for John-Boy Walton—go to college, well here we are, nearly ninety years removed from that story, helping our own granddaughter prepare for college.
I like the symmetry of that. Except, perhaps, for the rocking chair. Then again, Cracker Barrel has plenty of those.
And biscuits with sausage gravy. Hmm…
The actor Richard Thomas (born 1951) is best known for his leading role as John “John-Boy” Walton Jr. in the CBS tv-series The Waltons. Thinking back now about the television series, we were nearly the same age, he acting a television role while I was watching it.
My Retired Life 