Vaughn Family Pecan Farm Scottsburg, Indiana grows 800 pounds of nuts

Virgil Vaughn's family and neighbors still halfway expect him to step out into his pecan orchard.

This autumn marks the third harvest at Vaughn Family Pecan Farm since “the nut man’s” death, but his undeniable passion for pecans has kept his unusual project and intimate family business going.

Every weekend in October, the people who loved Virgil most spend hours working in his orchard of pecan trees, located about 35 miles from downtown Louisville in Scottsburg, Indiana. They all work day jobs, but on Saturdays and Sundays, they bring in as many nuts as they can from the 300 or so trees before the deer, squirrels, bluejays, and crows go after them. Then they spend countless hours husking the nuts by hand from their green ball-like casing, the oil from the husks stains their fingers and hands black for days.

They do it all in the name of a kind, eccentric, brutally honest, and skilled man they couldn’t help but adore.

“To know that a man of his caliber had that much passion for something, that keeps me driven,” his neighbor, Michael Bowels, said.

The bounty last year, which they sell through the farm's Facebook page and at the Scott County Farmers Market, totaled about 800 pounds of in-shell pecans, a sliver compared to what you’d see from major commercial pecan producers in places like Texas and Georgia.

That doesn't matter, though, to the small team Michael leads that keeps this operation running.

The annual harvest isn't about making money. It's about Virgil’s unconventional legacy as "the nut man."

There’s no denying that Virgil’s dream of growing pecans in Southern Indiana was a highly unusual ambition.

His deep knowledge of trees and nuts was largely self-taught, but he worked with the University of Texas to select the right varieties of pecan trees that would thrive in this climate. Some species of pecan trees are native to Indiana, but Virgil had never met anyone else in the area who had grown and harvested them successfully.

"The nut man" nickname wasn't just a description of the work he did. It often reflected how some people in the community felt about his atypical passion.

“If they told him it couldn’t be done, it just fueled him to prove them wrong,” Michael said.

Virgil had a track record of pursuing unorthodox careers. He spent 28 years working on the Alaskan Pipeline where he also did a stint as a trapper and even panned for gold. Then he moved south to Indiana and met his future wife, Neda, at the doctor’s office where she worked. With her son's encouragement, she agreed to go on a date with Virgil in December 1994. They were such a natural fit that they married weeks later on Jan. 28, 1995.

He planted the pecan trees on their 24-acre property that spring. While their love bloomed quickly, the orchard would take much longer to grow. Pecan trees aren’t short-term investments. By Virgil’s calculations, he expected it would take seven to 11 years for them to produce but by taking wood from older trees and grafting it onto his young trees, in theory, he could shorten the wait time.

When the first harvest came in 2007, he didn’t have the machinery needed to pick the pecans. So Virgil fashioned a lift of sorts to his truck and backed it up to each tree. He’d climb into the branches, reach for the pecans, and toss them down by hand. Several more years would pass before his farm could afford a shaker that rattled the tree so hard the pecans fell from the branches and another tool that collected the bright green orbs from the ground like the machine that picks up golf balls at a driving range.

Even so, that first year, he was thrilled.

But just as his wild pecan vision became a reality, the future of the farm became much less clear.

Virgil steadily began losing his sight.

He hired Michael to help mow the area around the trees while he prepared and recovered from his first eye surgery. As Virgil's vision declined, Michael took on more of a role in fertilizing and harvesting. After three unsuccessful surgeries on his eyes, Virgil knew Michael would have to eventually take over the pecan farm. As the years passed, Michael became an investor in the company and general manager of the whole operation.

Virgil never totally let it go, though. "The nut man" had memorized everything there was to know about his pecan trees. Even after he lost his vision, Virgil could identify the species just by feeling the shell of its nuts. He’d spend hours sitting in his home, feeling his way through totes of pecans and freeing them from their husks.

Even though he could barely see, he could sense which of his trees might be ready for harvest first. Sometimes he knew when the limbs needed to be trimmed. So much to Neda's dismay, Virgil would call Michael at his day job to send him out to the orchard later that night to see if his hunch was right.

And it usually was.

After that first harvest, Virgil had proven he could grow pecans in Southern Indiana. But then, he had to convince folks to pay a premium price for his homegrown, hand-husked morsels.

When Virgil was alive he loved to offer samples. He’d let prospective customers crack into the nuts themselves so they could taste the difference between his product and what they’d buy on the commercial store shelves. All the while, he’d tell stories about how he managed to grow the trees and the details of the different species he had on his farm.

Some buyers could taste the freshness and would spend roughly $6 a pound for the nuts.

In other cases, his family speculates they bought just enough to get Virgil to stop talking.

“You couldn’t get away from the man when he started to tell you stories,” Neda's son, Roger Vaughn said, with a good-natured laugh.

“He loved to share whatever he knew,” Neda remembered.

That knowledge went beyond the nuts and eventually took hold in other parts of the state through trees. Over the years, Virgil eagerly gave away small trees, seeds, and advice, so that anyone who had the faintest interest could grow pecans, too.

“When he first started out, he was comically given the name ‘the nut man,’ and they didn’t always mean it nicely,” Roger said. “But now it’s not a joke to people anymore.”

Virgil never quite said it out loud, but in the final years of his life, his loved ones believe "the nut man" took on a second passion project beyond the pecans.

He wanted to make sure Neda would have everything she needed after he died.

He put off buying new equipment for the pecan farm and instead bought a beautiful remote-controlled fireplace in his house. All the while, he apologized to Michael, again and again, for the delay in upgrades for the harvest. He also arranged for both of Neda’s sons to move to the farm, so that she’d have all the help she’d need if he ever passed.

Neda believes he must have sensed his time was running short. His vision had withered, but in general, his health seemed OK.

Then his appetite started to fade, too. Eventually, he stopped eating.

When he finally decided to check in to the hospital, the doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer and his condition declined rapidly. Nine days later, Neda brought him back to their home, the farm, and his trees.

She thought she’d have a few more days with him there in hospice care, but he passed within hours on June 7, 2022. From their house, Michael and Beth heard the ambulance drive away without the sirens on and rushed over to be at Neda’s side.

It all happened painfully fast.

But even so, Beth and Michael kept the business going. They kept selling the pecans. When the air chilled and the harvest began, Virgil wasn’t there to sense when a tree was ready for shaking. He wasn’t picking through totes of pecans and guessing what species they might be.

The loyal team he built, however, was dutifully there. The summer after his death Bowels started selling the pecans at Scott County Farmers Market. From March to September, the pair spend four hours each Saturday selling the nuts. In the off-season, Beth manages the Facebook page and arranges for purchases by appointment.

The Bowels say they’ll help Neda with it as long as they physically can.

In an unusual twist, this year Neda's helping in the field, too.

She’s always thought of herself as more of an indoor person, but this year is the first time Neda has been out with her son and neighbors working the harvest, too. On an autumn day, Neda’s fingers were still black from working in the pecan field the weekends before. As she clutched a framed portrait of her and Virgil, the black stain on her fingers matched his.

“That’s the only reason I want it to go on, because it was his passion, and he didn’t get to complete what he wanted to do,” she said tearfully.

To so many people Virgil was "the nut man."

But to Neda, he was the love of her life.

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at [email protected].