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Biography In 1978, He bought his farm in Cocke County, TN, and for the last 25 years, he has been growing heirloom vegetables, preserving heirloom varieties of seeds and plants of that nature. He has been a listed member of Seed Savers Exchange since 1990, and he has 81 listings with them. When he graduated from high school, John went to Ring-ling School of Art from 1962 through 1966. Then, he went to graduate school in Boston to do print making. He still does a lot of drawing and painting, mostly landscape painting, sometimes even make pictures of produce that he raised. He is also a collector of old time folklores. he has been going down to Louisiana since 1973, and he has collected a lot of stories from old timers, who are in their 70s, 80s, or older. Over those years, a lot of them have the unique stories of that region when they were children and things that were passed down by their fathers or people that they didn’t even know. He is working on a book of those tales in Washington Parish, Louisiana. He also collects a lot here in the Smokey Mountains from old timers that live near his farm. "I try to get the history of the area and the way they farm in connection with these seeds and seed saving because it’s also important to reserve the oral history and the way they farmed, types of crops they grew, what they were used for, how they preserved them, the history of them, where they got them, and anything related to that." Articles
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John was born in 1943, and still live in a house that his grandfather built in 1927. He has been interested in gardening and farming since he was a young child. His first garden was in 1954. That was when his dad took him out to the backyard and showed him how to plant corn and potatoes, and that was the first garden he has ever had. That was since then he has always had a garden every year. 