Sleeping among ancestors

Martha Venable Johnson, the third Martha in her lineage, holds up a portrait of her grandmother, Martha Fishback Venable, inside the bedroom they have used two generations apart. The current matriarch of the family has spent the last four years bringing her family’s homestead back to life.

Martha Venable Johnson stood in a pasture on her Clark County farm and watched the eastern sky turn pink as the sun set behind her. A sea of rolling hills undulated for miles before her, giving way to the mountains near Berea. “How can you describe this to someone without showing it to them? There are no words,” she said as she lifted her phone and snapped a photo.

The lifelong farmer is the latest in her family to spend evenings observing the sunset from FishBack Farm, a home to horses and cattle and members of her lineage dating back to the 1850s. Martha inherited the farm in 2021 from her father and aunt, who, as they grew older, could no longer maintain the family home at the heart of the property, much less the 27 sheds and barns that dot the landscape. After their deaths, Martha started restoring her childhood home to its former glory. With every tower of newspapers she cleared, another piece of family memorabilia resurfaced. Photo albums, sterling silver tea sets and Grandma Frankie Venable’s fantastical landscape paintings revealed a family legacy she wanted to preserve.

To bring the homestead to life, Martha has hung old family portraits on any wall that can hold them. Though she lives in nearby Paris, she has set up a room for herself in FishBack — she now calls it her vacation home. During nights spent at FishBack, her dogs and her ancestors’ pictures on the walls keep her company.

Martha recalled a conversation with her friend Clare Sipple Enoch, who had been helping her piece together her family tree. As they sifted through everything from wallet-sized snapshots to life-size portraits, Clare asked Martha if she was scared to sleep with so many dead family members staring down at her.

“I thought about that and I put the pictures in the room,” Martha said. “But they don’t bother me; they’re family. They’re looking out for me.”

Martha’s daughter, Ashley Woodford Johnson, has witnessed her mother’s ascension as family historian. While it will be a long time before Martha joins her relatives on the walls of the old house, Ashley already knows she will play a similar role.

“There’s so many things people don’t know about nowadays,” Ashley said. “So whether I wanted to or not, I’d be ignorant for not keeping our history going, because if not, it’s gonna be gone.”