A farm owned by WVU Potomac State College boasts a history that goes back nearly as far as the establishment of West Virginia itself.
Located just outside Fort Ashby, the Deremer Farm is part of the Potomac State College Agricultural Department. The property is divided on two sides by State Route 46, meaning that motorists who take that route from Fort Ashby into Keyser and then even into Piedmont drive right through College grounds.
“When you are here at the farm, all of what you see cleared here, all of these fields, this was all cleared out to make room for Route 46,” says Lantz Evans. For nine years, Evans has served as an independent contractor for Potomac State College, overseeing operations of the farm. It’s a property and a history for which he has become personally familiar.
The acreage officially became part of the College in 2010, at the request of the great-grandson and namesake of Herbert Deremer, who founded the farm in 1881. For 23 years prior, the land had been leased from the Deremer family to various tenants. For 15 of those years, Evans was one of those who leased the property – first from the Deremers and then from Potomac State College - operating his privately owned Smokey Hollow Farms from here. For the last seven years, he has been working as an independent contractor overseeing the property for PSC.
“My history with this place goes back 22 years,” he says. “But my knowledge of it goes back a lot longer than that.”
And while he no longer lives in the farmhouse (another employee of the College presently calls it home), he does have a personal, and even nostalgic, love of the farm. He knows its history, and it is that history Evans is hoping to preserve.
“My hope is this,” he says, taking a deep breath. “The College has owned the farm now for 16 years and completely controlled it for nine years, so I would like to see the history of the farm addressed and kept. There is a lot of history here in the buildings, and it’s not just the history of the farm but of Fort Ashby and the area. Even the way the barns and the silo and the house itself were built, it’s all historic. They don’t make buildings like this anymore.”
Three original barns on the property are still standing and are functional. Inside are remnants of a past life before the farm found its current purpose as a hay-producing and storage facility. The grains and hay stored here are used to feed the horses on the Keyser campus. Bales of rolled and squared hay are kept in the barns and transported when needed to the stables at Potomac State. But there is evidence still of the dairy cows that used to be located here and of the successful Deremer Dairy that existed from the early part of the 20th century until 1986, when the last of the dairy cows was sold and left the property.
Inside one barn are the original troughs where cows were fed. There are also watering spickets, water pumps on the property, and individual stalls that denote a home for 11 dairy cows at a time. Lofts that illuminate with natural light contain etchings on the walls believed to have been carved by members of the Deremer family.
In the main barn, various portions of the ceiling’s interior are stamped with a painted notation that has existed for almost a century. “Ship to Deremer Farms. Alaska, West Virginia.”
Local historians and history buffs – Evans counts himself as both – know that from 1881 until 1932, the town of Fort Ashby was known as Alaska. It was assigned that name at the time by the United States Postal Service. The name of the town, briefly before it was Alaska, was Frankfort.
That is just a fraction of the fascinating facts about this property. The Deremer family and local history here seem to go hand-in-hand, with changes to the property adapting with current events and changing direction when society and farming itself were doing the same.
“You can go into all of the buildings here and see history and feel history and get a sense for what life and farming used to be like back in the day,” Evans said. “There are things that are here – from records to just the way the buildings were built back then – that need to be studied and preserved.”
One of six children, Herbert Deremer was born in 1848 in Centreville, Pa, just south of Bedford.
West Virginia itself was fairly new, having seceded from Virginia in 1863 – two years before the end of the Civil War. At the end of the war, the state began a campaign providing incentives for people “up north” to come farm the land and acquire property. In some cases, land was being granted to eligible farmers who applied for property rights. It is not completely known if the Deremers purchased the property or were given the land by the state under one of these promotional incentives at the time. The move by the new state and its leadership was to promote the state as a destination for business and to create its own agricultural identity separate from Virginia.
Herbert Deremer would have been only 15 years old when West Virginia was established as the 35th state. He was barely 18 when the Civil War ended. At the age of 32, Deremer moved to the property, started construction of a house and farm, and he and his wife raised seven children here. The only known child of the seven to remain on the farm with the family business was son, Charles. Records show that Herbert also began selling off parts of the original acreage to pay medical debt.
Born in 1885, Charles Deremer married Sarah Daniel in 1908, and the couple would also have seven children. Those children included sons Dick, Herbert, George, Henry, and Douglas and daughters Mary and Susan.
In addition to running the family farm and raising children, Charles Deremer also served as the superintendent of Mineral County Roads. In honor of his years in this role, portions of Route 46 are named for him – Chas Deremer Road.
The Deremer Farm – under Charles’ tutelage – experienced an economic boon in the 1920s and in the years leading up to World War II. Charles introduced modern technology – like electricity and plumbing – to the property. The milk produced here was sold to dairies in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. In 1945, the farm enjoyed an exclusive contract with Queen City Dairy in Cumberland. That contract then enabled the Deremer Farm to add more upgrades, and the property underwent renovations to make the barns and buildings more secure and stronger.
When Charles’ health began to decline, his sons, Dick and Henry, became co-managers and later co-owners of the farm. Charles, however, lived and continued to work on the property until his death in 1975 at the age of 90.
Inside the property are documents dating back to the late 1940s and early 1950s that are simply addressed to “Deremer Brothers” – evidence that Charles’ sons were involved in the family business for nearly their entire lives. Dick and Henry remained bachelors and lived in the family home and operated the farm until early 1987. At that time, the federal government announced it had a surplus of milk and encouraged dairy farmers to reconsider the purpose of their farms.
“Dick was a very savvy person,” said Evans. “He could see trends and things happening in the future of agriculture that no one else could see. He would be made fun of for things he would say were going to happen, and then those things would happen.”
In 1997, Dick Deremer (the grandson of the original owner) sold 77 acres to Mineral County for the development of an industrial park. Deremer was criticized by townspeople at the time for that decision.
“I think Dick had this idea that an industrial park would mean good-paying jobs for Mineral County and that would be a good thing for the area,” Evans said.
Reportedly, the condition of the sale was that the county would construct its first building on the property within the first ten years of the purchase. If nothing were built that indicated an industrial park was indeed coming, the land would revert to a surviving member of the Deremer family. The first building erected on the site appeared in 2006, nine years into the 10-year agreement and less than one year before the caveat built into the contract expired.
Dick and Henry both passed away in 1999. Dick was 70, and Henry was 83.
Their brother, Herbert, then inherited the property. But Herbert was now living in Virginia and, at the time, was 74 years old and had no interest in returning to the family farm full-time. Instead, Herbert decided the best use of the property would be to lease it to local farmers who could work the land and keep the property maintained. Lantz Evans was Herbert Deremer’s longest private tenant, leasing the remaining 170-plus acres.
“Herbert gave me guidelines, though,” Evans said. “He had strict rules for what he did and didn’t want to happen here. And from time to time, he would come up and visit and take a look around.”
Then, in 2007, on one of those visits, Deremer made Evans an offer. He asked the then-53-year-old if Evans would be interested in buying the farm outright. Evans said at the time he was uncomfortable with “going into that much debt,” and he politely declined Deremer’s offer.
“Then one day, Herbert didn’t tell anyone about it; he just mentioned Potomac State College was honoring his family and giving him an award,” Evans recollected. “And in 2010, he gifted the land to the College."
Deremer was aware of the College’s agricultural history and its role in educating future farmers, and he felt the land would best be utilized for educational purposes. Just after settling on an agreement with the College in 2010, Herbert Deremer died at the age of 85.
From 2010 until 2017, West Virginia University and Potomac State College agreed to continue to honor Evans’ original lease of the farm for his business. For the next seven years, that was the relationship. In 2017, the College changed the scope of the farm’s future, using it for College educational purposes.
“That’s when I was told the College would not be renewing the lease, but they also said, ‘don’t go anywhere,’ and they asked me to become an independent contractor and oversee the property,” Evans said.
From 2017 until the fall of 2025, the original farmhouse was used as student housing for agricultural students.
“The purpose of the farm today is to make and store the hay for the horses in the College equine program,” Evans said. “I am still very much involved in doing that, but now with more employees and students, I am not as active as I used to be.”
Evans said he also occasionally assists when needed at the College-owned Malone cattle farm, located less than a mile away.
Today, Evans said he has made it somewhat of a personal mission to tell the story of the Deremer Family and their farm and its impact, importance, and legacy in the community.
“The Deremers were very well known around Mineral County and in Fort Ashby,” he said. “Everyone here knows about the farm, but they don’t know its history. And that history is important. My hope is that since Potomac State College owns it, that history can be preserved and protected by the College. There is a lot to learn from how things used to be done and how people used to live. We can learn a lot from history, and this place has a lot of history.”