Thalhimer’s Farm

The department store owner cultivated the hopes of Jewish immigrants

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The following is a sneak peek from our August 2018 issue, headed to newsstands now.

William Thalhimer, owner of the legendary Richmond department store, tried to save the lives of young people fleeing Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Thalhimer rescued 38 people but lived the remainder of his life believing he hadn’t done enough. He never shared the story with his family.

“I think he saw it as a failure because his ambition was to save hundreds of lives and he saved 38. But now, retrospect is 20/20,” says Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt, his great-granddaughter. “He did something really extraordinary. I had no idea [of] the context; this was so unusual, there [weren’t] farms all across America where they saved kids like this.”

Back then Thalhimer met Curty Bondy, director of a German-Jewish agricultural institute that trained young Jews in agriculture, which provided a skill that could allow them to flee persecution and emigrate. Having agriculture experience increased the chances of German Jews successfully immigrating to countries willing to accept Jewish farmers.

Thalhimer, who was of German-Jewish descent, bought Hyde Farmlands in Burkeville, a town in Nottoway County, as a place for the students to stay. The Great Depression had hit, and he had children to feed and a store to run, but he invested $10,000 of his own money and incorporated the farm, making the teens part owners, hoping to sidestep the U.S. immigration quota system of the time.

Robert Gillette wrote a book about the project in 2011 called “The Virginia Plan: William B. Thalhimer & a Rescue From Nazi Germany.” A research team at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum came across the book and incorporated the story into an exhibition to mark the 25th anniversary of the museum’s founding.

Five years in the making, “Americans and the Holocaust” offers a panoramic portrait of American society in the 1930s and ’40s exploring how the Great Depression, isolationism and anti-semitism shaped the American response to Nazism.

An interactive display at the center of the exhibition tells the stories of refugees who tried to escape to the United States during the height of the refugee crisis. Many faced U.S immigration barriers they were unable to overcome, barriers that ultimately halted Thalhimer’s efforts.

“We think of immigration stories often as stories of people coming to major urban centers in the United States. And here was something very different — refugees coming to a farm in Virginia,” says Daniel Greene, curator of the exhibition. “There was something just about the unusual nature of the story that grabbed a lot of us on the research team.”

Thalhimer’s farm was sold shortly after its brief operation in the late 1930s. It then served as a bed-and-breakfast and now sits empty. A neighbor serves as its caretaker and renovated the 1700s home, which now has historical markers.

“I really do feel like it is a special place, and I wish there was some way we could bring refugees there now," Smartt says.

A recent survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany showed that 45 percent of Americans can’t name one of the 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, and the percentage is higher among millennials. The survey authors wrote an op-ed stating that educating people about the Holocaust is the best way to counter anti-Semitism.

“Our goal with the exhibition is to get visitors to ask, to learn more about this history and to get them to ask difficult questions about this history,” Greene says.

"Americans and the Holocaust" continues through the fall of 2021 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

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