Agriculture Magazine, Summer, 2022 - Page 17
Perry Backus Photo
Close to 220 acres of the Paddock Ranch located north of Darby near the intersection of the Old Darby and Lake Como roads was preserved through a conservation easement through Ravalli County’s Open Lands Program.
Wild saved: Longtime Bitterroot Valley landowner conserves family ranch Perry Backus Ravalli Republic
This article orignally appeared in the Ravalli Republic on Jan 17, 2020. Anna Mae Paddock smiles as she sat at her kitchen table and thought about all the wildlife she saw last summer while irrigating her family ranch just below Lake Como. “There is a meadowlark out there that kind of scolds me when I go up the hill. They seem to like it best more or less away from the people. “And once in a while, there’s a blue jay. You don’t see them much. They like the pine trees. “But the one I’m most interested in is that kestrel. I just thought it was a small hawk. He’s kind of a pretty little thing. He mainly stays here in the head of this
draw and really doesn’t go off that way. And, of course, there’s the owl and the redtail. “And the turkeys. I don’t know where they go. They seem to be quite the travelers. Sometimes they come through here and then they disappear. One time this summer, there was a hen with her four little ones when the grasshoppers were bad. They were just picking them off.” She’s happy this day to know that it will always be that way. Paddock, who grew up in a small ranching family in the Bitterroot Valley, knows all about the challenges that come with keeping the land in agriculture. Her ancestors arrived in the Bitterroot Valley in a covered wagon in
1900. Sometime back in the late 1930s, her great-uncle, Fred Shawver, bought the Elderkin place that many nowadays recognize for its beautiful old barn just off the Old Darby Road below Como Peaks. It was the place that she would come to call home. “Just the first five years of my life were spent in Stevensville,” Paddock said on a recent afternoon. “All of the rest, I’ve been here.” She’s no stranger to hard work. Her family ran a dairy for a time, where they made good use of the barn that was built in about 1915 for George Elderkin — a Midwestern man who had purchased the original homestead in 1910. Work on the barn came to standstill
