Jay Strafford: Nelson County provides endless fodder for Elle Cosimano, Rita Mae Brown

For decades, folks in bucolic Nelson County farmed or found work in Charlottesville or Waynesboro.

But not Earl Hamner.

Samantha Koon Jones: UVa prof pens a family drama for the digital age

The author of the beloved novel “Spencer’s Mountain" — which led to the equally cherished, long-running television show “The Waltons” — kept close ties with his Nelson County family but spent most of his adult life as a television writer and producer in California.

With the arrival of the Wintergreen Resort in Nelson County’s Blue Ridge Mountains, choices multiplied, and some writers — such as elderly Phyllis A. Whitney, whose canon centered on romantic suspense — relocated to the nearby Monroe Institute.

Rita Mae Brown, who also moved to Nelson, focuses on rural areas and pursuits. Meanwhile, a re