Amy Fewell once listened to a woman share a dramatic dream. The United States had been thrust into impenetrable darkness. Then, in the distance, small flames began to appear, dancing like candles over the blackened landscape. These flames were all that could be seen.
“These are homesteads,” Ms. Fewell recalled the woman saying. “These are farms that are going to be a light in hard times. They will be places of refuge.”
This occurrence is an example of what Ms. Fewell likes to call “God things,” and it was hardly the first time she’d experienced one. Shortly before her encounter with the dream-sharer, Ms. Fewell had been rummaging around in her bedroom and came across the Bible she’d had since childhood. As it happened, stumbling upon this bit of her youth would turn out to be a course correction for her.
Ms. Fewell had been enduring a prolonged period of discouragement. Her organization, Homesteaders of America, wasn’t picking up the steam that she felt it needed to succeed. Furthermore, she felt it was taking away from the more important task of raising her children. Her husband also wasn’t yet on board with the venture. To top it all off, she was feeling the pressures that come with leadership. And leadership wasn’t something that had ever come naturally to her.
“I don’t think this is really for me,” she had told herself. Then, she opened her old Bible.
Out fell a note that a friend had written on the inside. It read: “You are a leader. I have anointed you to lead.” A rush of memories came flooding back to her.
The words her friend had transcribed were attributed to the first of a series of traveling evangelists who, on three separate occasions, when Ms. Fewell was between the ages of 13 and 17, had prayed over her.
“They all said: ‘God has created you to be a leader. You are not a follower. You are a leader,'” she recalled.
None of the evangelists knew each other.
However, despite what seemed to be an obvious sign of the direction her life would be heading in, Ms. Fewell resisted.
“It was hilarious to me because I was the most timid young woman ever,” she said, chuckling. “I was always afraid of getting in trouble. I just wanted to be really good. I just wanted to grow up, get married, and have kids. I always ran away from [leadership].”
But as she sat on her bed, with her old Bible open in her hands and her friend’s transcription of the evangelist’s words laid out before her, something changed. Ms. Fewell realized that to continue with Homesteaders of America wasn’t her own will.
“This was from God,” she said. “It gave me the strength to go on.”
Finding Her Calling
Ms. Fewell had founded Homesteaders of America (HOA) in 2016. Her background would hardly suggest a future in promoting homesteading, however. Though her father kept a large garden and her grandfather raised beef cattle, Ms. Fewell admittedly didn’t pay much attention to their farming efforts. After she and her husband were married, they lived on a small lot of about half an acre, and neither had any real desire to homestead. Then, in 2009, their first son was born.At barely 1 year old, he was diagnosed with childhood asthma. Doctors immediately prescribed a series of powerful medications. Ms. Fewell was hesitant.
“It just seemed counterproductive,” she said. “I knew there was a better way.”
Her desire to help her son led her down a more holistic path. She researched herbalism and began drinking raw milk and eating chemical-free food. Despite her husband’s initial reluctance, the lingering recession of the period convinced him that homesteading was worthwhile, and the family began successfully cultivating their little half-acre plot. But something was missing.
“I realized there really wasn’t any real community support for homesteaders,” Ms. Fewell said. “The only encouragement I was getting was from my friends online, who happened to be homesteaders.”
“She said: ‘What do you think about having a conference?’ and, at this point, nobody was hosting conferences like this,” Ms. Accetta-Scott said. “Her vision was to host this conference just to bring people together. It was just about community at the time.”
The idea, as Ms. Accetta-Scott recalls, was simple: Bring a bunch of homesteaders together and have them learn from one another. People could share their successes and failures and get to know their fellow Americans in a wholly unique and original way.
“When she came to me with that idea, I literally got goosebumps,” Ms. Accetta-Scott said. “I was like, ‘You need to do this. You have got to get this done.’”
“Bringing community together was something I knew how to do,” said Ms. Fewell, who had spent a career in media as the general manager of a magazine. However, it was more than just logistical know-how that was pushing her to begin this conference.
“I felt like God was saying that this was something you need to do,” she said. Still, she viewed the endeavor more as stewarding a community rather than leading one.
But HOA had begun, and the tracks were being laid for a train that Ms. Fewell had no way of stopping.
Tapping Into a Need
The first indication that this idea might be bigger than she ever imagined happened at the first conference.Held in early October 2017, after a year of planning, Ms. Fewell expected about 300 people to show up for the inaugural event. But 1,500 people did.
“It was this ‘wow’ moment,” she said. “This was way bigger than we thought this was going to be.”
She had tapped into something that the homesteading community at large desperately needed. It was a community yearning for connection. The fact that homesteaders of all levels, from beginners to seasoned pros such as Justin Rhodes and Joel Salatin, turned up made HOA much more than just a conference.
“It brings raw community,” Ms. Accetta-Scott said. “People come to HOA because they know the speakers walk the walk and talk the talk. It’s the knit and grit of success. It puts a spark of life into people.”
The second and third conferences in 2018 and 2019 brought with them ever-increasing numbers. The fourth conference moved online for 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was around this time that Ms. Fewell was in her discouraged slump. Then she found that old Bible, and 2021 brought with it some pretty remarkable “God things,” she said.
Then there was the 2021 HOA conference: 5,000 tickets had been sold in a six-month period. If Ms. Fewell had expected some last-minute drop-outs or stragglers, she was wrong. Every single ticket holder showed up. Traffic to the hosting fairgrounds was so backed up that it was reaching the highway exit miles away. Extra porta potties had to be brought in to accommodate the crowd.
“So many things could have gone wrong,” Ms. Accetta-Scott said. “But not a single person complained.”
The conference, and homesteading in general, it seemed to Ms. Fewell, now had a broader purpose. There was a mission behind it. As Ms. Fewell sees it, that mission is in line with the vision of the dream-sharer. Homesteads will become beacons of light for an America in hard times.
As tickets for the upcoming 2023 conference sold out in 45 days, maxing out the fairgrounds’ 6,000-person capacity, Ms. Fewell is looking for a permanent home for the conference’s future. She sees it as a place where the development of a parallel agricultural system is powered by a fellowship of ministry, small-scale local farms, and homesteading families.
As for herself, Ms. Fewell says that she’s beginning to get over the mindset that she can’t be a leader.
“God is refining me into his plan,” she said. “I want to be a leader. I want to step into that role.”
According to Ms. Accetta-Scott, however, Ms. Fewell has already stepped into that role.
“Amy, without even trying, is a force to be reckoned with,” she said. “She’s created a beast that needs to be unleashed.”
