Over a nearly 50-year journey, their names have become a part of this land. Ashofteh and Wood joined together to become Ashwood, and their story inspires the work we do here today and hopefully for generations to come.
Ashwood Mountain RetreaT
In the face of looming political unrest in the Middle East, a German-Iranian newlywed couple, Ashofteh and Reinhart Bouman, known to everyone as “A” and Wood, left Europe and the Middle East to find a place they could call home.
Wood’s background growing up in post-World War II Germany was one of the driving motivations to find a place where they could build a simple, honest homestead and, through hard work and determination, create a modest haven to start a family. By way of a Polish cargo ship, they arrived in Newark, New Jersey, in 1977 with a motorcycle and two saddlebags filled with only basic essentials.
An article in Mother Earth News and cool temperatures directed them southwest, looking for a place to build their life together.
“We were just following our nose,” they say. That nose led them to West Virginia in May, when the hills were erupting with the lush vibrance of spring. They pulled into a gas station and asked a man sitting on the porch if there “was any land available around here.” The man drove them four miles down the road to the end of the valley to meet his brother and sister-in-law, Bud and Ethel Holt, who were tending an old family farmstead.
Bud and Ethel let Wood and A shelter in their toolshed for two months while they negotiated the purchase of the land.
Wood and A raised two daughters, Fay and Tia, born on the land the family still holds sacred, lived out of their own garden, and built the structures that still house their family and community gatherings today.
Wood and A’s story and life’s work are inextricably linked to the values that Fay and her husband, Pete, seek to cultivate at Ashwood Mountain Retreat Center. At a time when America was considered “the land of opportunity”, Wood and A and their daughters found freedom in the hills of West Virginia, and Ashwood Mountain Retreat Center hopes to help people rediscover that freedom and purpose within themselves.
Over a nearly 50-year journey, their names have become a part of this land. Ashofteh and Wood joined together to become Ashwood, and their story inspires the work we do here today and hopefully for generations to come.