Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mapping the Farm

Mapping the Farm

Hildebrand, John

Paperback

Series: Minnesota

Biographies GeneralGifts & Stationery GeneralGeneral United States History

Publisher Price: $22.95

ISBN10: 0873514149
ISBN13: 9780873514149
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: Oct 15 2001
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.69 Depth: 8.41
Language: English
An evocative history of four generations of a Minnesota farm family and a chronicle of their way of life.

To some, the fields and farms of the Upper Midwest all look the same, but to the people who have struggled to raise families and make a living from the soil, each farm is a small kingdom with a rich and often troubled history. In Mapping the Farm, John Hildebrand, whom the New Yorker magazine praised for his skill of mind and craft, focuses on the O'Neills, the family of his wife Sharon, and their 240 acres near Rochester, Minnesota.

When William O'Neill began raising dairy cows in Minnesota in 1880, America was a nation of farmers. A little over a hundred years later, William's grandson Ed is too old and ill to continue farming. The farm is being chopped into subdivisions, an interstate has cut off access to the river, and changing technology and the tightening market have made small farms a thing of the past. Ed's children and grandchildren gather to try to find a way to keep the farm in the family.

In this absorbing and hauntingly beautiful book, Hildebrand tells the story of four generations of farming O'Neills and, in doing so, tells a quintessentially American story of land and labor, memory and loss--and one family's struggle to keep their dream alive. From boom times to bust, the bloody farm strikes of the Great Depression to the bittersweet optimism of a county fair, Hildebrand weaves a narrative that is at once an elegy for a vanishing way of life and a celebration of the tenacious and deeply held American values that have made today's way of life possible.

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