Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

Though few of us now live close to the soil, the world we inhabit has been sculpted by our long national saga of settlement. At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the continent. It lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story, too: she is the daughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized in her first two books but has not carried on.

In this clear-eyed, lyrical account, Brox twines the two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, Brox also considers the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them; and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness--and its intricate connection to cultivation--which changed as our ties to the land loosened, as terror of the wild was replaced by desire for it. Exploring these strands with neither judgment nor sentimentality, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of the farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries on in our collective imagination.

"Brox (Five Thousand Days Like This One) considers the farm's practical and symbolic roles in both American consciousness and her own family in this poetic rumination. 'In America,' she writes, 'not only do individual dreams have their origins in farming, the notion of the Republic is stowed there as well.' Telling the 'larger story of cultivation,' Brox gracefully moves between personal recollection and historical narrative. Her paternal grandparents — immigrants from Lebanon — acquired a small farm in the coastal hills north of Boston in 1901; it offered an escape from tenement living but isolated them from fellow Middle Eastern immigrants. Turning outward, Brox considers how, in earlier eras, the character of farms reconfigured the American landscape. The Pilgrims' fenced-in farms contrasted sharply with the open spaces in which Native Americans grew their crops; later, the need for building material in the burgeoning textile cities saw the coastal Northeast farmed for granite via deep stone quarries. And these days, she writes, the size of a farm can mean the difference between prosperity and failure, even as property taxes make land prohibitively expensive. Brox candidly reveals arguments between her father and brother over how to save their farm, as well as her own struggles to carve out a place for herself on it. The story has been written elsewhere, but Brox tells it with a clear, impassioned simplicity. Agent, Cynthia Cannell. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In this clear-eyed, lyrical account, Brox twines two narratives--personal and historical--to trace the evolution of the romanticized family farm to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture.