Bent Northrop Memorial Library

"I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp. So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great...

Eleven-year-old Nell must spend spring break in the country with an aunt and cousins she has never met, but while there she meets a mysterious, wild girl with a strange connection to horses and an uncanny understanding of Nell.

Fern is a young farm girl who rescues the runt, Wilbur. Wilbur the pig is saved from certain death and Fern visits him every day at her Uncle Homer's farm. But it's Wilbur's friendship with Charlotte the spider that ultimately saves him from the "smoke house." Charlotte's talent for weaving praiseworthy words about Wilbur into her web turns the Zuckerman farm into a tourist attraction.

Growing up on a farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow knows how to do a lot, but when her mom dies after a young illness, Bertie finds herself in charge of four younger siblings and struggling to keep the family together.

Land of the Burnt Thigh, first published in 1938,is one of the best accounts. Edith Eudora Ammons and her sister Ida Mary moved to central South Dakota in 1907 to try homesteading near the "Land of the Burnt Thigh" - the Lower Brule INdian Reservation. There these two young women, both in their twenties and "timid as mice," found a community of homesteaders (including several other single women) who were eager to help them succeed at what looked to...

"When Vonceil's older brother, Elber, comes home to their family's Oklahoma farm after serving on the front lines of World War I, things aren't what she expects. His experiences have changed him into a serious and responsible man who doesn't have time for Vonceil anymore. He even marries the girl he had left behind. Then a mysterious and captivating woman shows up at the farm and confronts Elber for leaving her in France. When he refuses to leave...

"When Lorenzo adopts a runt piglet destined for auction, an unexpected, life-changing friendship forms"--

In his final book of essays - completed just weeks before he died - self-described "contrary farmer" Gene Logsdon addresses the next generation of small-scale "garden farmers" seeking a better way of life.--COVER.

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a...

"Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, 'Hang on to your land!' But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family--like other irrigators--pumps...