Ben Logan - The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People

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Copyright 1975 by Ben T. Logan; afterword 2006 by Ben T. Logan;
introduction 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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The Land Remembers was first published in a hardcover edition by Viking Press, Inc., and a large print edition by Hall in 1975; in a mass market paperback edition by Avon Books in 1976; in 1985 by Stanton & Lee; in 1986 by NorthWord Press; in 1992 a collectors edition by NorthWord Press; in 2000 a 25th anniversary edition by NorthWord Press, an imprint of Creative Publishing International; and in 2006, with a new afterword, by Itchy Cat Press, an imprint of Flying Fish Graphics.

Printed in the United States of America

This book may be available in a digital edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Logan, Ben, 1920 author. | Meine, Curt, writer of introduction.
Title: The land remembers: the story of a farm and its people / Ben Logan.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017]
| Introduction by Curt Meine. | Copyright 1975 by Ben T. Logan;
afterword 2006 by Ben T. Logan; introduction 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin SystemTitle page verso.
| The Land Remembers was first published in a hardcover edition by Viking Press, Inc., and a large print edition by Hall in 1975; in a mass market paperback edition by Avon Books in 1976; in 1985 by Stanton & Lee; in 1986 by NorthWord Press; in 1992 a collectors edition by NorthWord Press; in 2000 a 25th anniversary edition by NorthWord Press, an imprint of Creative Publishing International; and in 2006, with a new afterword, by Itchy Cat Press, an imprint of Flying Fish Graphics.Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058732 | ISBN 9780299309046 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Logan, Ben, 1920Childhood and youth.
| Authors, American20th centuryBiography.
| Farm lifeWisconsin. | WisconsinSocial life and customs.
Classification: LCC PS3562.O444 Z469 2017 | DDC 977.5/7 [B]dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058732

ISBN 978-0-299-30908-4 (ePub)

Laurance, Lee, and Lyle, the only ones left who shared that hilltop world with me, told me when we met that I didnt get all my facts straight. We argued some about that, but mostly I just reminded them of what a neighbor used to sayWhen youre trying to tell somebody who aint been there just how hot it is in a hayfield with the temperature at a hundred degrees in the shade, its not lying if you make it a hundred and ten.

Now only my brother Lee and I are left.

He Walked Through Open Doors

An Introduction to The Land Remembers

CURT MEINE

A friend asked Ben Logan, then eighty-nine years old, what he considered the most important quality in his outlook on life. Having curiosity, he responded. I still have a tremendous curiosity about things. I still have an irresistible urge to push open the door of an old deserted farmhouse to see if those who once lived there left fragments of their life story. We need to stay tuned into things, keep our minds open. His friend then asked him what he wanted his epitaph to be. Ben answered: He walked through open doors!

Which brings to mind the opening lines of the rambunctious chapter A Day of Our Own in The Land Remembers:

In spite of long days in the fields, something in the summer brought the four of us boys together. A day when we did not have to work was very special. It was ours. We were free. We could vanish into the child-hiding green of hundreds of acres of countryside and make a world out of a single day. (150)

In a book rich with details of the daily responsibilities on an early twentieth-century midwestern farm, the passage provides an uncharacteristic departure. And it hints at the reason behind the books broad and enduring appeal. Logan walked through open doors in both directions: inward to gather the fragments of his own life story and outward to connect his story to the life of the land that held and nurtured it. At that threshold of his inner and outer lives, Ben Logan made a world.

It is a world that hundreds of thousands of readers have come to know and feel that they too somehow belong to. First published in 1975, The Land Remembers appears here in its ninth edition. It remains one of the most popular books ever to come out of Wisconsin. Readers from far beyond Wisconsin discovered the book and found in it something of their own story. Later, after Ben returned to Seldom Seen Farm, pilgrims (as he called them) began to show up at his door. Logan understood that they were looking for something in the world that he recollected. Perhaps more than anything else their quest is for solid values and a sense of community (292). The Land Remembers brings its readers to the thresholds of family and place, innocence and experience, memory and longing.

Part of the broad and lasting appeal of The Land Remembers lies in its seeming timelessness and placelessness. Its stories deal with universals: childhood, parents, siblings, neighbors, seasons, weather, farming, foods, plants and animals, education, holidays, quiet mysteries, and, of course, the land. Such shared themes have allowed the book to reach, as Logan would cheerfully note, not only childhood acquaintances and fellow midwesterners but anonymous New York City subway riders and sophisticated urban book reviewersall of whom felt he was somehow describing their own experience. (Now, he could also include Amazon.com commentators. This book is so-o-o good it made me feel as if I had lived on that farm and in that family. Bens words transcend farm life. Even city-folks can relate.)

Yet The Land Remembers is profoundly the story of a specific time and place: the western edge of Wisconsins Kickapoo River valley, in the unglaciated Driftless Area, in the mid-1920s to mid-1930s. Ben Logan was born in the rural Town of Seneca in Crawford County, Wisconsin, on September 9, 1920. His book collapses into a single round of seasons an array of memories from his early boyhood years up until the age of sixteen. Occasionally his generalized narrative yields to explicit dates: the advent of tractors in the neighborhood around 1929; the never-ending cloud of dust storms from the Great Plains that occurred with increasing frequency after 1931; the adoption of soil conservation practices in the mid-1930s.

These dates allow us to appreciate the particular circumstances of Logans early life. The farmscape of his boyhood was in fact undergoing rapid social and environmental change. Readers encounter, as he did, the emerging forces of rural economic developmentthe advent of telephones and filling stations, new lamps and hybrid cornand then the wrenching reality of economic depression. The mechanization that the Logans old neighbor Abe found so unsettling (Seems to me a tractor gets a man up in the air too high) was transforming midwestern farming. With its several scenes of mingled draft animals and internal combustion engines,