In this Book
- Haymakers: A Chronicle of Five Farm Families
- Book
- 2000
- Published by: Minnesota Historical Society Press
summary
The Haymakers is an epic—the history of man’s struggle with nature as well as man’s struggle against machines. It relates the story of farmers and their obligations to their families, to the animals they fed, and to the land they tended. But The Haymakers is also an elegy—to a way of life fast disappearing from our landscape. In the most heartfelt essays, Hoffbeck chronicles his own family’s struggle to hold onto their family farm and his personal struggle in deciding to leave farming for another way of life. Hoffbeck also seeks to document and preserve the commonplace methods of haymaking, information about haying that might otherwise be lost to posterity. He describes the tools and the methods of haymaking as well as the relentless demands of the farm. Using diaries, agricultural guidebooks and personal interviews, the folkways of cutting, raking, and harvesting hay have been recorded in these chapters. In the end, this book is not so much about agricultural history as it is about family history, personal history—how farm families survive, even persevere.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- 2. "Hope and a Future"
- pp. 19-48
- A Yorker’s Sojourn in Minnesota
- pp. 49-76
- Farming Forever
- pp. 77-108
- Tradition and Change
- pp. 109-138
- Blue Silos on the Prairie
- pp. 139-172
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 183-185
- Bibliography
- pp. 199-207
Additional Information
ISBN
9780873517362
Related ISBN(s)
9780873513951
MARC Record
OCLC
864844875
Pages
223
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No