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The Power of Place: Garland's Iowa

by Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris

Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Inside the barn This photograph is from inside the barn on the Garland homestead.  (Note the wooden pegs.)  According to the current owner,20 the barn was built by the Garland family, although Garland makes no references to barn building in his autobiographical books.

 

 

 

#5 Inside the barn

"Farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery.  My pages present it -- not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it -- but as the working farmer endures it." [Preface to Other Main-Travelled Roads, 1910]
Maple trees

#6 Maple trees

“Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had planted fifteen years before.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]

These majestic, 60-year-old,21 silver maples stand guard over the Garland house today, replacing similar maples planted by the Garlands in the 1870s.  As Garland explained in Boy Life: “Nearly every farm-house sorely needed protection from the winter winds, and the thriftiest of the farmers set about planting trees at once. . . . [T]o bring any kind of tree into being seemed noble and fine. . . . They shot up like corn . . . and yet, fast as they grew, they were too slow for the settler.  It seemed as though they would never grow tall enough to shade him.  (They stand there now with bodies big as his own -- reaching out their arms like yawning young giants.)”22

Cornfield

#7 Cornfield

“No writer, so far as I knew, had ever put the farm life of the West into literature. . . . With a resolution to maintain the proper balance of rain and sun, dust and mud, toil and play, I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking, faintly hoping it might please some editor.” [Introduction to Boy Life on the Prairie, 1926]

 The cornfield is a key port of entry into Garland’s literary career, to the point that he entitled an early short story “Among the Corn Rows.”  He describes his motivation for writing in an introduction to a school edition of Boy Life on the Prairie:  “I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking. . . . I had the advantage of having spent many days in corn husking. . . . As I went on with my composition, my design broadened.  From a resolution to write of my personal boy-life experiences, I began to dream of depicting the habits and customs of my elders.  I became a short-story writer and later a novelist and chronicler of the region I like to call the Middle Border.”23  
Clods of dirt Garland's local color approach, which he called "veritism," was anticipated by Thoreau's memorable phrase, "words transplanted to the page with earth adhering to their roots."  According to Garland, "Genuine American literature . . . must come from the soil and the open air, and be likewise freed from tradition."24 

 

#8 Clods of dirt

"There was a faint, peculiar but powerful odor of uncovered earth in the air, and the touch of the wind was like a caress from a moist magnetic hand."  ["A Stop-Over in Tyre," in Other Main-Travelled Roads, 1910]

Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

 
Last updated: 08/10/04
Maintained by
Keith Newlin | newlink@uncw.edu 

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