The New England Country

In 1894, Clifton Johnson wandered the back roads of New England with a scholar's eye and a poet's heart, documenting a world that was already vanishing. He captures the sounds of farm life: the creak of wooden barn doors, the rhythm ofhand-raked hay, the church bells calling neighbors to Sunday meeting. But this is no mere inventory of chores and customs. Johnson writes with the particular sadness of someone who knows he's witnessing an ending. The old farmers he meets still remember when every family knew its neighbors by name, when harvest suppers lasted half the night, when the land demanded everything and gave everything back. As smoke from factory stacks begins to drift over the hills, Johnson's pages become an act of preservation, capturing a New England that existed in memory even as he walked its roads.