A Farm In The Firelands Of Ohio.

A Farm In The Firelands Of Ohio

Dayton A. Williams

Next Friend Press

12699 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights, OH 44106-3332

0974793701, $19.95 1-216-225-1829

"A Farm In The Firelands Of Ohio: Memories Of The Post-Civil War Period" is a fascinating and informative of what it was like to grow up on a family farm in Lyme Township, Huron county, Ohio. Dayton A. Williams was born in 1874, graduated in 1899 from Kenyon college (where he captained the last football team to beat Ohio State) and then some fifty years after he left the family farm, wrote a series of letters which included essays on Decoration Day at the country church and on Christmas celebrations at the church in town. Here are personal memories of peddlers, tramps, boyhood inventions for easing farm work, descriptions of the farm machinery of yesteryear mid-America, and even a quiz for readers to test themselves on their knowledge of the 'farmer business'. Deftly edited by Dayton Williams grandniece Anne Southworth McFarland (who began her own correspondence with Dayton when she was child on the farm with a pony and grew up to become a law librarian and author), "A Farm In The Firelands Of Ohio" is a superbly presented and engaging memoir that is as entertaining as it is thoughtful in presenting life on a typical Ohio farm in the latter part of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. As original source material, "A Farm In The Firelands Of Ohio" will prove to be of especial interest to both scholarship and non-special general readers with an interest in American History.