Last house on the road
Subtitle: excursions into a rural past
By: Ronald Jager.
Series: The Concord library
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 263
Subjects: Jager, Ronald -- Homes and haunts -- New Hampshire -- Washington.; Country life -- New Hampshire -- Washington.; Washington (N.H.) -- Social life and customs.
Description: Ronald Jager's Eighty Acres, a memoir of his boyhood on a Michigan farm, was acclaimed as "a moving evocation of its time and place" (New York Times). In this sequel to Eighty Acres, Jager explores the links between a rural New England landscape and the routines of its human inhabitants, now and in the past. The setting is Washington, New Hampshire, where Jager and his wife bought an abandoned farmhouse nearly thirty years ago.

Through the years they reclaimed both the house and its history - laying bare its post-and-beam construction, unearthing its original hearthstone, and uncovering details of the lives of the Revolutionary War soldier who built the house and the farmer who owned it later.

Last House on the Road also explores the routines and benchmarks of present-day country life. Here are rich, lively portraits of a church fair, a week of deer hunting, and the ancient custom of "perambulating the bounds." In one chapter, Jager accompanies the local road crew on a predawn plowing expedition in a snowstorm. Another chapter brings to life the annual town meeting, a New England institution with its own rituals and drama.

Joining history with natural history, Jager traces the rise and fall of New England farming over two centuries as he surveys the rolling hills, forest and farmland of his southern New Hampshire home. Whether his subject is fireplace building, puppy raising, or local politics, Jager probes and celebrates the age-old process of taking what is old and making it new.