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See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America

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'See You In A Hundred Years'
Engrossing, Entertaining Chronicle of 1900 Rural Living Experiment

By David M. Kinchen


Could you give up your car, electricity and all the conveniences of modern living in order to get back to the basics circa 1900?

Logan and Heather Ward decided in 2000 to do just that, leaving their comfortable home in New York City, where they had lived for about 10 years, buying a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and deciding to try to live as much as possible like a typical farm family in 1900. Logan Ward writes about their experiences in "See You In A Hundred Years" (Delta Trade Paperback, 272 pages, $13.00).

Very few people are going to follow the example of the Ward family -- which included their toddler son Luther -- seeking a simpler life that would remove the urban rat race aspect from their life, but just about everybody will enjoy this book -- and learn many valuable lessons about conservation and consumption in our consumer-driven society.

Reading this book, I was reminded of a 1945 book and 1947 movie, "The Egg and I," starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as an urban couple buying a chicken farm in rural Washington state. The movie introduced Ma and Pa Kettle, played by Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride, to an eager movie-going audience. About the same time as the Betty MacDonald book and subsequent movie came out, I was growing up on a similar farm in southwest Michigan, probably longing for a more civilized existence that would eliminate the use of an outhouse in snowbelt winters when our septic tank froze up.

When they bought their farm near Swoope, VA, the Wards decided to remove all the modern conveniences that had been added through the generations. No more electric pump at the well, no more Volvo to go to go shopping, no more electricity, a phone unplugged (although they kept the phone service current in case of a medical emergency). And yes, no more indoor toilet! Logan had to shave with a cut-throat straight razor -- ouch! -- because King Gillette's safety razor didn't come along until 1903. No more shaving of Heather's legs and underarms, either. She wasn't about to use a straight razor.

As the months piled up from their year-long experiment, marital and family stresses emerged and were illuminated, Ward writes. They had experienced a different kind of stress in their life in Brooklyn, with Logan Ward constantly on the go around the world and writing free-lance travel and home oriented stories (he has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure and Popular Mechanics) and Heather with an absorbing -- and time consuming -- job.

Both Logan and Heather had Southern roots -- Logan from South Carolina, Heather from Alabama -- so the choice of a farm in rural Virginia seemed to make sense. It reminds me of a similar back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and 1970s that brought urbanites from the Northeast and elsewhere to rural West Virginia, especially Summers, Greenbrier and Monroe counties.

Swoope is also home to Polyface Farms, which Michael Pollan discusses in his book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (for my Dec. 16, 2007 review, see: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/071216-kinchen-columnsbookreview.html). I wish Logan Ward's book had included an index, something I consider vital to any nonfiction book. Ward writes about his contact with Polyface, an organic farm, in this book, but you'll have to page through the book to find the reference, in the absence of an index.

Logan and Heather and Luther learned about living with basic transportation that existed in 1900. They bought a horse, Belle, a 2,000-pound Percheron draft horse, and found a buggy in nearby West Virginia. Logan Ward's learning curve with Belle and his experiences driving a one-horsepower vehicle are worth the price of the book. They also used bicycles and that old reliable, walking. People walked a lot more a century ago. Our Michigan farm made use of draft horses, but we also had John Deere, International Harvestor and Ford tractors.

How did their neighbors react to the city slickers and their back-to-the past experiment? Surprisingly well, although many were perplexed at what the Wards were doing. Some applauded their efforts and helped them with the basics of country living. Just about everybody helped them with canning and supplying them with food and advice.

In an interview included with the publicity materials included with the review copy, Logan Ward says he "learned a big lesson about the importance of community. We never could survive the year without the friendship, encouragement and help of our neighbors. They shared what they knew about gardening, driving draft horses, chickens. They loaned us wash basins and walnut crackers that had been gathering dust in their garages. They brought us news of 9/11 -- and offered comfort and security in its terrible aftermath."

No more modern kitchen appliances for Heather Ward: she had to learn how to cook and bake on a wood-fired range and wash clothes the old-fashioned way. Occasionally they would switch chores, with Logan doing the cooking and Heather providing the firewood and water. They learned that they alone were responsible for the food they ate, the water they obtained by a hand pump from the well, Ward writes. There was no TV and radio in 1900, so the Wards did without. They read a lot by lamplight.

These lessons were transferred to the home they bought a few years later in Staunton, VA, not far from Swoope. Logan Ward: "Even though we rely once again on electric appliances and inexpensive manufactured goods and packaged food, it's in our bones not to be wasteful...Like many people, we do our part to limit unnecessary consumption, to practice the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), shop locally, buy raw foods at the farmers market (and use a canvas bag rather than plastic), turn lights off in unoccupied rooms....And we walk places whenever we can!"

So, read Logan Wards book, delight in his family's experiences and learn how to practice the three Rs in your own life.

Logan and Heather Ward and their son Luther moved from New York to Swoope, Virginia in the Spring of 2001. Their plan was to move not only in space but also in time as they began their "1900 Project"--a year in which they would live as if the year were 1900. No car, no electricity, no phone. You get the picture. Except you probably can't really get the picture because the hardships are these days almost unimaginable. This book tells their fascinating story. It's a rewarding (and surprisingly compelling) read of how Heather and Logan rediscover each other and in the process learn so much, far more I'm sure than Ward was able to fit into the book: how they de-snaked the hen house, how Logan learned to drive the wagon hitched to a horse, how they learned to cook on the wood stove, how they learned to can a year's worth of food and store it in the cellar. It must have been an amazing experience for them.
"For two days now, the wind has howled through our little corner of the Valley like a ghost train, snapping maple branches, rattling the tin roof, spooking the animals, whistling through gaps in the house. It hectors us, tugging hair and crowding the mind with sound. I'm in the kitchen when I hear a crash from the wasroom. I rush in to find shards of glass strewn across the floor. The wind has ripped the windwo out of its frame."

Country Real Estate, #74: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, February 19, 2009

Back to 1900 is not the way back to the land

By Curtis Seltzer

BLUE GRASS, Va.--Every once in a while you read a memoir of folks doing something so colossally pointless that you root for them to succeed. Like a one-legged man of 102 hopping up Mount Everest backward and blindfolded in a flip-flop, holding his breath to avoid breathing oxygen-thin air.
I picked up Logan Ward's See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America last Friday. It turned out to be one of those entertaining clueless-urban-writer-moves-to-farm-and-writes-heartfelt-account-of-finally-mastering-the-rural-skill-of-spitting-into-a-cup.
Ward and his willing wife, Heather, along with their young son, followed that well-written path, but took it one giant step into the vapors. They chose to live poor, as they imagined it was in 1900. No electricity, indoor plumbing, gas engines, computers or phones, with exceptions for emergencies and well-drilling in a drought. They spent a year trying to live "the life of dirt farmers from the era of our great-grandparents."
Why would anyone do this? Ward's answer: He felt stressed by modern urban life, burned out with keeping up and disconnected from the Milky Way.
The Wards hoped to free themselves, as Thoreau tried, from lives of "quiet desperation" and "self-imposed bondage." Nothing wrong with that. They shared Thoreau's interest in "individual simplicity," and, like Thoreau, Ward "posed for himself" to study himself as both artist and model, in E. B. White's words.
So they bumbled around for a couple of weeks until they found an old brick house with a root cellar on 40 acres in Swoope (rhymes with hope), a rural community of come-heres and been-heres near Staunton, Virginia, about an hour's drive from my place. They had no farm experience, no knowledge of what they were doing and no one to help them learn the ropes. They brought the presumptuousness of their ignorance, a silent brashness they didn't know they had but certainly needed.
Similarly equipped, the first English at Jamestown 400 years ago mainly starved. The natives saved them, and later the clueless Pilgrims who followed on Cape Cod. The Swoopians, too, befriended the time-colonists who had landed amongst them, offering acceptance, advice, food and cold beer.
The Wards ate what they could coax out of two goats, a handful of chickens and a garden that mainly fed several dozen other species. They bought some staples, like coffee and flours, and left their lifestyle hibernacula only by foot, bicycle or one-horse wagon.
Like Thoreau, the Wards spent their year thinking about themselves, feeding themselves and heating themselves. They realize early on that piling up enough food to survive a year was as stressful as hunting and gathering assignments from Manhattan editorial offices.
Did Ward find what he sought? He writes: "It's the same story all over again. Just like in New York, here I am nervous, preoccupied, unable to focus my energy. ...I fret over the weather and insects, feeling frustrated, angry, and inadequate." Issues like his generally travel well, even backwards.
Millions of farm families survived 1900 because they had the intellectual tools, field-tested know-how, infrastructure and equipment to make a go of it. What seems so impenetrably challenging to the Wards would have been a routine chore to a 13-year-old farm kid 100 years ago.
Milking a goat would not have led to carpal tunnel syndrome. Killing a barn rat would not have occasioned a treatise on the right to life. Every Tom, Dick and Harriet would have known how to pick a hoof, open a flue damper and hatchet a chicken so that it did not run around with its head cut off.
After reading one Ward flub-a-dub after another, I felt myself wincing in anticipation of the next page. I was watching "America's Funniest Home Videos" from 1900.
Thousands of young people "dropped out" and went "back to the land" in the 60s and 70s. Some chucked modernity as the Wards did until poverty, disease, boredom or survival instinct brought them back. The excursion left many roughed up.
Having watched some contemporaries reject indoor plumbing once, I didn't find Ward's second sitting any more ennobling or enlightening.
Others back then blended modern technology with boots and banjos. The axis around which this group spun was The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), which Apple's Steven Jobs described as "Google in paperback." It was an oversized encyclopedia of tools, from hand-made hoes to the sharpest of technology's cutting edges, packaged with ideas for being and doing in an environmentally responsible way.
The WEC was a vehicle for helping back-to-the-land metros become competent and share their knowledge.
A Hundred Years is not that kind of book. It's not intended to be useful, and it's not--though it is funny in spots and earnest everywhere else.
Chucking modern life -- with all of its stress and excess -- is the prescription of Islamic ideologues who want to drag everybody back 1,000 years and seal up the tomb. Going back isn't an option, even if had been nicer back then, which it wasn't. And neither is staying put.
When it comes to modernity, I guess I'm a half-chuck guy. Simplifying makes sense as does living light; rejection doesn't.
Memoirs, of course, are always about the memoirist. I found the Wards' struggles and befuddlements a nice weekend read. But the premise of their year is essentially silly. I didn't take much away from Ward's triumph over garden bugs by popping each one between his gut-stained fingers or his losing tussles with a 2000-pound, mind-of-her-own, Percheron mare.
I, too, have a mare, though considerably smaller. And though I've whispered in her ears hundreds of times, she continues to bare her perfect teeth at my most sensible instructions with the warning: "Stay out of my beeswax, Jack." I fear she, too, is not trainable.
The Wards made it to the end, which I did not believe likely when they started their survival garden in June. They began with the idea that, maybe, they'd continue their little goat-cheese business. But after serving their sentence, he decided that he hated goats, and she decided that she hated making goat-milk cheese.
What I most liked about this book is that Ward knew he was a doofus and does not flinch from showing us the evidence. That's more than self-deprecating humor, that's being an honest writer.
Ward can be reached at http://www.loganward.com/. A paperback version with a new Afterword appeared in December.
Both the hardback and paperback were printed with computer technology and were not distributed by farm wagons pulled by Percherons.

[...]

This is a wonderful book. Let's start with the idea of buying a rundown farmhouse and voluntarily subjecting yourself and your family to a year without electricity, telephones, automobiles, television, or any other convenience of the 20th, let alone 21st, century. The reader wants to know, first off: is this a gimmick or is the author after something deeper and more meaningful? A page or two will settle that question for any thoughtful reader. Yes, this is an exciting story of survival in a world of plough horses and wood fires, where something as incidental to modern city dwellers as a change in the weather could determine how well you eat for the next few months. Ward delivers the historical details with accuracy, humor and poignancy. But calling "See You in a Hundred Years" a survival story would be like calling "Walden" a nature book. In the end, what makes this work such a treasure is the author's honesty in confronting his own successes and failures as a husband, father, provider, and man. Joys, pains, minor humiliations, major setbacks, and redemptive victories unfold like the Virginia seasons and combine to form a moving and graceful meditation on what it means, in this century or any other, to be alive.

There is something about young New York professionals who have some international experience in their backgrounds that makes them think they are capable of anything, anywhere. Perhaps I have run across just one too many of these "I lived in Bolivia one summer and therefore feel capable of x, y, and z, and besides I am also from New York and if I can make it there I can make it anywhere" tales of misadventure and mis-experimentation, but I found this book to be unbearable.

I approached it with eagerness to learn about life in 1900 and how modern people moved between centuries, but about mid-way began to read it from a sense of duty. I wanted to give the Logan family their full year to make their statement about what they did.

This is not a book about 1900 or farm life. It's about a pair of monied fools who decide to inflict themselves upon a rural community for a year and ram their way through what they consider to be an experiment in simple living. Rather than ease into this life, alotting more than a year for the transition, humbly learning the needed skills and shaping their plans as they learned, the Logans buy some animals, a bunch of antique work tools, and jump in. They know so little about community and farm life that they decide to fence off some land and let it go wild. Then they resist killing the resulting thistles, whose seed will spread to every neighbors' land, until it is pointedly made clear to them how much work they will create all the real farmers.

The Logans are able to make it through the year because the locals, whom the author doesn't hesitate to mock, come to the fools' aid with practical advice and lessons on how to do tasks effectively. Without them, the couple would have been back in New York in months, I suspect. Their experiment's rigors are eased, too, by a bunch of other non-farming transplants who have moved to the community from elsewhere. The self-absorption of this couple is made clear when the wife opines that they have become the focal point of the community. Ah, yes, a place where real farmers have farmed for hundreds of years was just waiting for the Logan family to bring it all together.

In short, the experiment is largely a farce. The book details little about life in 1900, but much about the state of the couple's marriage and eventually tiresome stories about their three-year-old. It will be fun for the three of them to read this book in a couple of decades, but the rest of us can give it a pass.

I was intrigued by this book because I grew up on a small farm during the 1930s and we had no running water, electricity, or telephone. I wanted to know how they dealt with things I am familiar with and which I would not want to deal with again. I was amazed that the garden, nearly devastated during the early drought, regenerated itself and produced abundantly. Even the tomato plants survived an attack of blight. There is no mention of mosquitoes or houseflies, which were so prolific before chemicals came into common use. There is also no mention of the blisters, calluses, strained muscles, sunburn, and other physical afflictions of the working farmer. I would have liked more information on how the canning operations were managed without pressure canners. He mentions canning zucchini and squash. Why would anyone want to do that? The long cooking would turn them to mush. In spite of these quibbles, the book is an attempt to portray a romantic and idealistic approach to simpler living, a la Thoreau. The author seems to have found what he was looking for.
He should also be commended for the courage displayed when he opted to take his wife and child into unknown territory to prove a point. Or perhaps it was naivete.

I found this book very engaging, hard to put down. I wish that Logan gave an update about their return to the future at the end of the book. I did find one thing troubling, I have hard time believing that their son (age 2) became ill just once and never required a visit to the doctor. Also, the fact that Logan was so unsure about his wife using a car and a phone when she had a medical problem. An experiment is one thing health should be paramount!

What an amazing story. Logan and Heather Ward had the courage not only to live like 1900 in the 21st century (with their little boy) but were astute enough to take notes and share their heartwarming story. The excellent descriptions of their adventures as well as the author's personal doubts and fears make this book hard to put down. Be prepared to become so involved in the Wards's story that you will not be able to stop reading! If you have the chance, go to one of his book signings and meet the author.... an incredible young man... a great author.

I would have more respect for the author if he had prepared properly for his 1-year visit to 1900. But he deemed his experiment had to begin on a certain day, regardless of the fact that he didn't know how to harness or drive his horse, hadn't tested the wood-burning stove to see if it would work, and hadn't even finished planting the garden that was to sustain him and his family through the winter. I wouldn't have minded if he were the only one participating in this adventure, but I think he should have been more prepared for emergencies that might affect his toddler son and wife. At one point, when his wife is experiencing great abdominal pain, he suggests she ride her bike to the nearest clinic - a distance of several miles - just to avoid breaking the no-car rule. I found that rather cold and unfeeling as he was clearly putting the experiment above his wife's health and safety. Schmuck!

Many of us yearn for the simple life and a return to gentler times. Journalist Logan Ward and his attorney wife Heather, tired of their stressful lives and lack of family time, made it a reality, living Manhattan behind not only for farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia but living as if it were 1900.

This book is an account of their year in the country, in 1900, beginning in June 2001 with their culture shock of both small town Virginia and living without the amenities and luxuries we daily take for granted. No more automobiles. No more running water. No more electricity. No cell phones or telephones. No microwaves, dishwasher, washing machine or dryer.

Most interesting to me are Logan's accounts of their daily lives - - with Logan pumping water from a well, milking goats, watching out for snakes and learning how to drive a horse and wagon; Heather cooking three meals a day on an old woodstove, handwashing clothing, including their two year old son's diapers, and keeping an energetic toddler at bay while accomplishing the daily chores. Additionally, both Logan and Heather deal with planting a garden of winter foods, drought, pest infestation (both in the garden and in the house) and safely canning enough food for winter.

While I wish there had been even more accounts of the day to day life, it was rewarding to hear of the Ward family writing letters to family and friends, as well as their evenings spent reading books aloud to each other or simply sitting on their front porch, enjoying both the quiet and their own company.

In the end, the Wards not only found a community that warmly welcomed them (and where they still are, albeit not in 1900) but strengthened their marriage and family. See You in a Hundred Years is a quick and easy read and very entertaining to boot, making the reader wish he could find his own piece of the Shenandoah Valley.