|
1-878086-41-3
$13.95 paperback
6" x 9"
234 pages black-and-white illustrations
Down Home Press
|
The year was 1919. Henry
Chase, a sharecropper in Union County, North Carolina, had his best year
ever growing cotton. He used his profits to pursue a life-long dream.
Drawn by glowing advertisements promising the good life and a land of
plenty, he bought, sight unseen, a farm near the Pee Dee River in North
Carolina's Sandhills.
Reality turned out to be
nothing like his dream. The century-old farmhouse into which he moved
his wife and five children was not just dilapidated, it also leaked. The
scraggly land had been stripped of its timber, was overgrown with briers
and brambles and barely productive. But the family settled in to scratch
out a new life for themselves.
Theirs is a story not only of
struggle and perseverance but of love and dedication, hope and joy. At
times touching and laugh-aloud funny, it fairly burbles with the
irrepressible human spirit. In it, Chris Florance not only relives her
youth but also preserves a time and a place as few others have.
about the author
Chris Florance, a former history teacher, landscape contractor and
garden consultant, was garden columnist for the Greensboro Daily News
for 16 years. Her work has appeared in Southern Living and
numerous other publications. She is author of Carolina Home Gardener
and Up From Mt. Misery, a book about the blossoming of the
Sandhills at the turn of the century. Now retired, she lives in
Greensboro.
|
