Please note: This essay first appeared in September 2015 on my previous blog site, and was titled “Homesteading”. I’ve made some additional edits to reflect the passage of time. I’ve purposefully kept this one brief; enjoy!
I’ve always loved the word homestead. Reading or hearing it draws a picture in my mind of a log cabin in Appalachia, of rough-and-tumble characters making a go of it in a difficult landscape, generation after generation. (Quaint and essentialist? Yes and yes, but I can’t help it).
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Trinity University Press, 2006) is a wonderful resource containing hundreds of terms that refer specifically to environmental features. Such words include bluff, copse, flatiron, hollow, hoodoo, wilderness (naturally) and many more (including some gems like lava tongue, scabland, and nubble). The purpose of gathering all of these different terms together is to remind us that collectively, these words are the human interpretation of the landscape of our country.
Our relationship with American soil (and water, and sky, and bird, and beast) is beautiful and painful and complicated. The term homestead never really applied to indigenous peoples living here; in fact, the Homestead Act of 1862 was devastating to the thousands of Native Americans who already knew the land intimately. That term may not have the same connotation for them, given the violent history of removing people from their land and erasing their bodies, identity, and culture from the soil.
In spite of the multiple meanings of this word (and perhaps, because of it), connecting with language draws us closer to this place we call home, and ultimately, ourselves. We are, of course, complicated creatures.
Of homestead, Scott Russell Sanders writes, “In colonial America, a homestead was understood to be a plot of land adequate to support a family. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted a quarter-section (160 acres) of U.S. public land to any head of family, on the condition that the settler live on the parcel for five years and ‘improve’ it, typically by clearing fields for cultivation and by erecting buildings…Although agrarian in origin, homestead has come to be defined in the laws of many states as a person’s principal residence, whether urban or rural” (179).
So in the 21st century, homestead simply refers to the place you call home. I like to think of it in a slightly different fashion, though. To me, a homestead is a place that holds a special place in one’s heart—maybe it’s somewhere you once called home and no longer do, for any number of reasons. To me, this definition (which has no actual etymological basis; I just like it) evokes a kind of a spirit of a place, reminiscent of the sepia-toned photographs like the picture at the top.
There are a lot of places where I’ve homesteaded: my childhood bedroom, which was (up until 2014) still decorated with the faces of dozens of high school celebrity crushes.
My college campus, where one could walk the trails in the nearby forest and emerge, as if in a dream, into a huge field and a mansion filled with art.
My adopted hometown in Arizona, where I could probably walk the downtown streets blindfolded, and name all the stores, restaurants, and bars by memory, as well as the characters that frequented them.
Even my old office at Ben and Jerry’s headquarters, where I had the same desk for 10 years and walked the colorful hallways (painted with playful cows and ice cream cones) hundreds of times.
These are the places where you keep your stuff, where you have your routines and your space and even if you don’t think of them as home at the time, you’re building residual memories of place. The ability to appreciate this closeness can sometimes only be recognized once you’ve moved on. Coming back can feel like a homecoming, or like you’re a stranger in a place that has moved on without you.
I try to savor the present whenever I’m in the woods. The picture at the top is actually the current site of Camp DREAM in rural Northern Vermont. This photo appears to have been taken sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. The fields are gone, the cows are gone, but low stone walls and foundations remain. This location became our main area of activity at the camp, with our kitchen, dining pavilion, and garden, and we called it, appropriately, The Homestead.
I came to know the place well. After years of traipsing through the woods, clambering over rocks and skirting through stands of pine, ash, and maple, I intimately knew its layout by touch and sight. Up until I left in 2018, I probably knew the lay of the land better than anyone else, and even since then, I would expect the number of us who know it so closely to be in the single digits.
I had favorite trees I liked to visit a couple of times a year, plants I liked to touch or smell or eat, animals I was always on the hunt for. I like that Camp DREAM will always be wild, even with a touch of its homesteading past; because of a partnership with the Vermont Land Trust, the 50+ acres are conserved in perpetuity and will always be almost completely undeveloped.
Now that I have a few more homesteads under my belt, it’s the understanding of and appreciation for connection to place that drew me to write this newsletter, and to delve deeply into what homestead really means to me.
This past spring, I moved on from a job that was inextricably intertwined with 3,000 acres on Fidalgo Island in Washington. I now serve in a role in another beautiful place, 105 acres on the shores of Lake Samish. Undoubtedly, these forest homesteads—home to giant Douglas fir, spindly and steadfast Bigleaf maple, ferns and moss and much, much more—are a part of me now, too.
I know what I love in a day job, and it’s getting to spend time in the woods.
It is a privilege for us to know these places so well, wild or not. These homesteads live within each of us, becoming a part of our story, growing and merging with the others, an ecosystem alive and unique and all our own.
Reflection questions:
What does “homestead” mean to you?
What remnants of homesteads past possess the most meaning for you, and why?
The state of Vermont is located on the land of the Wabanaki and N’dakina (Abenaki) nations.
Where I live and work in western Washington is home to the Salish, Coast Salish, Skagit, and S’Klallam peoples.
Image: A farm in Fletcher, Vermont, 19th or 20th century, on the shores of Metcalf Pond. Photographer unknown.