Yon Far Country: A Social and Personal Memoir of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

by Sara Stambaugh

“The world changed greatly in the twentieth century. As a result people only a few years younger than I am have no idea of what life was like before the dishwasher, the automatic washing machine and dryer, even the vacuum cleaner, though I remember my mother sweeping the living-room rug with a wet broom, a bucket of water beside her. Such memories are fragments of the past. [This book is] intended as the biography of a country community and of the changes it has seen since the last century, but it is autobiographical as well. My excuse is that my own roots are deeply embedded in the Lancaster County countryside. I saw and took part in many of the old ways and, however inadvertently, helped to initiate some of the new ones. Even my education (leading to the life I have led since I left the county) is in many ways typical of the world the majority of North Americans now live in as they move out of the past I have attempted to describe, and into an unknown and sometimes frightening future.”
– From the Introduction " Yon Far Country is a memoir of a woman born and raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but it is also a memoir of a particular community. The novelist Sara Stambaugh (1936-2002), daughter of Evelyn Hershey Stambaugh and Clarence Stambaugh, was born in the town of New Holland and spent most of her childhood life in surrounding Lancaster County. Today Lancaster is known for its Amish population and attracts thousands of tourists every year. Stambaugh describes a different era in Yon Far Country, one in which Mennonites owned more of the farmland and tourists were fewer in number. The book depicts this earlier time in the rural country culture and in the community in Lancaster. The book is also a fascinating window into the early life of a writer who, despite moving to Canada and living there most of her life, still felt rooted in and connected to her childhood homeland." - Eileen R. Kinch in the Mennonite Quarterly Review Sara Stambaugh (1936-2002) was born in New Holland, Pennsylvania on December 4, 1936. She received her B.A. from Beaver College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Minnesota. From 1969 until 1995, she taught in the English Department at the University of Alberta. She is the author of several works of fiction but is best known for her critical analyses of the works of Isak Dinesen entitled Isak Dineson in America and The Witch and the Goddess in the stories of Isak a Feminist Reading .

345 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008