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Northern Farm
a new edition of Henry Beston's classic Northern Farm - A Chronicle of Maine, chronicling a year in the late 1930s on the author's farm, Chimney Farm, in Nobleboro, Maine. This edition is a facsimile of the edition illustrated by Thoreau MacDonald, and all proceeds from this edition go to preserve and protect Beston's Chimney Farm.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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About the author
Henry Beston
40 books81 followersHenry Beston was an American writer and naturalist, best known as the author of The Outermost House, written in 1925.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
October 6, 2025
I love Henry Beston’s writing and the nostalgic time he writes about.
When describing his house in Maine, Beston says,
“It is the north, and as I set down these words, the whole country lies quiescent in the cup of winter‘s hand.”
Beston often berates the industrial age and the loss of the natural order of things.
“As I settle down in this familiar house… I find I am shaking off the strange oppression which came over me when I lived by an urban sense and understanding of time.“
“As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.”
In conclusion he writes:
“What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace, and the full of human joy.”
When describing his house in Maine, Beston says,
“It is the north, and as I set down these words, the whole country lies quiescent in the cup of winter‘s hand.”
Beston often berates the industrial age and the loss of the natural order of things.
“As I settle down in this familiar house… I find I am shaking off the strange oppression which came over me when I lived by an urban sense and understanding of time.“
“As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.”
In conclusion he writes:
“What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace, and the full of human joy.”
October 12, 2024
The Northern Farm by Henry Beston is a loving narrative of the changing seasons in a year on the author's farm in northern Maine.
Quotes to savor:
The ice often spoke and groaned before a big storm. I must watch the glass and the wind and the northeast.
A jar of mincemeat made from deer meat, a colonial recipe treasured on the farms.
Some scholar has said, and very wisely, that the songs of a people are an excellent token of their character. The student of human nature would do well to add their clothes!
The house was full of the sound of the gale. It was a winter northeaster, furious with wind and snow, and driving down against us from the dark and desolate North Atlantic and a thousand miles of whitecaps and slavering foam. Wailings and whistling cries, ghostly sighings under latched doors, fierce pushings and buffetings of the exposed walls--thrusts one could feel as a vibration of the house itself.
The sound which snow makes against glass--that curious, fleecy pat and whisper of touch which language cannot convey or scarce suggest.
Timber and wall, the old, honest, well-built house resisted with its own defiance. It has closed with such storms for almost one hundred and fifty years, standing in its ancient fields as a fortress of the hopes of man and his will to live.
Home again from a visit to friends in town, glad to be back where everything doesn't come into the house along a wire or down a pipe. What a relief it was to get into my farm clothes and have a reasonable amount of physical work to do!
In the old lumbering days there were bells on all the teams to give warning of their coming along the narrow, winding roads.
Full midwinter, the season of snow, ear-tingling cold, and skies into whose blue the earth reflects back its own intensity of light. So glittering is the morning air and so cloudless the sky that the sun rolls up over the eastern woods like a sudden miracle of radiant gold.
No sound is more characteristic of this leafless time than the cries of blue jays from the woods. To us on the farms it is music for it means that life in the air, daring, vigorous, and even jocular, is sharing the winter with us, and has not fled from us before the deep bitterness of cold.
The day was the very quintessence of the winter, a time of pure, universal blue and white.
To speak in paradox, a sense of some joy in living is one of the most serious things in the world.
Before sunrise, the windows glazed with ferns and opaque mysteries of ice, all turning a glowing crystalline rose as the hidden sun clears the tree tops to the east.
Cheered by the increasing light and a long spell of pleasant weather, "up March hill" we go, to use an old phrase which is still very much alive among us.
A normal range of physical sensation, a sense, for instance, of the fabric of earth underfoot and the sudden cold of a change of wind, is not only a part of the discipline of life but also of its reward.
March with its snows and light and warmer temperatures can be one of the loveliest months of the year, but alas for early April and the long fortnight immemorially known as "mudtime". It is then that the "bottom falls out of the roads", as the local phrase has it.
When we meet, our ironic and universal phrase is this: "Nice weather overhead."
On a farm, the day's work is the most exciting and interesting thing that goes on, and farm children are instinctively aware of it, deserting their toys on the instant to rush out and see Buttercup's new calf.
There is something very fine in family labor shared together in goodwill by all the generations under a roof. It holds the household together in a bond of life and a unity of purpose, it gives a human core of strength, and it builds up a family against time and loneliness.
Like many of these older farms, we have two kitchens, a summer one and a winter one, each with its own sink, chimney and running water.
One of my pet superstitions, inherited from a wise and ever-honored grandmother: the first hearthfire of the year must be lit by the woman of the house.
Are we farm people the only ones left who still laugh with gusto in the old, almost roll-on-the-floor way? I sometimes fear so.
Corn, the truly sacred plant of America, the staff and symbol of its ancient being. The long rains come from the east and sea, the black thundershowers from the west; the rustling sound of corn is heard on the August wind.
Few moments of the country year are as lovely as the green quiet of an early summer morning.
Above our railroad crossing, on a wooded hillock, a number of larches stand among white pines and red. Surely one of the most beautiful greens in Nature is the green of new leaves of this tree.
Honey bees visit the dandelions; I see them all day long crawling over the golden faces, filling the air with an industrious hum. Local housewives put up jars of dandelion greens for winter use. That green bitterness of early summer can be very refreshing when served with potatoes and winter squash of February.
At the end of winter every house needs a carpenter as it might need a doctor, and early summer is a good time to get things done.
Auctions are part of our summer adventure. We buy agricultural tools and implements at farm auctions, at town auctions are liable to bid for what takes our fancy. Because we are an old, conservative, thrifty people, shipbuilders and seafarers withal, there is no telling here what an auction might bring to light. "I now show you," begins the auctioneer, and not only do I like what he holds up to view but I feel that it would take a charge of bears to separate me from it. "Sold to Mr. Beston for three dollars and fifty cents!"
Perhaps asking too much is an error more dangerous than we realize, a thing of strong poison to the human soul. Our world would do well for awhile to muse upon the serenity and happiness possible within our human and earthly limitations.
Every saltwater creek and inlet now seems to have its great blue heron, every pond shore its solitary sandpiper. Strawberry season is over; no more shortcakes at supper. Now come blueberry muffins.
Calling and replying to each other across the rain-pitted water, loons began their quaverings and trills: they always have something to say when rain begins. Then to the senses came that first country smell of dust and rain, then a smell of wet earth and rain, presently followed by a cool breath of air moving with the rain along the fields, fragrant with a faint, cool smell of grass. Our gardens which had been standing still from dryness would now awake. The earth was drinking in the showers.
Oh, work that is done in freedom out of doors, work that is done with the body's and soul's goodwill, work that is an integral part of life and is done with friends--is there anything so good?
There are times when I think that some pests regard arsenate of lead as an exhilarating marmalade.
Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things. Country living is a pageant of Nature and the year; it can no more stay fixed than a movement in music, and as the seasons pass, they enrich life far more with little things than with great, with remembered moments rather than hours. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.
When one lives in the country and observes wild animals, one is sure to come upon dramas and acts of courage which profoundly stir the heart. The tiniest birds fight off the marauder, the mother squirrel returns to the tree already scorched by the on-coming fire; even the creatures in the pond face in their own strange fashion the odds and the dark. Surely courage is one of the foundations on which all life rests!
When our orchards bear, let us be grateful to the bees, and remember that man has a number of food plants which some special insect alone can pollinate.
So cloudless and glowing are the days, so warm and still the bright autumnal hours that we tend to forget what the sky to the northwest has stored away for us of bitter cold and "the treasures of the snow".
The days are too fine to spend five minutes indoors.
The seasons have their fragrance. In summer there is a smell of greenness, of heat, grass and surface dust; in autumn the fragrance is one of cold dews and ripeness, of fallen leaves and the tang and ferment of leaves, of a world smouldering and withering away in the year's invisible fires.
Arthur R. Macdougall Jr. "Mak" is the author of the genial, amusing, friendly-spirited "Dud Dean" stories so cherished all over America by all good fly-fishermen.
A pleasant elderly woman who runs a tiny shop full of second-hand thing and "antiques" tells that she was one of twenty-two children, all of whom lived. "We never took anything for sickness but Indian herb medicines. Father knew all the healing plants. He was wonderful."
The old-fashioned "baked bean" is an important part of our farm economy in this higher north. With plenty of "baking beans" in storage, a piece of salt pork, and a jug of molasses in the "buttery", a wood range that knows its business is in the kitchen, and a family bean pot in the oven, we feel ready here for anything that may arrive when the north and east darken beyond the hills and a three day storm begins to howl.
Shaken from the dooryard trees by a light, almost imperceptible wind, leaves drift down past the kitchen windows in the rhythm of the great flakes which so often announce the beginning of a night of snow.
"Johnny Ride the Sky", the horse-and-jockey weather vane which has come down to us from the farm's horse and buggy years.
On these cold nights when a rising wind rattles the windows and ragged clouds sail across the moon, we know in our warm kitchen what will presently come down upon us from the solitudes of the north. Strengthened and provisioned like fortresses, our cordwood stacked under cover and our cellars filled, we should not fear the northeaster and the wind running in above the sea.
In Maine we call our preparation for the siege--and the phrase is ancestral--"housing up".
Two wood fires, one in the kitchen range, and one in the great fireplace, burn all day long, and smoulder away to nothing in the night. The stove in the center of the house, however, now using coal, keeps a steady core of comfortable warmth in the heart of our winter fortress.
Quotes to savor:
The ice often spoke and groaned before a big storm. I must watch the glass and the wind and the northeast.
A jar of mincemeat made from deer meat, a colonial recipe treasured on the farms.
Some scholar has said, and very wisely, that the songs of a people are an excellent token of their character. The student of human nature would do well to add their clothes!
The house was full of the sound of the gale. It was a winter northeaster, furious with wind and snow, and driving down against us from the dark and desolate North Atlantic and a thousand miles of whitecaps and slavering foam. Wailings and whistling cries, ghostly sighings under latched doors, fierce pushings and buffetings of the exposed walls--thrusts one could feel as a vibration of the house itself.
The sound which snow makes against glass--that curious, fleecy pat and whisper of touch which language cannot convey or scarce suggest.
Timber and wall, the old, honest, well-built house resisted with its own defiance. It has closed with such storms for almost one hundred and fifty years, standing in its ancient fields as a fortress of the hopes of man and his will to live.
Home again from a visit to friends in town, glad to be back where everything doesn't come into the house along a wire or down a pipe. What a relief it was to get into my farm clothes and have a reasonable amount of physical work to do!
In the old lumbering days there were bells on all the teams to give warning of their coming along the narrow, winding roads.
Full midwinter, the season of snow, ear-tingling cold, and skies into whose blue the earth reflects back its own intensity of light. So glittering is the morning air and so cloudless the sky that the sun rolls up over the eastern woods like a sudden miracle of radiant gold.
No sound is more characteristic of this leafless time than the cries of blue jays from the woods. To us on the farms it is music for it means that life in the air, daring, vigorous, and even jocular, is sharing the winter with us, and has not fled from us before the deep bitterness of cold.
The day was the very quintessence of the winter, a time of pure, universal blue and white.
To speak in paradox, a sense of some joy in living is one of the most serious things in the world.
Before sunrise, the windows glazed with ferns and opaque mysteries of ice, all turning a glowing crystalline rose as the hidden sun clears the tree tops to the east.
Cheered by the increasing light and a long spell of pleasant weather, "up March hill" we go, to use an old phrase which is still very much alive among us.
A normal range of physical sensation, a sense, for instance, of the fabric of earth underfoot and the sudden cold of a change of wind, is not only a part of the discipline of life but also of its reward.
March with its snows and light and warmer temperatures can be one of the loveliest months of the year, but alas for early April and the long fortnight immemorially known as "mudtime". It is then that the "bottom falls out of the roads", as the local phrase has it.
When we meet, our ironic and universal phrase is this: "Nice weather overhead."
On a farm, the day's work is the most exciting and interesting thing that goes on, and farm children are instinctively aware of it, deserting their toys on the instant to rush out and see Buttercup's new calf.
There is something very fine in family labor shared together in goodwill by all the generations under a roof. It holds the household together in a bond of life and a unity of purpose, it gives a human core of strength, and it builds up a family against time and loneliness.
Like many of these older farms, we have two kitchens, a summer one and a winter one, each with its own sink, chimney and running water.
One of my pet superstitions, inherited from a wise and ever-honored grandmother: the first hearthfire of the year must be lit by the woman of the house.
Are we farm people the only ones left who still laugh with gusto in the old, almost roll-on-the-floor way? I sometimes fear so.
Corn, the truly sacred plant of America, the staff and symbol of its ancient being. The long rains come from the east and sea, the black thundershowers from the west; the rustling sound of corn is heard on the August wind.
Few moments of the country year are as lovely as the green quiet of an early summer morning.
Above our railroad crossing, on a wooded hillock, a number of larches stand among white pines and red. Surely one of the most beautiful greens in Nature is the green of new leaves of this tree.
Honey bees visit the dandelions; I see them all day long crawling over the golden faces, filling the air with an industrious hum. Local housewives put up jars of dandelion greens for winter use. That green bitterness of early summer can be very refreshing when served with potatoes and winter squash of February.
At the end of winter every house needs a carpenter as it might need a doctor, and early summer is a good time to get things done.
Auctions are part of our summer adventure. We buy agricultural tools and implements at farm auctions, at town auctions are liable to bid for what takes our fancy. Because we are an old, conservative, thrifty people, shipbuilders and seafarers withal, there is no telling here what an auction might bring to light. "I now show you," begins the auctioneer, and not only do I like what he holds up to view but I feel that it would take a charge of bears to separate me from it. "Sold to Mr. Beston for three dollars and fifty cents!"
Perhaps asking too much is an error more dangerous than we realize, a thing of strong poison to the human soul. Our world would do well for awhile to muse upon the serenity and happiness possible within our human and earthly limitations.
Every saltwater creek and inlet now seems to have its great blue heron, every pond shore its solitary sandpiper. Strawberry season is over; no more shortcakes at supper. Now come blueberry muffins.
Calling and replying to each other across the rain-pitted water, loons began their quaverings and trills: they always have something to say when rain begins. Then to the senses came that first country smell of dust and rain, then a smell of wet earth and rain, presently followed by a cool breath of air moving with the rain along the fields, fragrant with a faint, cool smell of grass. Our gardens which had been standing still from dryness would now awake. The earth was drinking in the showers.
Oh, work that is done in freedom out of doors, work that is done with the body's and soul's goodwill, work that is an integral part of life and is done with friends--is there anything so good?
There are times when I think that some pests regard arsenate of lead as an exhilarating marmalade.
Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things. Country living is a pageant of Nature and the year; it can no more stay fixed than a movement in music, and as the seasons pass, they enrich life far more with little things than with great, with remembered moments rather than hours. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.
When one lives in the country and observes wild animals, one is sure to come upon dramas and acts of courage which profoundly stir the heart. The tiniest birds fight off the marauder, the mother squirrel returns to the tree already scorched by the on-coming fire; even the creatures in the pond face in their own strange fashion the odds and the dark. Surely courage is one of the foundations on which all life rests!
When our orchards bear, let us be grateful to the bees, and remember that man has a number of food plants which some special insect alone can pollinate.
So cloudless and glowing are the days, so warm and still the bright autumnal hours that we tend to forget what the sky to the northwest has stored away for us of bitter cold and "the treasures of the snow".
The days are too fine to spend five minutes indoors.
The seasons have their fragrance. In summer there is a smell of greenness, of heat, grass and surface dust; in autumn the fragrance is one of cold dews and ripeness, of fallen leaves and the tang and ferment of leaves, of a world smouldering and withering away in the year's invisible fires.
Arthur R. Macdougall Jr. "Mak" is the author of the genial, amusing, friendly-spirited "Dud Dean" stories so cherished all over America by all good fly-fishermen.
A pleasant elderly woman who runs a tiny shop full of second-hand thing and "antiques" tells that she was one of twenty-two children, all of whom lived. "We never took anything for sickness but Indian herb medicines. Father knew all the healing plants. He was wonderful."
The old-fashioned "baked bean" is an important part of our farm economy in this higher north. With plenty of "baking beans" in storage, a piece of salt pork, and a jug of molasses in the "buttery", a wood range that knows its business is in the kitchen, and a family bean pot in the oven, we feel ready here for anything that may arrive when the north and east darken beyond the hills and a three day storm begins to howl.
Shaken from the dooryard trees by a light, almost imperceptible wind, leaves drift down past the kitchen windows in the rhythm of the great flakes which so often announce the beginning of a night of snow.
"Johnny Ride the Sky", the horse-and-jockey weather vane which has come down to us from the farm's horse and buggy years.
On these cold nights when a rising wind rattles the windows and ragged clouds sail across the moon, we know in our warm kitchen what will presently come down upon us from the solitudes of the north. Strengthened and provisioned like fortresses, our cordwood stacked under cover and our cellars filled, we should not fear the northeaster and the wind running in above the sea.
In Maine we call our preparation for the siege--and the phrase is ancestral--"housing up".
Two wood fires, one in the kitchen range, and one in the great fireplace, burn all day long, and smoulder away to nothing in the night. The stove in the center of the house, however, now using coal, keeps a steady core of comfortable warmth in the heart of our winter fortress.
January 28, 2021
If you've been looking for a book that was just endless nature descriptions, interspersed with random, disconnected sermons about the soullessness of modern city life compared to the simplicity of working the land, Henry Beston's Northern Farm is for you.
The good news is that the descriptions are lovely and poetic. The bad news is that I find even the most beautiful nature descriptions tedious after awhile. Looking back, I think I would have enjoyed this more if I had just read a chapter a night, treating each almost like a poem to savor. When just trying to read through it like a novel, however, I often found my mind wandering and eyes glazing over after 10 minutes or so. It legitimately is a good book to help you fall asleep at night.
I do take issue with Beston's glorification of farming life, although I can understand it as a reaction to the mechanical horrors of the recent WWII. But it's hard to take him seriously when the reader strongly suspects that he doesn't actually rely on his farm to support himself and his wife. He very much seems to be doing this work just for fun, and he is constantly mentioning the neighbors who come over to help them out. Is this really just how helpful they were? Or did they see the Bestons as a rather hapless pair of writers, who need the help because they didn't really know what they were doing? It's tough to tell. But I do note that Beston mentions the help they get far more often than any help they give.
Still, it was a fine read. It's just that I can't stay that engaged in nature descriptions, and the periodic preaching about the soulless modern age annoyed me.
The good news is that the descriptions are lovely and poetic. The bad news is that I find even the most beautiful nature descriptions tedious after awhile. Looking back, I think I would have enjoyed this more if I had just read a chapter a night, treating each almost like a poem to savor. When just trying to read through it like a novel, however, I often found my mind wandering and eyes glazing over after 10 minutes or so. It legitimately is a good book to help you fall asleep at night.
I do take issue with Beston's glorification of farming life, although I can understand it as a reaction to the mechanical horrors of the recent WWII. But it's hard to take him seriously when the reader strongly suspects that he doesn't actually rely on his farm to support himself and his wife. He very much seems to be doing this work just for fun, and he is constantly mentioning the neighbors who come over to help them out. Is this really just how helpful they were? Or did they see the Bestons as a rather hapless pair of writers, who need the help because they didn't really know what they were doing? It's tough to tell. But I do note that Beston mentions the help they get far more often than any help they give.
Still, it was a fine read. It's just that I can't stay that engaged in nature descriptions, and the periodic preaching about the soulless modern age annoyed me.
November 23, 2008
very lovely, very slow, and very preachy.
April 24, 2016
Gorgeous imagery, soothes my soul to follow the seasons on his farm. A book you keep by the bed to pick up every day for a booster shot.
September 3, 2017
Nothing could be as good as "The Outermost House." But Beston turns his eyes, ears, mind, and heart to his beloved Chimney Farm in the Maine woods. He takes us through a year, from glassy blue snow shadows, to the pond ice groaning as it begins to loosen, through that first spring-ish day when a window can be opened, letting in "a few flies who look in need of kind words and vitamins." A hot summer, the young farming men stripped to the waist and crusted with hayseeds and sweat. Then the autumn, and the ritual of "housing up," where spare rooms are closed and used to store apples and potatoes, the summer kitchen gear relocated back into the winter kitchen and the woodstove is set back in its hearth to warm the reduced living quarters. It's intimate, with the details of observation only Beston can see and put into words: the soft pat of huge snowflakes on the windows, how to remove a dire ink stain from a handwoven tablecloth, how neighbor children are dispersed to other people's houses to do their homework by lamplight and occupy the house while the owners are gathered for a social evening. A lovely portrait of a home, a landscape, and a community, if perhaps without the broader scope of ocean, climate, and the earth as a whole he shows us from the cape.
March 5, 2019
I really enjoyed Beston's descriptions of the Maine countryside. I now will look for the different colors of shadows in moonlight on snow! What I didn't enjoy as much was his waxing of how country people seem to understand things more and enjoy life more, and that it is a shame that machinery is taking over things formerly done by humans. ("Can't store farmers in a barn.") Personally I like automation, because it frees up the human for creativity and other more (in my book) worthy pursuits. He didn't really talk about that.....but I think I know what he's getting at. Enjoy!
May 30, 2020
I read this book every year. It is calming and uplifting. This gentle telling praises the life on a small farm in Maine of an older couple in the 1940s. They work the land, know their neighbors, chop wood, make their own meals and share with others. This is a time and place where people care for each other and live their lives in peace, close to the land. I may be romanticizing, but anxiety is not a constant concern as they are too busy working in the outdoors, enjoying life and getting a peaceful nights sleep in the still quietness up north.
December 12, 2020
I'm from coastal Maine and thus this book is close to my heart; the description of the seasons, the land and the wildlife still ring true today. Clearly written by an older man than The Outermost House, for all his poetic waxing about farm life Beston seems to have become fairly jaded about humans in his older years, and not a little bit sentimental about the past, something white men of a certain age are wont to do throughout history.
August 4, 2024
A beautiful snapshot of midcoast Maine in the late 40s. Others have said preachy, and it is, maybe moreso because it was originally published as serial essays. Still lovely, though, if you have any relationship to the area or the history. Seeing the names of people who lived in the area back then is worth it in its own right -- there's some great ones. The illustrations by Thoreau MacDonald are also a delight.
July 16, 2020
When I was in high school and college, I loved reading about the observations of nature made by men: Henry David Thorough, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., and others. Henry Beston's prose is beautiful and his observations are interesting. I was raised in the far north, so I have an affinity for snow, cold, and dramatic seasonal changes. This was an excellent read.
January 4, 2026
Lyrical and elegant, this book takes the everyday life of a farmer and elevates it to the level of philosopher and artist. The author's appreciation and respect for nature invites the reader to explore their own relationship with the world's most powerful and vulnerable treasures.
November 29, 2019
I should have loved this book, I normally love nature writing but despite some beautiful passages I felt there was something missing.
January 22, 2022
One of my all-time favorite books of nature-writing.
September 11, 2022
I really enjoyed reading about a year on Damariscotta after spending a lifetime of summers there.
June 1, 2023
A gentle read. I'm not a fan of nostalgia and most of the content felt timeless.
September 20, 2020
The book describes one year of life on a farm in Maine. Despite a harsh weather the farmer looks at the bright side and finds beauty in nature surrounding him and hard work he has to do. The author remains suspicious of progress, modernity, towns, machinery, cars and science and reflects about the good old times... "what has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity".
I was bit disappointed as this books does not offer any action. All 46 chapters consist of pure descriptions and narrations of present and past. Luckily each chapter is generally brief, so the reading is not so burdensome.
I was bit disappointed as this books does not offer any action. All 46 chapters consist of pure descriptions and narrations of present and past. Luckily each chapter is generally brief, so the reading is not so burdensome.
September 3, 2011
Henry Beston (1888-1968, born like Elisabeth Ogilvie in Quincy, MA, and his wife, the writer Elizabeth Coatsworth, in 1931 purchased Chimney Farm in Nobleboro on the shores of Damariscotta Lake. Beston’s exquisite book Northern Farm, similar to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and in many ways its equal, is set there. Their daughter, the poet Kate Barnes, Maine’s first Poet Laureate, lives in Appleton. In 1970 Coatsworth published a selection of Beston’s writings called Especially Maine. Its three sections are entitled South of Maine, In Maine, and North of Maine, which tells you all you need to know about the priorities of people like them, and me.
February 28, 2013
"Northern Farm" by Henry Beston is an excellent nonfiction book: A story of life on Chimney Farm in Maine in the 1940s. The author's descriptions of the landscape, seasons, and natural world are calming and enjoyable to read. You can also get a sense of the life of the community in the "Farm Diary" entries that are woven throughout the book. "Northern Farm" is a good book to enjoy on a quiet evening at home, and it leaves you with a wonderful appreciation for Beston's "...own land of the deeper snowfalls and the great evergreen woods..." (p. 3). Also recommended: "The Outermost House" (1928) and "The St. Lawrence" (1942), two additional books by the same author.
June 30, 2016
Although the story was written over half a century ago it resonates with things that could be said today. Henry Beston writes about his life, one year in the life of his farm. We get to know the rhythmn of life, how his neighbors live, and the political strife of the time. He writes beautifully, sometimes I feel as if I am reading poetry when it is only prose. Great insights.
January 18, 2015
Loved this book. Though written in 1945, the author's comments about the contrasts between urban & rural life still resonate. If you love nature and the countryside, you'll identify with many of his thoughts. Well worth reading. Too bad it's out of print!
May 17, 2009
Though I enjoy nature writing, this book dragged on and I never finished it.
December 14, 2009
One of my favorite books. I seem to reread this often, especially at the turn of the year.
June 19, 2012
Sweet and gentle but no comparison to The OUTERMOST HOUSE ...still my favorite
April 30, 2014
I love reading about living in Maine. I'm ready to brave the biting flies and the biting, cold months. Okay, I'll settle for a 1 or 2 week visit if I can't move there.
July 12, 2016
Henry Beston is a poet. He uses the most delicious vocabulary when he describes the day to day life on the farm in Maine. For a romantic like myself, I love this book.
October 12, 2016
Excellent book to remind us of connection to and dependence on nature and one another.
October 2, 2017
Beautiful descriptions of nature throughout a New England year. Insightful reflections on human nature. I will read this book again and again.
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