Though few of us now live close to the soil, the world we inhabit has been sculpted by our long national saga of settlement. At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the continent. It lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story, too: she is the daughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized in her first two books but has not carried on. In this clear-eyed, lyrical account, Brox twines the two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, Brox also considers the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them; and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness--and its intricate connection to cultivation--which changed as our ties to the land loosened, as terror of the wild was replaced by desire for it. Exploring these strands with neither judgment nor sentimentality, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of the farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries on in our collective imagination.

"A moving, graceful elegy for the American farm." --Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato "Nonfiction literature of a high and lasting order . . . Clearing Land, [Brox's] third book, parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant family's farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American landscape: wilderness, prairie, mountain, city. Her precise, eloquent prose, wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded, strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . The result is a deeply affecting conclusion to her trilogy of books about living the consequences of natural process, human desire and the shifting balance between them." -Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune "Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure." -Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Clearing land is the book's guiding metaphor, one that encompasses both time and space, and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it. . . This [Brox] does with eloquent melancholy." -Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

Never before has the story of Chicagoland's great southwest side been told in such a sweeping manner. This book contains the only history of the Belt railroad yards, the giant Clearing Industrial District, Midway Airport and many other subjects too numerous to mention in such a short space. More important yet are the stories of the Indians and settlers, the aviators and industrialists and the ordinary people who have made Clearing what it is today. "A Little Known Story of the Land Called Clearing" is the end product of twenty years of research by local author Robert Hill whose grandfather arrived in 1909 and opened the first hardware store in the community. Originally published in a limited quantity in 1983, this treasure trove of local Chicagoland history has been reissued and updated by permission of the Hill family. Now the generations to come will learn the history of a land called Clearing.