Quotes About Homesteading

As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.

I began raising chickens primarily for their eggs, but over the years, I've also grown fond of caring for them and learning about their many different breeds and varieties.

As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother, who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie. Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains.

In life, loss was the engine that set Wilder's fiction in motion. Exile propelled the powerful emotional current of the Little House books, an intensely felt nostalgia for people and places lost to her. That emotion was absent in "Free Land," relegating it to homesteading soap opera. Its loosely linked anecdotes were joined not by familial love but by Lane's, and the Post 's, ideology.

It is our custom to close the day with a reading from the Bible. Often when we have indeed seemed heavy-laden, we have found in its words new life and courage. Here on our lonely prairie we have felt a sense of nearness to Him who 'giveth power to the faint,' and have realized anew that 'to them that hath no might He increaseth strength.' However it may be for others, I feel that no homesteaders equipment would be complete without this book of books.

We are homesteading a claim here in old No Man's Land... In spite of droughts and hot winds, blizzards, dirt storms, hail storms, grasshoppers, and in fact almost every form of discouragement, the fascination of being so near the beginning of things, of finding ourselves not quite mastered by various calamities, has held us. We have always felt that if we could hold out a few more years we should succeed; our homestead would really become a home.

Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money, gone West and taken up a homestead. Now the free lands were gone. In earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own a mine. That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority, and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their grasp the great anthracite industry.

In most major cities, you can find stores for urban homesteaders. They sell everything you need so that you won't need anything. Sort of a 'Take This Civilization and Shove It' starter kit.

Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming.

The business of procuring the necessities of life has been shifted from the wood lot, the garden, the kitchen and the family to the factory and the large-scale enterprise. In our case, we moved our center back to the land.

I'm focusing on cultivating my land. I have vegetables and fruit trees; I want to get some chickens and solar and really get off the grid and focus on just, really, being a mother.

We'll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we'll just say the hell with goin' to work, and we'll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an' listen to the rain comin' down on the roof

That's a big goal of mine, to try and grow as much of my own food as possible.

Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith's Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre