In 2006, a year before the Bedlam Farm Journal was spawned, I began visiting local farmhouses to take photographs and meet some farm families. I was eager to know the farmers and see their farms and write about them. I found that many of the old farms were occupied by farm widows, their husbands had all died riding tractors or out milking cows in the barn.

It seemed that male farmers who went to Florida or retire tended to die quickly, they struggled to find purpose after decades of milking their cows twice a day and tending to the fields. In one of the first farms I visited, the elderly widow, who was in her 90’s and courteous and supportive, went up to an old dresser and pulled out what she said was a Farm Journal.

It was her grandfather’s, she said, and it was a thin leather-bound volume, it said “Diary, 1861,” and  in it, in small and meticulous handwriting, was the life of a farmer.

Every day, he recorded – with incredible brevity – his day. What he bought, what he sold, what the weather was, what catastrophe’s occurred. Storms and heat waves, droughts and blizzards, the cost of feed and bales of hay, the slaughter of pigs,  trips to town, broken wagons.

On one short passage, he recorded the escape of one of his most belligerent bulls: “Bull got out,” he wrote on a Tuesday, “Bill came back,” on a Thursday. He recorded the sudden deaths of two children from colds, and the death of son when a tractor rolled over on him.  His son, who was 12, broke a leg which got infected. There were no antibiotics then.

The notations were brief and without emotion.

The farmers were honest and direct. Their lives were hard and unsparing. A surprising winter storm could easily wipe out their herds and their farms. So could a flood or a drought. There was no net under them.

In the coming months, I visited a score of farms, and came back with a score of beautiful old farm journals. None of the widows would accept any payment, they just wanted the journals to live.  I eventually gave all but two the County Historical society, and this one, the one above, inspired me to write a farm journal, I called it the Bedlam Farm Journal.

It is an amazing thing for me to realize this journal was kept and written in the first year of the American Civil War. I keep it right in front of my computer where I can see it when I write.

I was struck by the farmer’s openness, their wish to record and share their lives. This was my inspiration to do the same thing on my blog. I found this journal today as we were going through my books and drawers preparing to make room for a new desk.

I was very happy to see it. It is the mother of my blog, which I love very much.