Black Swamp Farm

In the headlong rush that characterizes American life as we know it today, the quieter ways of just a generation ago have all but passed from the scene and are remembered by only a few. Men's eyes are fixed on tomorrow and the day after; yesterdays pass unnumbered and often unremembered into time.Howard E. Good recaptures a vanished way of life for those who still remember, and recounts it for those who cannot. He was born on a farm in an area of the Maumee Valley in northwestern Ohio that was known as the Black Swamp, a dank remnant of the violence of the ice age and its glaciers, from which farmland had to be wrested by long and arduous labor and where only the stouthearted had any hope of success.Mr. Good remembers playing shinny with clamp-on skates and a tin can that had been stomped until it whizzed across the ice with just the right combination of speed and accuracy. He recalls the boom of the steam engine as it pulled the threshing machine to your farm on a hot summer day, and the excitement of riding high on the top of a wagonload of hay and gazing down on the broad, shining backs of the horses. He describes the springtime task of making soap, the ritual of the shivaree, and the pleasures of the church ice-cream social. He remembers well-and chronicles for the reader-the unproclaimed achievements of good men and women whose courage and grueling toil brought them rewards of a kind that life no longer affords.The Black Swamp is now gone, and neat, productive farms cover the area with geometric precision. Mr. Good still lives nearby, and he visits the area frequently in search of those few remaining traces of the heritage of the land. A private air strip, he notes, now occupies the field where once, as a small boy, he labored at whipping potato bugs from the vines with a small branch from a nearby tree.