The Virginia Bookshelf ia a series of paperback reprints of classic works focusing on Virginia life, landscapes, and people. "This entertaining book, made up in part of essays written for various publications and for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, ia a celebration". -- New York Times In the tradition of Wendell Berry and John McPhee, Donald McCaig writes with a powerful sense of place and of the history of Virginia's Highland County in An American Homeplace. On the fast track in the New York advertising world, McCaig gave it all up to move to a ramshackle farm in Virginia's upper Cowpasture River Valley. McCaig traces the history of his property -- which he and his wife Anne acquired, decrepit farmhouse and all, in 1971 -- from 1750 to the present day. In the memorable title essay, he draws on his own research, as well as stories from local residents and excerpts from old letters, to recount the events and hardships that once characterized daily life in rural Virginia: perilous Indian attacks, precarious tobacco crops, the Civil War and its aftermath, the industrial age that drove a once-prosperous farm into ruin. Since 1971 the McCaigs have had their share of adventures on the land, and the remaining chapters of An American Homeplace present an affectionate portrait of farm life: rescuing newborn winter lambs from a frozen fate, the intricacies of neighborliness, how to train sheep dogs effectively, learning to milk a cow. Enhanced by the author's evident love for his land and for the stories it has to tell, An American Homeplace is an inviting combination of personal memoir and narrative history.