Carl Sandburg Home

On a gentle hillside above the village of Flat Rock, surrounded by two hundred and sixty-four acres of mountain pasture and forest, sits a white farmhouse that was home to one of America's most celebrated writers for the last twenty-two years of his life. Carl Sandburg came to Connemara in nineteen forty-five, and he never left.

Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in eighteen seventy-eight, the son of Swedish immigrants. He had worked as a milkman, a harvest hand, a hotel servant, and a soldier in Cuba before finding his way to journalism and then poetry. His nineteen sixteen collection Chicago Poems announced him as something new in American letters: a voice that celebrated working people, industrial cities, and the unglamorous texture of ordinary life. He described Chicago as Hog Butcher for the World, Stacker of Wheat, City of the Big Shoulders. It was not the language of polite verse.

Three Pulitzer Prizes followed across his career. The first came in nineteen nineteen for his poetry collection Cornhuskers. The second, and perhaps most remarkable, came in nineteen forty for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, a four-volume biography so exhaustively researched and humanly rendered that it remains one of the defining portraits of Lincoln in American literature. A third Pulitzer arrived in nineteen fifty-one for his Complete Poems.

He and his wife Lilian moved to Connemara partly for the mountain quiet that writing demanded, and partly because Lilian raised champion dairy goats and needed the pastureland. She became one of the foremost Nubian and Toggenburg goat breeders in the country, winning national titles from this farm.

Sandburg wrote more than a third of his published work here in Flat Rock, working through the night at a table surrounded by his twelve thousand books, often sleeping until noon. He died at Connemara in July of nineteen sixty-seven at the age of eighty-nine.

The National Park Service took stewardship of the property in nineteen sixty-eight. The house is preserved as the Sandburgs left it, books stacked everywhere, the goat farm still active with descendants of Lilian's original herd. It stands as one of the few literary shrines in America where the landscape itself was part of the writer's life.