Hamlin Garland's Homestead

Hamlin Garland was born in a log cabin in West Salem in September eighteen sixty, son of a restless farmer who kept moving the family west across Wisconsin and into the Dakota Territory. Garland escaped to Boston, taught himself literature, and became one of America's first realists, writing raw stories of Midwestern farm life that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in nineteen twenty-two.

With his first earnings, he did something surprising: he came back. In eighteen ninety-three he bought this house in West Salem as a homestead for his aging parents, then spent months of each year here writing while his daughters grew up on the same Wisconsin soil his father had once abandoned. The house caught fire in nineteen twelve but Garland rebuilt it for his father's sake. It is now a National Historic Landmark, preserved by the local historical society as a rare example of a writer returning to the place he once had to flee.