West Salem, Wisconsin

West Salem is where Hamlin Garland was born on September fourteenth, eighteen sixty, in a small log cabin. Garland would grow up to write the stories that turned the hard truth of Midwest farm life into literature, rejecting the sentimental myth of the pioneer homestead in favor of its exhaustion, debt, and loneliness. His collection Main-Travelled Roads and his memoir A Son of the Middle Border earned him the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen twenty-two for A Daughter of the Middle Border.

When his writing gave him the means, Garland bought a house in West Salem in eighteen ninety-three so his aging parents could return from the Dakota Territory. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-one. The village itself was platted in eighteen fifty-six and sits in the coulee country just east of La Crosse, where the hills rise steeply from the Mississippi River valley, landscapes Garland knew by heart and carried into every story he wrote.