For the past three years, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has been leading a collaborative Smithsonian project on Urban Waterways. The project comes out of a desire to explore the various issues facing urban communities and document the diverse responses to such challenges. Rivers, typically imagined in the context of a wild, natural landscape, are often “forgotten” […]
In the 1860s, an 83-acre property on what was then Smith Road, now South 51st Street, in Franklin, Wisconsin was bought by our great grandfather, Johann (John) Barg and his wife Maria (nee Tietgen). The Barg homestead’s main barn was erected in 1877. Later, his son, our grandfather, Edward J. Barg and his wife Annette […]
In the 1960s I learned everything I needed to know about gardening and cooking from one of the original organic gardeners and foodies: my grandmother. After World War II she noticed that it was hard to get good produce anymore; the peddlers who used to sell door-to-door didn’t come around any more. So she bought […]
The catalpa tree in the front yard of our family farm is still living today. As far as we know our parents planted the tree. There are six of us. Pa and Ma referred to us children as “first and second crop hay” as they had two girls and a boy (like first cutting of […]
Gardening was an important part of my grandparents’ life on their farmstead in western Iowa where my father grew up and also where I grew up. Originally the area around the house was bare of plants but with time Grandpa Henry and Grandma Olga planted numerous trees, bushes, flowers and a lawn around the home. […]
My father Nicola, emigrated to the United States in December 1965. He came to live with his brothers and sisters who had already established themselves in Flushing, New York. In September of 1967 he traveled back to his hometown of Mola di Bari, Italy, where he met my mother Rosa. They married in Mola di […]
Although my Granddaddy passed away about a year ago, I wanted to share the story of his commitment to farming the way he was raised. Granddaddy grew up on this very farm around the turn of the twentieth century growing row crops as is so common on the Eastern Shore. Although farming was not his […]
Greenhouse 17 (GH17) is a forty-acre domestic violence emergency shelter and farm that has become a healing oasis to thousands of women and families since 2004. Greenhouse 17 is a Grow Appalachia success story for its innovative therapeutic farm stipend program for survivors. The farm, a multi-acre community garden with six high tunnels, was started […]
Collecting Milkweed Pods During World War II We lived in a small, prosperous town in the middle of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, a very fertile valley, good for growing fruits and vegetables, still an area of small farms and truck gardens, with a range of mountains to the north and south. We were a family of […]