Reviewed in Appalachian Heritage

This is one of the most amazing little books I’ve ever laid my eyes upon! I just sat here and read it, and now I want to drive to Old Salem, Ohio, drive out Paradise Road, and see for myself what this little book describes! “No, I can’t tell you how 1 got interested. 1 was working as a metal grinder in a foundry?dirty work but good money. 1 just couldn’t see bowing and scraping to a boss all my life and being totally dependent on that job no matter how good the earnings...Yep, I started when 1 was twenty-four. I try to make a quarter-acre of farm every day. Course, it don’t always go that fast.” That’s Wally Spero talking in 1965 about how he bought strip-mined land for five dollars an acre and made it into farm land with an old Allis Chalmers bulldozer, by basically undoing the damage done by the strippers?finding the top-soil they scraped over into piles, scraping off the “spoil” they left, and creating farm land.

This book not only tells about that visit, but about another visit thirty years later to see the wonderful community of people who have sprung up-those who had the commitment and the urge to buy little re-claimed farms from Spero. Wow! What an inspirational story! And what a neat little book! No wonder Wendell Berry wrote the Forward! Gene Logsdon runs a small farm near Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and is the author of nineteen previous books.

Appalachian Heritage