The Owner Built Home & Homestead
(Page 11 of 15)
So a rural setting can verily support an owner-builder in a
sort dovetailing set of circumstances. A family buys an
acreage of land in hinterland where land is not so
expensive. Taxes are therefore not so high. Building
regulations are almost non-existent; so only moderate
construction funds need be amassed. The land can be made
productive and so cash need be earned for foodstuffs, thus
allowing more time and money to be spent on building and
land development. Nutritious food raised on the land can
improve the family health, and thus more energy available
for greater homestead development.
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In a few years a family should be happily situated on its
own debt-free home. How it should go about developing the
(garden, orchard, pasture, woodlot), water supply, fencing,
barns and buildings will be the subject of The
Owner-Built Homestead.
The idea of a family earning its economic necessaries from
a homestead (with a part-time money income to supply
amenities which cannot be family produced) goes back to
depression years when Roosevelt's Federal Security
Administration dabbled in "subsistence farmsteads." But a
much more significant contribution to this back-to-the-land
movement was made by pioneers like Ralph Borsodi and Milton
Wend.
Ralph Borsodi an d the books he wrote in the 30s (and
since) helped shape the homestead trend. Economist Borsodi
established his family homestead 25 miles above New York
City in 1921, and saw the need for smal-lscale technology
to help revive productive living. In 1929 he wrote his
famous critique of modern culture This Ugly
Civilization, and suggested that the small homestead
was a human and constructive way out of the urban pressures
he saw developing. All this was popularized in his
Flight from the City , in 1938 (and later
printings).
Borsodi, in effect, dropped the idea and reality of the
modern homestead into the social pool in the 30s. The
ripples of that act have spread far. Some of those
affected, who have since spread the idea, included Milton
Wend, Ed Robinson, J. I. Rodale, Paul Keene, Agnes Toms,
Elizabeth Nutting and Mildred Loomis. Borsodi established
the first School of Living near Suffern, N. Y., in 1937, to
do research in how to live, to build homesteading
communities, and to develop a curriculum for a new
education for living.
Milton Wend, now of Edgartown, Mass., was a trustee of the
first School of Living. His experiences and ideas were
reported in his How to Live in the Country Without
Farming. The book has been widely read. Wend is still
active in his Human Engineering Institute.
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