Yon Far Country:

A Social and Personal Memoir of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania

"The world changed greatly in the twentieth century. as a result people only a few years younger than I am have no idea of what life was like before the dishwasher, the automatic washing machine and dryer, even the vacuum cleaner, though I remember my mother sweeping the living-room rug with a wet broom, a bucket of water beside her. Such memories are fragment of the past.

This book is intended as the biography of a country community and of the changes it has seen since the last century, but it is autobiographical as well. My excuse is that my own roots are deeply embedded in the Lancaster country countryside. I saw and took part in many of the old ways and, however inadvertently, helped to initiate some of the new ones. Even my education (leading to the life I have led since I left the county) is in many ways typical of the world the majority of North Americans now live in as they move out of the past I have attempted to describe, and into an unknown and sometimes frightening future.