The Pearson House
A stop on the Underground Railroad, a spittoon with a story, and a featherbed that hid more than feathers.
Coming SoonAbout the Book
A Bend in the River, a Bend in Time
Keosauqua sits inside the great oxbow of the Des Moines River, where the water bends nearly back on itself before continuing toward the Mississippi. My family has farmed inside that bend for five generations, and worshipped in the same Methodist church for just as long.
Farming on the Oxbow is a memoir of that place and those people — the pioneers who broke the prairie, the circuit riders who preached across it, and characters like Henry Clay "Dirty Shirt" Dean, the brilliant and eccentric preacher-orator whom Mark Twain never forgot.
But it is also a book about now. The early settlers of Van Buren County disagreed about nearly everything — politics, religion, war — and yet they raised barns together, buried each other's dead, and built a town that endures. In an age when Americans struggle to stay in the same room, the oxbow has something to say.
“When the last farmhouse disappears from the landscape, what stories disappear with it?”
