Shantyboat

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard, it became a cherished reality. In their small river craft, the Hubbards became one with the flowing river and its changing weathers. This book mirrors a life that is simple and independent, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

Kentucky is nationally renowned for horses, bourbon, rich natural resources, and unfortunately, hindered by a deficient educational system. Though its reputation is not always justified, in national rankings for grades K-12 and higher education, Kentucky consistently ranks among the lowest states in education funding, literacy, and student achievement. In A History of Education in Kentucky, William E. Ellis illuminates the successes and failures of public and private education in the commonwealth since its settlement. Ellis demonstrates how political leaders in the nineteenth century created a culture that devalued public education and refused to adequately fund it. He also analyzes efforts by teachers and policy makers to enact vital reforms and establish adequate, equal education, and discusses ongoing battles related to religious instruction, integration, and the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). A History of Education in Kentucky is the only up-to-date, single-volume history of education in the commonwealth. Offering more than mere policy analysis, this comprehensive work tells the story of passionate students, teachers, and leaders who have worked for progress from the 1770s to the present day. Despite the prevailing pessimism about education in Kentucky, Ellis acknowledges signs of a vibrant educational atmosphere in the state. By advocating a better understanding of the past, Ellis looks to the future and challenges Kentuckians to avoid historic failures and build on their successes.

Harlan and Anna Hubbard, newly married in middle age, build the boat of their dreams and drift down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Harlan is an artist and a writer with a poet's eye for the beauty of the world. Anna is a musician and an elegant master of the arts of graceful living. For seven years (1944-1951) the Hubbards make their home on their little boat, drifting with the river, camping on the land. Together they learn how to create and sustain a self-sufficient way of life that is infinitely fulfilling. It is a "river way of life"—free-flowing, endowed with the love of nature, the discovery of community, the rewards of good work, and the joy of creativity. The journal is a witness to history, embracing the gentle spirit of an America now lost to modern "progress." It is one of the most significant renderings in our literature of a deeply felt sense of place. Out of this journal grew Harlan Hubbard's enduring classic, Shantyboat, and his idyllic Shantyboat on the Bayous. His later Payne Hollow is a Thoreauvian testament to the values embodied in the homesteading life the Hubbards lived for four decades after they completed their epic river journey. Their life together has been praised by Wendell Berry as "one of the finest accomplishments of our time." The Shantyboat Journal reveals its creation.

Since the publication of Shantyboat: A River Way of Life in 1953, Harlan Hubbard achieved a wide reputation as a modern-day Thoreau. Not content simply to advocate a life of simplicity and self-sufficiency, Hubbard and his wife Anna in 1944 built with their own hands a houseboat on the banks of the Ohio near Cincinnati and in 1946 set out on a leisurely, five-year journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Shantyboat, Hubbard's recounting of their journey to New Orleans, and Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, his sequel telling of their life in a corner of rural Kentucky after their return, won him a host of readers. Shantyboat on the Bayous is the middle chapter of the Hubbard saga. It tells of Harlan and Anna's voyage of explorations into the remote reaches of Louisiana. For more than a year after reaching New Orleans, the Hubbards meandered through the lush Cajun country on the Intracoastal Waterway, along Bayou Lafourche, thought the marshes around Avery Island, and finally up the storied Bayou Teche toward the farthest point of navigation. The story of these travels, along with the author's illustrations of the bayou country, offers a portrait of one of the most unusual and least-known regions of our country and of the people who inhabit it. In this book, the Hubbards once again demonstrate their gift for living in simple and eloquent harmony with the land. As Don Wallis notes in his foreword, Shantyboat on the Bayous completes Hubbard's autobiography of "the life he shared with Anna, self-created and self-sustained, difficult and joyful, full of achievement and discovery, diligence, pleasure, and reward." Here is a jewel of a travel book, certain to be treasured by Hubbard's many admirers and discovered by scores of new ones.

Harlan Hubbard was Kentucky's Thoreau, and his journals are intimate records of a life lived in harmony with nature. For more than fifty years the artist, writer, and homesteader described daily activities and recorded keen observations as he sought to live simply and authentically. The third and climactic volume of his journals, Payne Hollow Journal, contains entries from the years he and his wife, Anna, lived at their Payne Hollow home along the Ohio River's Kentucky shore. There they mastered the arts of country life, building their own stone and timber house in 1952 and raising their own food. To live with nature was not a novel experience for the couple; earlier they had floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on their homemade shantyboat. Hubbard described this journey in Shantyboat Journal, the basis for his Shantyboat and Shantyboat on the Bayous. By turns poetic and practical, Payne Hollow Journal celebrates nature's intense beauty and sometimes harsh realities as perhaps only an artist can see them. Here Hubbard reveals how dedication to work that provides sustenance -- gardening, wood chopping, fishing, foraging, and raising goats-can also be fulfilling. Don Wallis's arrangement of the Payne Hollow entries reflects the seasonal changes in Hubbard and his life as well as in the natural world around him. At the beginning of this volume Hubbard writes, "When we are away from Payne Hollow, that place does not seem real or possible.... It is hard to explain our situation, to give reasons for our living this way to people who have no understanding or sympathy." A visit to the Hubbards' home through Payne Hollow Journal is ample explanation for anyone who has yearned to lead a life of simplicity and purpose.

THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT—Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller “Poignant, engrossing.”—People • “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong. Publishers Weekly’s #3 Longest-Running Bestseller of 2017 • Winner of the Southern Book Prize • If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection This edition includes a new essay by the author about shantyboat life.

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

In the early 1970s, two idealistic young people—Gwen Carpenter Roland and Calvin Voisin—decided to leave civilization and re-create the vanished simple life of their great-grandparents in the heart of Louisiana's million-acre Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp. Armed with a box of crayons and a book called How to Build Your Home in the Woods, they drew up plans to recycle a slave-built structure into a houseboat. Without power tools or building experience they constructed a floating dwelling complete with a brick fireplace. Towed deep into the sleepy waters of Bloody Bayou, it was their home for eight years. This is the tale of the not-so-simple life they made together—days spent fishing, trading, making wine, growing food, and growing up—told by Gwen with grace, economy, and eloquence. Not long after they took up swamp living, Gwen and Calvin met a young photographer named C. C. Lockwood, who shared their "back to the earth" values. His photographs of the couple going about their daily routine were published in National Geographic magazine, bringing them unexpected fame. More than a quarter of a century later, after Gwen and Calvin had long since parted, one of Lockwood's photos of them appeared in a National Geographic collector's edition entitled 100 Best Pictures Unpublished—and kindled the interest of a new generation. With quiet wisdom, Gwen recounts her eight-year voyage of discovery—about swamp life, wildlife, and herself. A keen observer of both the natural world and the ways of human beings, she transports readers to an unfamiliar and exotic place.