Hamlin Garland was one of the great "Literary Pioneers." His style was as direct and honest as the country about which he wrote. He was the first American to write successfully about the Midwest and to sell what he had written to the sophisticated publishers and readers in Boston. The formative years of his life were spent in Osage and Burr Oak Township where he received the inspiration to become the foremost writer and reformer ever to come out of the Middle West.

He was born in Salem, Wisconsin, in 1860. After the Civil War in 1869, his father, who was a Union veteran, moved his family to Burr Oak Township in Mitchell County, Iowa, four miles northeast of Osage. Here Mr. Garland purchased a farm of 160 acres, now known as the Lyel Loney farm. While a house was being built on this farm, the family lived in a log cabin one mile east on the banks of "Dry Run," a stream where Hamlin spent his spare time fishing and dreaming.

At this time Hamlin Garland was ten years old and did a man’s work following a breaking plow turning over the virgin sod. At the end of the first year the family moved into the new house which still stands and is the present home of the Lyel Loney family, although an addition has been added. Hamlin and his younger brother slept in the upstairs room which was unheated and which was reached by placing a ladder to an outside window. Hamlin and his father planted the trees which, after more than 100 years, still adorn the original Garland homestead.

Hamlin Garland received his early education at a country school one half mile to the north, and the family went to church at Burr Oak town, two miles east. In 1876 he entered the Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, a four year academy. He and a neighbor’s son, by the name of Babcock, roomed in an attic in the east part of town. The Garland finances were so restricted that it was necessary to bring a week's supply of food from the farm on Monday morning. Garland states that usually this food was gone by Thursday and they subsisted the rest of the week without. He was an avid student.

It is said that he read every book in the school library and many from the city library as well. This, together with the inspiration he received from the Cedar Valley faculty, formed the background and the foundation for the fruitful life to follow.

Young Garland was graduated from the Seminary with honors in 1881. He then taught school in Illinois for one year. After that he staked out a homestead claim in McPherson County, South Dakota. Here two dry withering summers and three blizzards ended his farming career. His family had in the meantime moved to Ordway, South Dakota, because of grasshoppers and cinch bugs on the Iowa farm, which then reverted back to the mortgage holder.

Then came a period of tramping around the country from east to west in company with this brother. Expenses were paid and a small reserve accumulated by manual labor, digging ditches, carpenter work, etc. Finally he bent his steps eastward to complete his education. Not having sufficient funds to enter a university, he took 6 an attic room in Boston and proceeded to read everything available in the Boston public library. Joseph E. Chamberlain of the Boston Transcript writes about him: "He lived in bleak, little attic rooms, breakfasted on eight cents, dined on fifteen, and supped on ten; but his head was up, and his manner, though grave, was confident. He would not equivocate or compromise or deny anything he really believed in. He refused to write anything for a newspaper that he was not willing to sign with his own name.”

It was at this time that he "became a reformer with the improvement of rural conditions in the Midwest as an objective. He had seen his father grow stooped and bent from labor on a Mitchell County farm; he had seen his mother grow old before her years; he had seen his sister Harriet laid in her grave in the Osage cemetery even before her prime, and he had seen another sister perish on the prairies of South Dakota without proper care. It is no wonder that he felt farm conditions in the rural Midwest should "be improved. He wrote articles for the Transcript, Harpers magazine, the Century and other publications. He told the elite East and the people of Boston just what the conditions in the West were. He cultivated the friendship of such notables as Theodore Roosevelt, and he waited arm in arm with men like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and Lorado Taft, whose sister he married. It is said that as early as 1910 he laid before President Roosevelt his plans for the rural electrification of the Middle West. Then followed the books for which he has become famous: A Spoil of Office, A Son of the Middle Border, A Daughter of the Middle Border, Trailmakers of the Middle Border and many others.

Besides his literary work, he became a traveler and lecturer of note. He visited California and Alaska in the nineties. He was conversant with the leaders in foreign lands. He made a speaking tour of the West in the nineties for the Farmers Alliance and the Peoples Party to expound Henry George's philosophy of the single tax.

This country boy had learned to read from McGuffeys Reader on an Iowa homestead, lectured on literary style and won honorary literary awards. Hewas elected to the American Academy of Arts and letters in 1918, later becoming its president. He won the Pulitzer prize in 1921. In 1951 he was awarded the Roosevelt Memorial Association Medal for distinguished service as a social historian. Hailed as one of the first realists in a period dominated by the traditions of a Victorian Europe, he disliked the term "realist." His stark, realistic and sometimes grim picture of pioneer life he preferred to describe as that of a "Vertist," a word he coined to express his attitude towards his writing.

Thus can Mitchell County, the City of Osage, and, indeed, the State of Iowa look with pride on the life and accomplishments of this great man, who passed away in his home in California on March 4, 1940, never forgetful of his boyhood home where he received the training and inspiration which prompted his career of writing, lecturing and of reform.

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(Written by W. H. Biedermann.)
Mitchell County Historical Society
Osage Library
Courtesy Osage Chamber of Commerce

Transcribed by: Neal Du Shane 1/26/05
Webization by Kermit Kittleson