Black Soil Hardcover – September 10, 2010

I loved being transported back to 1800's Iowa, learning about the hardships so many faced as they arrived in Iowa. I really enjoyed this book.

I grew up in Granville, Iowa, where the welcome sign reads, "Welcome to Granville, Home of Black Soil." This novella was in many of the libraries of the families I knew growing up, and still sits on my mother's table of keepsakes from our home. While this is not an earth moving work of fiction, it paints a picture of the life of struggles on the prairie, a life all the settlers faced. It is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in details of what life was like on the prairie in the late 1800s.

Don't be mistaken. Black Soil is not a great novel. However, it tells a story too soon and often and easily forgotten--the kind of story told in Giants in the Earth and elsewhere. The homesteading experience, on this side of the Missouri River at least, didn't take all that long--maybe a decade. But it's important to know how it happened and who was displaced. Josephine Donovan takes a shot at that American saga in this 1930s novel. If you're from the black soil she describes, as I am, this novel should be required reading. I'm sitting on land right now that's part of the story.

When one approaches Granville, Iowa, there is a sign reading: "Home of Black Soil." This book was published in 1930 and supposedly is laid in Granville, though the true name of the town is not mentioned in the novel. It tells of Tim Connors, his wife Neill, their children, and Sheila, who lives with them. There are blizzards, grasshoppers, pioneer hardships, and a reasonably happy ending. This is not really a good book, but anyone interested in early Iowa should read it. Roy W. Meyer, in his book The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century, published in 1965 by the University of Nebraska Press, says of this book: "The chief distinction of Black Soil is that it, almost alone among farm novels. deals with a group that consists chiefly of Catholics, the Irish and German settlers of northwestern Iowa."

I thought that this was a very good book and gave an excellant picture of life in early Iowa and what our forefathers went through in setteling our mid west.