A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family

by Leila Philip

Overview

In this luminous memoir, award-winning author Leila Philip tells the story of her ancestral Hudson River home, Talavera, the mystery of her attachment to it, and her search to come to terms with the truth about her family's fascinating three-century history there. After her father's death in 1992, Philip and her family struggled to find the means to keep Talavera intact. This uphill battle led her to examine the forces that compel a family to sacrifice almost everything to hold on to a piece of land. In a historical quest both surprising and engaging, Philip addresses the tensions between memory and recorded fact and invites readers to take a new look at their own sense of home.

Author Biography: Leila Philip is the author of The Road Through Miyama, a memoir of her apprenticeship to a master potter in Japan, for which she won the 1990 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Colgate University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780670030132
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/24/2001
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.56(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Leila Philip is the author of The Road through Miyama, a memoir of her apprenticeship to a master potter in Japan, for which she won the 1990 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction. She teaches English at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in Connecticut with her husband, her son, one dog, two cats, two lizards, and a large, unruly garden.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In the Beginning

1. One

2. The Count

3. Claverack, 1732

4. After

5. Yesterday’s Harvest

6. Talavera, 1969

7. Wild Bees

8. In the Hollow of His Hand

9. Writing to the Wind

10. Talavera, 1866

11. Household Accounts

12. Hardly a Hasty Word

13. Talavera, 1913

14. The Lives of Aunts

15. Anna

16. Another War

17. In the Orchard

Epilogue
Family Tree
Sources
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Tracing her family history for nearly two centuries by focusing on just one house, Philip's meandering but mesmerizing memoir is set in Talavera, a rambling Federal-period manse on several hundred acres in the Hudson Valley, two hours from downtown Manhattan. Spurred by the 1992 death of her father, who for more than 40 years had tended the land's thousands of apple and other fruit trees, Philip began to dig through the accumulated household accounts, daily journals, family letters and collected artifacts stretching back to 1807, when the house was built, and even to 1730, when her Dutch forebears first settled the land. Her aim was to learn how her family has held on to the land for so long, and to understand why, though confronted by harsh financial realities, she and her mother and four siblings are determined to carry on. In a style that's more prosaic than poetic, she tells of her own decision to take a leave (as professor of English at Colgate) to help her mother run the farm, while exploring her fascinating family past of 18th-century manor lords and tenant farmers, Civil War and World War II heroes, dissipated sons and rebellious daughters, suffragette aunts and grandmothers and, most stirring of all, the existence of a half-sister her father never knew he had (or if he did, never told his own family about). Both narrative threads are profoundly personal. Braided together with insight, they pay homage to the ideals of home and family with a resonance that should extend beyond her home region. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Philip (English, Colgate Univ.; The Road Through Miyama) grew up at Talavera, an estate in New York's Hudson Valley that has been in her family since 1807 and is now a working apple orchard, struggling to survive. Philip and her four siblings had to help their mother maintain the estate after the death of their father, no small feat considering the financial risk and the vast history of the land. Philip researched Talavera and her family, finding that it is no ordinary one; she uncovered diplomats, war heroes, renegade aunts, irresponsible playboys, and even an illegitimate child. While all this may bring to mind family-based TV sagas like The Big Valley or Dallas, the fact that the story is still unfolding as you read makes it all the more riveting. Relying on both family lore and documents from historical societies, this is one of the most finely written family histories available. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Lee Arnold, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An exquisite rendering of a Hudson Valley family farm, as detailed and colored as a Persian miniature, from Philip (English/Colgate Univ.; The Road Through Miyama, 1989). Since 1732, Philip's family has had a farm in Columbia County, New York. Talavera, the farm mansion built by her forebears the Van Nesses, is where her mother lives today, though precariously. Maintaining a farm on such desirable property is tough. The pick-your-own apple and pear operation the family had run for the past few decades produces too little income these days to contend with high taxes and the cost of labor and agricultural inputs. The thought of losing Talavera is crippling to Philip: "I know where I am when I am here. I am home." Attempting to fathom her attachment, the author reads the wonderfully complete record of diaries and business accounts and work orders that comprise the family archive. They provide a remarkably clear picture of the farm, starting from the years preceding the Civil War. Although the gentleman who built the house was a bit of a local grandee, the Van Ness/Philip family were not country squires, but working farmers who tended orchards and hog operations, horses and field crops. The letters so lovingly kept also reveal a cast of family characters: "The wild aunt, the radical aunt, the aunt who had been forgotten altogether. All had lived at Talavera and had left their mark." There are rectitudinous men and women, and there are black sheep: "Gaston was sent out of the country for a while until the affair settled down." And while Philip comes to recognize that Talavera is much a part of her identity, she also begins to understand the Van Ness/Philip brood were a footloose bunch thatrarely had a boodle, and if she were forced to surrender Talavera to development, her ties would never be cut. Philip's family history is alarmingly transporting, and her sense of place so rich you can taste it.

Kirkus Reviews

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