Uncle Will of Wildwood: Nineteenth-Century Life in the Bluegrass

Uncle Will of Wildwood is a warm and humorous memoir of the nineteenth-century Bluegrass that recalls a defining period of Kentucky's past. It was a time of self-sufficient country estates when, as Thomas D. Clark writes in his introduction, "every Bluegrass farm gate was the entryway into a ruggedly independent domain." Wildwood was such a place, ruled by the affable Uncle Will of this classic book.

Everything at Wildwood revolved around Will Goddard, who was "a cross between a hurricane a...