Farmer Boy

Summary

Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice. The big boys from Hardscrabble Settlement have driven off earlier teachers, and everyone fears for the gentle new teacher, Mr. Corse, until he meets their leader, Bill Ritchie, with a long ox whip lent him by Almanzo's father and drives the gang out of the school. Most of the book follows the farm's work through the seasons. Almanzo gets up before dawn to milk and feed stock, and for his birthday Father gives him a small ox yoke so that he can train his calves, Star and Bright. The family fills the ice-house from the frozen pond, keeps a quiet Sabbath in church at Malone, and buys tinware from a peddler. In spring Almanzo plants potatoes and corn and helps with the sheep; when a June frost threatens the corn, the whole family rises before sunrise to pour cold water on every plant. On Independence Day in Malone, Almanzo's cousin Frank dares him to ask Father for a nickel; Father gives him a half-dollar instead and explains how much plowing, planting and hoeing it stands for, and Almanzo uses it to buy a young pig to raise. While the parents are away visiting relatives, the children make ice cream and cake, feed candy to the pig Lucy, and in a quarrel Almanzo throws a stove-blacking brush at the parlor wall; Eliza Jane quietly patches the stain with wallpaper and never tells. In the fall Almanzo's milk-fed pumpkin wins first prize at the county fair, the harvest is threshed and stored, a cobbler comes to make the year's boots, and the family keeps a Christmas of cousins and feasting. Near the end Almanzo finds a pocketbook on the road holding fifteen hundred dollars. Its owner, Mr. Thompson, first suspects him and offers only a nickel, until Mr. Paddock, the wheelwright, shames him into paying a two-hundred-dollar reward. Mr. Paddock then offers to take Almanzo as an apprentice in his growing wagon business. Father explains to his son the security of town work and the freedom of a farmer who answers to no one but the land and the weather, and lets him choose. Almanzo says he wants to be a farmer like his father, and above all to have a colt of his own. Father puts the reward money in the bank for him and gives him the colt Starlight to raise and train. Harper & Brothers published the book in 1933 with illustrations by Helen Sewell; Garth Williams illustrated the 1953 edition still in print. It is the second Little House book and the only one centered on Almanzo.

Top Lessons

• Trust is earned by faithful work

  Father will not let Almanzo handle the young horses until he shows he can be patient and careful with smaller things, starting with the calves Star and Bright. By the last chapter Almanzo's steady work has earned him Starlight.

• What money stands for

  At the Fourth of July, Father shows Almanzo that a half-dollar is the plowing, planting, hoeing and harvesting of a bushel of potatoes. Almanzo learns to think about money as stored-up work, and chooses to buy a pig that will grow rather than spend it on treats in town.

• Honesty and gratitude

  Almanzo returns fifteen hundred dollars without taking a cent, even when Mr. Thompson treats him like a thief. Mr. Paddock's anger at Mr. Thompson shows that a good deed deserves thanks, while Eliza Jane's secret kindness about the parlor wall shows grace given without being earned.

• The free life of a farmer

  In the last chapter Father compares the wheelwright's comfortable town job with farm life, where a man feeds, clothes and warms his family from his own land and is his own master. Almanzo hears both sides and chooses the harder, freer life.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book has no illness of note; its interest for medical history is diet and labor. Wilder's long descriptions of meals (pies, doughnuts, baked beans, ham, fried apples'n'onions) record the heavy, home-produced diet of a prosperous northern farm family before refrigeration, with ice stored in sawdust for summer and food salted, smoked and stored for winter. Almanzo's constant hunger is that of a growing child doing a man's share of chores. The contrast with the near-starvation of the Ingalls family in Wilder's later The Long Winter makes a useful classroom pairing on food security.

• Chapter 6, "Filling the Ice-house"

  Ice is sawed from the pond and packed in sawdust to keep milk, butter and ice cream cold through the summer.

• Chapter 26, "Christmas"

  The family's holiday dinner, one of the book's long catalogs of farm food.