Ag Man's Travels

One Saturday in 1885, after plowing less than an eighth of an acre of Vermont rock in a full forenoon, Fred W. Chase told his wife he'd done his last job of plowing on that farm. That spring, the family headed for Nebraska, where their first home was a dug-out and their first farm earned the name Hard Scrabble Ranch. Over the next 35 years, Chase built the Chase Farm into one of the best-known farmsteads in eastern Nebraska, ran corn experiments for the state university, lectured at Farmers' Institutes, and earned a University of Nebraska certificate of honor for promoting better agriculture and good roads.

Then he retired, and in 1920, he and Anna set out in a Buick five-passenger touring car to see the continent: 20,000 miles through 38 states, Canada, and Old Mexico, most of it by automobile. He photographed the whole way, though not like a tourist. His camera recorded what interested him most: how they harvest bananas, how they farm back in Vermont, and at every university he passed, the agriculture building.

An Ag Man's Travels reproduces both records Chase left behind: the autobiography he published in his own words and the travel scrapbook, presented in facsimile with the billboards and roadside clutter intact, so you see early highway America as he saw it. Compiled and introduced by his great-grandson, Charles Chase, it's the portrait of one man of agriculture, father of the founder of the Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory, at work in the years when farming was turning into a science and the road trip was still an American adventure.