In 1935, Aldo Leopold bought a worn out farm along the Wisconsin River. Taking up (second) residence in a former chicken coop, they wanted to live close to the land. “Wilderness is the one kind of playground which mankind cannot build to order,” he wrote in his now-classic A Sand County Almanac. https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/ald…
The former homestead was also the site of his grand experiment in attempting to bring life back to Dust Bowl era terrain. Over the course of more than a decade the family of seven planted nearly 50,000 trees and today their property is a lush landscape of conifers, hardwoods and prairie.