The name “Featherstone Farm” is taken from the township in Goodhue County (west of Red Wing, about 80 miles north of Rushford) where Jack’s great grandfather homesteaded in the late 19^th century.   Handed down to us through his memoir, this man’s vision for agriculture and the environment continues to inspire all that we do at Featherstone Farm a century later.

Alexander Pierce (AP) Anderson was born in a dugout house in the “Little Smaland” valley of Featherstone Township in 1862.  He spent his first 30 years on the homestead and teaching at the one room schoolhouse just down the road.  After losing his home to a fire in the early 1890s (and his parent’s death shortly thereafter), AP left the farm to attend the University of Minnesota and study botany.  He spent the next 30 years as a teacher, farmer,  inventor and world traveler. 

In the early 1900s AP Anderson returned to his roots in Featherstone Township to raise a family and to buy back the original homestead and farmland around it.  By the 1920s he was farming nearly 500 acres- and experimenting with conservation tillage and a number of grain cultivars.  Generating all of its own energy and fertility and feed, this original “Featherstone Farm” was undoubtedly more sustainable than the one we operate today.

But AP saw the destructiveness of pre-dust bowl agriculture in the area as well.  He was keenly sensitive to the richness and diversity of the high grass prairies and woodlands that he helped to plow up, chop down and grub out in his youth.  As a trained botanist, he understood the vastness of what had been lost.  He became an early conservationist; when he returned to Featherstone Township in midlife, AP began planted tens of thousands of trees and shrubs on his farm “to replace what [he] destroyed.”

AP Anderson’s legacy was passed on through a memoir “The Seventh Reader” -a collection of verse and writings on the prairie homesteads of his youth- that AP assembled and self published in 1932.  This memoir came to be a huge inspiration for his great grandson Jack Hedin, who discovered it during his idealistic college days.  The book is full of the original “Featherstone Farmer’s” musings on nature and agriculture and humanity’s place in the environment.  Above all, it gives a rich glimpse into this man’s curiosity and generosity of spirit… qualities which we try and bring to the present, 21^st century Featherstone Farm.

Last updated on July 9, 2011 by Featherstone Farm