There’s no place like a homestead
DUG into a sleeve of soil, the Earthship looks south from the Finger Lakes, in New York state, over a rippling field of countryside framed by mountains.
The foundation of the ecoconscious home was made with car and truck tyres filled with dirt. It was one of a few places to vacation if you wanted to bang dirt into tyres. Along with the foundation, guests helped build an outdoor patio, stacking the tyres, pounding dirt into them and pouring concrete to bind them. Other visitors to this homestead ate fresh produce and herbs from a greenhouse attached to the side of the home like a glass rib cage. One couple came to experience the subzero temperatures of a Finger Lakes winter in a home made of trash. Every guest had this in common: They came for a taste of living on a homestead.
“More and more people want to live a far simpler life,” said Sue Merriam, an author who has written about guiding families who want to pursue a homestead life. “Living in a huge home is not only crazy, it’s just not doable for many people.”
The rise of so-called slow living has inspired many to migrate from cities to rural hamlets. For all its idiosyncrasies – walls lined with tin cans and glass bottles, rainwater collection systems, the attached greenhouse – the Earthship in Freeville, New York, is now one of several hundred listings appearing on short-term rental websites like Airbnb, VRBO and Hipcamp that promote a relaxed, environmentally friendly approach to travel and a 21stcentury take on homesteading.
“You are welcome to help us with the many projects that farm living offers, from gardening and caring for the animals to projects around our restored 1860s log barn,” read one recent listing for a property in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The owner of a farm in Franklinville, North Carolina, wrote that guests “are welcome to accompany and/or assist the owners with the daily farm maintenance or simply relax in the rocking chairs on the front porch or sit under the shade umbrella on the back deck”.
Along backcountry roads more travellers are finding adventure through rustic enlightenment, according to industry professionals and current homesteaders. While some city dwellers find homesteading to be an idyllic escape – a website dedicated to fleeing couples is called Urban Exodus – there is no reason to buy a poplar cabin in Kentucky, or a cedar-framed cabin in the Berkshires. To get a taste, all you need is a reservation.
“More and more people are looking to experiment with this rural, small-footprint, homesteading lifestyle,” said Stephanie Smith, who rents out three cabins in Coyote Valley, California.
The word “homesteading” comes from the 1862 Homestead Act. The law granted small parcels of public farmland to any adult citizen who paid a nominal fee. The citizen’s family had to live on and till the land for five consecutive years before they could legally own the property. Intended to hasten western expansion, it helped to settle states like Oklahoma and, later, Alaska.
On a balmy weekend last year, I visited several farms and homesteads in Massachusetts, New York and Vermont. Prices ranged from $79 to $151 per night.
Chad and Courtney DeVoe own the Freeville Earthship. They are educators with one young daughter and another child on the way. They adopted the methods of the New Mexico architect Michael Reynolds, the creator of the Earthship concept and its passive solar design, which provides heating and cooling. For many years the DeVoes offered space to guests who wanted a taste of agricultural life, an arrangement sometimes referred to as agritourism.
Guests who stayed at the Earthship found ways to use natural resources and learned to reduce their environmental waste footprint, adopting what they learned on their vacation in their lives back in the city.
“We had a lot of people from the city,” DeVoe said. “They want to know what it’s like living off the grid – see what a house of garbage looks like.”
I then made my way east to a homestead called Snow Farm, in Newfane, Vermont.
Snow Farm operates as a community-supported agriculture farm, an open-invitation homestead and an outpost of the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms network. Volunteers learn to live on an organic farm, tilling land, milking cows and taking produce to market, with the prospect of operating their own farm someday.
WWOOF volunteers work for room and board during the summer farming season. But David Hull, who operates Snow Farm with his wife, Apple, also rents rooms to guests who want the opportunity to live in a cabin, work the land and benefit from the fruits of their labor, with the freedom to relax when they please.
“My hope is that they want to participate in some way,” Hull said. “I want them to get dirty.”