We moved here in 2002 to fulfill a dream of living in the country. When Deborah read Walden in college in 1983, she fell in love with Thoreau’s ideas of living deliberately and simply. When children began to fill our home in the suburbs of Chicago, Laura Ingalls Wilder books became a read-aloud favorite. In the early 1990s, we began to talk about moving to the country. We looked for property intermittently, but were never able to find more than a few acres, and it was usually cut out of a cornfield. We were also limited geographically because we had to be within an hour of the college where Mike teaches. In February 2002, we finally found what we were looking for – 32 acres, mostly wooded, with a 2-acre hay field. We moved our family into the double-wide mobile home on April 10, 2002, and immediately began filling the barn and pasture with animals. Two years later, we began construction on our house.

We are located in central Illinois between the small towns of Pontiac and Streator. Unlike most of the state, our 32 acres has gently rolling hills and lots of old oak and hickory trees. A creek runs the length of our property, and a pond is situated in the middle, where the ducks swim, turkeys can often be found getting a drink of water, and Canadian geese stop by to visit.

In this section of our Web site, you can learn more about farm, our new house and our homeschooling philosophy. You can also see what’s been in the media about us and our homestead.