| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America. By David Walbert. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii, 258 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-19-514843-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-514844-4.)

David Walbert's emphasis is not the past viewed as empirical reality so much as the past viewed as historical memory. His is the history of an idea: Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as the nation's "garden spot." He explores that locality's distinctive sense of place: feelings about actual landscapes (and the lifeways encompassed) that have endured as social stereotype if not social imperative. As the author effectively demonstrates, Lancaster County provides a useful "window" into America's fascination both with traditional rurality (family and community anchored in the ownership and stewardship of land through farming) and modern development, especially urban development (as a fuller embrace of individual opportunity through modernity). How is it, Walbert asks, that, despite extensive urbanization, Lancaster County continues to be thought of as a quintessentially agrarian place well anchored in the historic past? What does this stereotype portend for the locality's future? And for the future of other similar areas?

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