Uncle Will of Wildwood

This warm and humorous memoir of the nineteenth-century Bluegrass recalls a special moment in Kentucky's past. It was a time of self-sufficient country estates; a time when, as Thomas D. Clark writes in his introduction, "every Bluegrass farm gate was the entryway into a ruggedly independent domain." Wildwood was such a domain, ruled by the titular Uncle Will of this classic book. Everything at Wildwood revolved around Will Goddard, who was "a cross between a hurricane and an electric fan." The irrepressible Uncle Will, with his mad dashes to Harrodsburg for mowing-machine parts, his habit of leaving his stallion, Black Joe, unhitched, and his uncanny perception of the potential of a horse, became a family and community legend.