I kept farm, so to speak for nearly ten years, but less as a farmer than as a fugitive from the world that seemed to me to 'disallow' me. It was all instinctive, but I can see now that I went away to save myself and fix myself before I measured myself against all creation.

-- Robert Frost, 1915 From a letter to the literary editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, March 22, 1915. (Quoted in Sheehy, D. G., Richardson, M., & Faggen, R. (eds.) The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 1, 1886 - 1921 (2014), page 12)

Robert Frost came to farming at a difficult period of his life. He had failed to get an undergraduate degree after attending Dartmouth and then Harvard. Frost's three-year old son Elliott had just died months earlier. Finally, he had a wife and daughter with no clear way to either financially support his family or develop the writing career he wanted.

This exhibit includes excerpts from the only non-fiction article written by Frost for The Farm-Poultry. Frost profiled his agricultural mentor: Charlemagne Bricault in the article "Three Phases of the Poultry Industry." Two other local farmers were featured in this piece: Mr. and Mrs. Nichols from Lawrence, Massachusetts and John A. Hall of Atkinson, New Hampshire.

The final sections of this exhibit include monographs on general poultry farming practices of Frost's contemporaries and articles describing current USDA research on poultry farming and links to the research units working in this area of poultry science.

(Click any image in this exhibit to get more information, including access to full text)