“I used to think of our poor farmers as holding on to the sides of the hills, and scratching at the hills for a livelihood… I still see the men scratching away, but it is to support the hills and not the men. I seem to see men holding up the hills.” –From Holding Up the Hills
The dusty roads, the green hills, the small farms and the Irish farmers of Jackson Township, Monroe County, in the early twentieth century and through the Great Depression, live again in the words of Father Leo Ward. Holding Up the Hills is the biography of a community, a portrait gallery of the individual men and women of Jackson Township as well as a warm-hearted memoir of lives well lived.
Holding Up the Hills was first published in 1941 and was long out of print. This edition contains the complete text of the original, but adds photographs, both old and new, to show the people and the place.
Leo R. Ward, C.S.C., was a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. The author of textbooks on philosophy and ethics, he also wrote several popular novels and was an award-winning poet. He was born in Melrose, Iowa in 1893, studied at Notre Dame, Catholic University, and Oxford, and was ordained a Holy Cross priest. His writings on Catholic education were used by Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame, as the map to create a world-class Catholic university. He died in 1984.
164 pages, with black and white illustrations.