Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground

A finalist for the National Book Award, Battlefield chronicles the author’s experiences building a farmhouse on a forty-acre site near Harrisonburg, Virginia, which years before had been the site of the Civil War “Battle of Cross Keys,” in which Confederate forces stopped a Union advance and provided Stonewall Jackson with an important victory in his Shenandoah Valley campaign. Svenson intertwines a detailed description of the battle with self-deprecating accounts of a fledgling hay farmer attem…