Legacy

Winston Hardegree was born in the throes of the Great Depression in 1932, but spent happy boyhood summers on his grandparents’ rural Alabama farm, where hard work and adventure led to a deep appreciation for life’s simple pleasures. At nineteen, Winston lost his father and suddenly became family patriarch for his mother, siblings, and new bride. He took a job in the local textile mill, and over thirty-five years of unrelenting hard work became a successful top-executive of this international company. Disenchanted, Winston decided to return to the simpler way of life he had so loved as a boy. Winston’s quest to reintroduce the man he had become to the boy of his youth brought about these stories of gardening, life with regular folk and beloved animals, and adventures that Winston and his wife, Beth, shared in the garden, in love, and in living the autumn and winter of his years at The Blessed Earth Farm in the rural upstate of South Carolina. This book is a compilation of essays and short stories written during Winston’s search for simplicity, and his observations on life and on death, as he faces the final days of a terminal illness. This is Winston Hardegree’s Legacy.