Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg plays his guitar.

Photo by June Glen Jr.

A Midwesterner for most of his life, Carl Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois as the second child to hard working parents of Swedish ancestry. Sandburg’s extraordinary story traces the life of a young man leaving school at the age of 13 and later establishing himself as a writer, poet, and musician. He found his subject in the American people and the American landscape; he found his voice after a long, lonely search and struggle, in the vivid, candid economy of the American vernacular. He worked his way to a rugged, individual free verse style which spoke clearly, directly, and often crudely to the audience that was also his subject. His poetry celebrated and consoled people in their environments—the crush of the city, the enduring solace of the prairie.

In his work for the Day Book, the Chicago Daily News, and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, Sandburg became a skilled investigative reporter with passionate social concerns. He covered war, racial strife, lynchings, mob violence, and the inequities of the industrial society, such as child labor and workplace disease and injury. These concerns were transmuted
into poetry. His first published book of poetry, Chicago Poems, offered bold, realistic portraits of working men, women, and children; of the “inexplicable fate” of the vulnerable and struggling human victims of war, progress, and business.

Through his poetry, Sandburg became the poet of democracy, and his belief that the poet had a public duty to speak of his times established his legacy as the “Poet of the People.” In addition to journalism and poetry, Sandburg was a historian, publishing a four-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Abraham Lincoln. He was later awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for his poetry in 1951. In 1959, Sandburg won a Grammy Award for his narration of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” with the New York Philharmonic.

In 1945, Carl and his wife Paula, in search of a warmer climate and a residence better suited for Carl’s writing and Paula’s dairy goats, purchased a 245-acre estate called Connemara by a previous owner, in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina near the small town of Flat Rock. Connemara offered Sandburg peace and solitude for his writing and more than 30 acres of pastureland that Mrs. Sandburg needed to raise her champion dairy goats.

Connemara not only provided the Sandburgs an abundance of nature, but also a dramatic history dating back before the Civil War. The property’s main house was built in 1838 by Christopher Memminger, the Confederacy’s future Secretary of the Treasury, who purchased the land and built a home where he and his family spent summers until his death in 1888. In 1900, Ellison Smyth, a wealthy leader in the textile industry, purchased the estate and named it Connemara because of its resemblance to his emerald, ancestral Ireland. Under Smyth’s management, the property was transformed into a farm of vegetable and flower gardens and small populations of oxen, cows, sheep, pheasants, turkeys, ducks, and guinea fowl. Smyth lived on the estate only seasonally until he retired in 1925, then permanently until his death in 1942. Connemara then lay idle for three years until the Sandburgs purchased the farm in 1945. The property’s pastoral landscape with its numerous farm buildings and structures led Sandburg to say, “We didn’t buy a farm, we bought a small village.”

During the Sandburg family’s time at Connemara, Carl published more than one-third of his works, hiked trails, and read his poetry at local schools. He enjoyed meeting new people in the community, listening to their stories, and in turn sharing his own life experiences, music, and poetry. Carl and Paula Sandburg, along with their three daughters, lived at Connemara for 22 years until Carl’s death on July 22, 1967, at the house. Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site was designated the following year.