From June 11, 1890, to April 14, 1891, Nannie Stillwell Jackson wrote with pencils in a small ledger the best and meanest moments of her life on a small farm in southeast Arkansas. The combination of dreariness and charm that informs the diary is found on every page in the accounts of social gatherings, floods, poultry trades, dress-hemmings, and deaths. Through the diary and accompanying pictures and Margaret Bolsterli's introduction and notes, we are transplanted into Desha County, Arkansas, almost one hundred years ago. The experience is rich and awful, as is also what we may learn from it about the human spirit on the edges of civilization.