See You in a Hundred Years

By Jann Malone Times- Dispatch Copyright All Rights Reserved

Photos contributed by Logan Ward Logan Ward is the son of Nini and John Ward. He went to Hammond Academy in the first grade when his family lived in Columbia for a year. They moved back to Columbia when Logan was a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. After college, Logan worked as a dispatcher at Hardaway Concrete to earn money for a yearlong teaching stint in Kenya.When he returned, he waited tables for a year in Columbia before moving to New York where he became a freelance writer. Logan met his wife Heather at Vanderbilt. She worked several years in international affairs in Washington, D.C. Heather and Logan spent a year in Quito, Ecuador, jointly operating the South American Explorers Club. Later Heather worked for the U.S. Justice Department at Guanatanamo Bay, Cuba. In 1997, she earned a masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. In August, she will become Mary Baldwin College's director of International Programs. Before his retirement, Logan's father worked at Providence Hospital as a pathologist. Logan's mother is an artist and was a student of Reubin Gambrell. She is one of five partners in Viridian Studio/Gallery. Logan and Heather have two children, Luther, age eight, and Eliot, age four. Logan and Heather Ward and their toddler, Luther, let New York City in 2000 in search of a simpler life.

They found it on a farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley.

Here's the catch: Not content to simply swap urban for rural living, they lived as if it were 1900. Logan Ward's book about his family's adventure, See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America (264 pages, BenBella Books, $24), has been published.

Living in 1900 meant no electricity, no running water, no car, no TV, no contact lenses, no dental floss, no trash bags, no Scotch tape, no Tupperware, no Graham Greene novels. No lots of things.

Thank goodness for Tootsie Rolls (circa 1896). Could the project have succeeded without them?

"Not at first," said Logan, who practically inhaled them for quick energy in between farm chores.

"Eventually," Heather said, "I learned how to make a pie."

The back story

"We were feeling really restless," said Logan, who turned 41 yesterday. "We'd been in New York for 10 years."

He was working as a freelance travel writer. Heather, now 37, worked in a stressful job for an organization that provided technical assistance to foreign governments trying to improve their criminal- justice systems.

He was looking for new adventures that had room for a toddler. She was burned out.

They wanted to return to the South - he's from South Carolina; she's from Alabama.

Logan Ward (above) plows the field while his wife Heather picks vegetables to make dinner.

"It was a strange feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do when we got there," he said. "When this idea came up, it became something to focus on."

Luther Ward loves the 1900s. The idea

An article on reality shows that mentioned PBS' "The 1900 House" sparked the idea: "What would we do in this country in 1900?" Logan asked himself. "We'd live on a farm."

"It was a way to do something adventurous with a small child. It was affordable. We weren't going to take our child out and climb some mountain.

"I guess I had this Robinson Crusoe fantasy. So I thought it was my thing, but when I mentioned it to Heather, she was all for it. It was really scary for me. I didn't expect her to take me seriously."

Heather says yes

"We'd always said that someday we'd like to live on a farm," Heather said.

"Another thing: When you live in New York, leaving can feel like giving up. This felt like more of a challenge."

After that, Logan said, "we kept looking for that one reason we couldn't do it. And we couldn't find that."

So they put their apartment on the market. They got three offers the first day.

Time travel

The Ward farm in Swoope,Virginia

The Wards left the 21st century on June 12, 2001.

But before they could do that, they parked their station wagon in a pasture, unplugged the phone - they kept the line active for an emergency - and had the power company kill the electricity.

After that, there was no turning back. "We'd uprooted our whole lives," Logan said. "I really felt driven to get this thing done."

There was also no cheating, except for a health emergency. "Once we started," Heather said, "we didn't intellectualize the rules, we lived them. We went about our days not thinking about what else we could be doing. It was our reality."

They had their rough moments, mostly involving a pair of milk goats and Belle, their 2,000- pound draft horse.

Then there were the fantasies, but they weren't about Big Macs and hot showers. "We both had these vivid travel fantasies about trips," Logan said. "But it was total fantasy: We knew we couldn't."

Heather Ward prepares for supper. Writing it down

Without a computer, a typewriter or a gel- ink pen, Logan went low- tech. "I'd keep a little notebook and a pencil in my overalls or jeans. I ended up with a couple dozen of these notebooks and some journals and lots of letters.

"People we wrote to frequently," Heather said, "saved the letters and gave them back to us at the end."

Family and friends wrote back in longhand. "That was one of the real joys: waiting for letters," Logan said. "It ranked right up there with the apple pie."

Eeeuuuwww, snakes!

Logan Ward grows food for his family.

"I was surprised how uncomfortable I was with nature," Logan said. "I always thought of myself as a nature boy growing up. We were pretty amazed at how squeamish we were about . .

" . . . dirt, bugs, mud," Heather said.

"And possums rooting around at night," Logan said. "But we definitely became comfortable with nature."

In 1900, you didn't have any choice.

No news is good news

"Breaking out of the news cycle was not hard," Logan said. "Some people can't believe that we went a year without daily news. Most of our news came from neighbors. You're going to get all the important stuff from them."

Bathroom of the 1900s That included news of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To this day, Logan said, "I've never watched the TV footage of 9/11."

A gracious plenty

The Wards tended a vegetable garden and canned much of what they grew - and what neighbors shared - to get them through the winter.

"People still ask us, 'Did you starve?'" Logan said. "We ate like kings in a way."

Well, like kings who cooked all their meals on a wood- fired stove. "For breakfast, Logan would eat five fried eggs, a plate of biscuits. We were working so much, we burned it right off."

What entertainment?

"We didn't have any," Logan said, "except for meals."

Well, that's not quite accurate, though neither of them played an instrument or could sing. They read books, took long walks, looked at the night sky and played games. "Shadow Puppet Night was one of the best," he said.

And then there's this: Daughter Eliot, now 4, was born just a few months after the project ended. Logan says she might be "the first child conceived in 1900 and born a century later."

Editor's note: Logan Ward will be at the Happy Bookseller July 19, 2007, at 5 pm to sign his book, See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America.

Finding community

The Wards had a lot of company.

"We were keeping a tally," Logan said, "and it was six months before someone didn't show up and only about 12 days without visitors in the whole year."

Friends and family visited - they took the only photos of the experiment because the Wards didn't have a camera - but most of the visitors were neighbors.

"They were checking in eye to eye," Heather said. "They didn't say, 'Are you OK?' but it was contact. We found a social safety net, which was really shocking. We didn't think it would exist in this day and age."

Back to the future

Luther takes a bath. "The day the project ended," Logan said, "we were still living in 1900. We didn't set it up so we could turn the electricity back on - we'd pretty much ripped out the wiring. The car didn't work, so we borrowed our neighbor's truck.

"Until we got power back weeks later, we were still living with one foot in each century. We'd come to town and do laundry and get takeout. We borrowed a refrigerator from a neighbor. So we lived in various stages of modernity."

"It was a gradual way to come back," Heather said.

Epilogue

As Logan resurrected his freelance writing career, Heather reintroduced Luther into society. "Our life with him was very focused in Staunton," she said. The drive from farm to town took 30 minutes. "So I didn't feel like part of either community."

Juggling Logan's work, Luther's in- town life - he's now finishing second grade - and keeping up with the farm got to be too much. Even though they had bought it with the idea of staying put and had undertaken an 18- month renovation, they sold the farm and moved into Staunton, Virginia.

Now they walk almost everywhere, and the merchants know their children's names.

"We had gone from one extreme in New York to this other extreme in Swoope," Logan said, "then our pendulum settled in the middle, in a small town not unlike where we each grew up."

Five things we missed the most

Cleaning supplies

By Logan Ward

1. The kitchen sink - those carefree days when water poured from a tap and ran by force of gravity down a drain. Every ounce of water we used in the house, we had to haul in and haul back out again. During the drought, we'd carry our dishwater to the garden and dump it there.

2. Clothes washer. Heather spent hours up to her elbows in soapy, stove- heated water, agitating with a metal plunger, scrubbing with a washboard and wringing with her bare hands.

3. Music. Neither of us plays an instrument, and we don't even sing all that well. We had no songbooks, so we didn't really know any songs. We learned not to fear silence, which is something that has stuck with us both.

4. A decent pencil sharpener.

5. I missed my Tevas. My 21st- century feet live in sandals all summer. In 1900, I wore hot, smelly leather boots every day. In spring, after 10 months in 1900, I used my straight razor and a length of leather cord to fashion my first pair of worn- out boots into a pair of funky sandals. I was so proud of them, even though Heather made fun of them. A friend visiting from New York asked me if they were Danish, thinking they were some fancy import!

Goats and Belle, the Wards' 2,000 pound horse Five things we didn't miss at all

By Logan Ward

1. The refrigerator. I thought this would be tops on the list. We realized that food spoilage is (largely) a bugaboo, one result of the disconnect between people today and what they eat. A cold bottle of beer would have been nice, too.

2. Television. We've never been big TV people, so it was not a sacrifice. I talked to a group of school kids once at the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace here in Staunton, and that was the most surprising thing to them, that we could ever manage without the TV.

3. Telephone. It can be such a distraction.

4. Daily news. Around 1900, there was a news weekly distributed in Augusta County called the Argus, but we opted for no newspaper. We learned the important news from neighbors and missed all the junk.

5. Processed food.

Wash day