Homesteading in Remote Parts of Alaska and Massachusetts

By Lloyd Kahn on August 7, 2019

Hi Lloyd,

I’ve been digging through your books hard lately. We bought a house with 3 acres about an hour north of Boston and I’ve been homesteading it up. Building terraces for the garden, stonework, improvements for the sawmill barn, and extensive landscaping. I’ve yet to dig into the inside house work.

Anyway, I first heard about your work while up on an 80-acre parcel with a homestead in the deep interior of Alaska. My buddies dad quit architecture school just before graduation and got a big chunk of land under the homestead act in the late ’70s. Out of Anchorage, I took two small planes to get picked up by a boat for another 1.5-hour boat ride upriver.

Anyway, my buddy who summers there, said you gotta look at this book.  It was: Shelter. I was intoxicated. That was 15 years ago. You know in life we seem to find things at the right time in life?  Now sorting through your recent publications (early 2000s on) it’s the perfect tonic as i dig into new crazy projects. I’ve got a sauna and a treehouse on my mind right now.  I run a fancy-pants tree pruning company and run a backyard sawmill operation while also a full-time high school arboriculture teacher. Well anyway, thanks for all your work on these magnificent publications.  The Builders of the Pacific Coast book was possibly my favorite for my needs right now. I liked seeing you really dig into some talented individuals.

What is next for you? One book that I think would be interesting is some exploration of East Coast modern homesteaders. I’ve got a bunch of friends in the Maine/NH area that are doing some pretty special things. A book I started, but shelved was interviewing Massachusetts Sawmills and photographing sawmills today and discuss the changing paradigm that sawmills are faced in a world lumber market. It’s a weird world.

Anyway, I’m just rambling, but just wanted to say thanks.

I document some of my homestead efforts on instagram @sherwood_homestead.

Chris Wood
Ravenswood Tree and Landscape LLC
Newton, NH 03858

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
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