Fred McTaggart

Fred McTaggart spent the first 12 years of his life in Pawnee, a small rural town in Sangamon County, Illinois. The diverse strands of his family all came to this area in the early part of the nineteenth century to establish family farms. As settlers, anxious to buy cheap land from the U.S. government, they were oblivious to the claims of Native Americans who had occupied this area for many years. They were, however, quick to accept the antislavery messages being circulated by Abraham Lincoln...See more

Fred McTaggart spent the first 12 years of his life in Pawnee, a small rural town in Sangamon County, Illinois. The diverse strands of his family all came to this area in the early part of the nineteenth century to establish family farms. As settlers, anxious to buy cheap land from the U.S. government, they were oblivious to the claims of Native Americans who had occupied this area for many years. They were, however, quick to accept the antislavery messages being circulated by Abraham Lincoln and Methodist circuit riders such as Peter Cartwright and Francis Asbury. McTaggart's previous books include Wolf That I Am: In Search of the Red Earth People (Houghton Mifflin, 1976 and University of Oklahoma Press, 1984) and Kalamazoo County: Where Quality Is a Way of Life (Windsor Press, 1989). As a followup to Wolf That I Am, Sangamon Soil has been a long time coming. It is an examination of his own family's relationship to the Sangamon soil and the corn crops it nurtured. Fred McTaggart was an assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University from 1974 to 1979, then worked as a self employed writer until his retirement in January, 2018. He and his wife, Donna Carroll, were co-owners and writers for HEALTHWire/Words, etc., a subscription based article service for hospitals and health care professionals. They live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. See less