Stand on a country road in the middle of this valley and experience an expanse of space to all sides. Fields stretch out before you in every way to a distant horizon. It is an eerily quiet place except for the distant grinding of tractors and trucks and the haunting sound of an unseen locomotive.
Dotting the landscape like little islands are old farmhouses. Many of these are no longer occupied but used as storage buildings surrounded by parked tractors, plows, and diskers. These old houses make it easy to picture earlier generations making their lives farming here. It is quiet, too. On a Sunday, one can park and paint on a side road, and in the course of two houses, only two or three cars will pass.