The Old Gray Homestead was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1919, Keyes’s first novel. Set on a struggling Vermont dairy farm, the novel tells the story of the Gray family’s financial difficulties and their eventual rescue through a combination of hard work, modern farming methods, and a romantic plot involving the eldest son and a wealthy young woman from Boston who comes to board at the farm.
The novel is conventional in its plotting — the love story follows predictable lines, and the resolution is idealized — but it already shows Keyes’s characteristic strengths: detailed knowledge of her setting (she grew up in rural New England and understood farming life), sympathetic treatment of women characters, and careful attention to the economics and social structures that shape daily life. The depiction of a declining New England farm struggling against modernization — competing with Western agriculture, losing young people to the cities, maintaining traditional values against commercial pressure — captures a genuine social reality of the early twentieth century.
As a debut novel by a senator’s wife (she was already married to Henry Wilder Keyes when it was published), the book received attention it might not otherwise have attracted, and it sold modestly well. Its significance is primarily as the starting point of a career that would produce thirty novels over forty years, each one more ambitious in scope and setting than the last.
Collecting The Old Gray Homestead
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25