"This book is about once-upon-a-time in America." -- Eric Sloane. Writer and artist Eric Sloane had an abiding love for America and worked throughout a long and productive life to capture the American spirit in word and picture. The America Sloane loved was rooted in the simple virtues of our native soil: love of freedom, respect for the individual, sensible frugality, and determined self-reliance -- all of which went to make up what Sloane perceived as our true American heritage. Nowhere is this heritage more amply portrayed than in the work and ways of the early Americans in our pioneer days. In this book you will listen to Sloane's talk of home and hearth, farm and field, and see all manner of tools, utensils, buildings and rural scenes rendered in his finely detailed and lively drawings. A visit to America of "once-upon-a-time" brings us home to a land whose pioneer spirit endures, even amid the rapid and radical changes of our times