Using stories, anecdotes, history, and even veterinary science, Jackson braids together a series of dramatic fragments and episodes to vividly recreate life on the Dougan Guernsey Farm Dairy.

Founded in 1911 by W. J. Dougan near Beloit, Wisconsin, the Dougan farm, with its unusual round barn, is symbolic of a vanishing era. A renowned farm which was among the first to introduce many aspects of modern dairying to its operation, the Dougan farm eventually became a victim of agribusiness-style dairying and was closed. As Jackson charts the history of the farm from founding to decline and end, her deft characterizations make the farm come unforgettably alive. She gives us a profound understanding of a life marked by hard labor, disappointment, and danger, as well as by satisfactions and adventures; of the place where parents and children, hired men, relatives, and neighbors strive together for a life worth living.

As Jackson recreates the texture and tone of life on the farm, larger themes emerge: the constant balancing between material life and spirit, the quest for humane values within a hard world of business and labor, the difficult lessons fundamental to childhood. A fascinating mixture of biography, oral history, and creative nonfiction, Stories from the Round Barn is a moving tribute to the legacy of generations past, and definitive proof that, as Jackson says, "everything, in all directions, in all dimensions, is bound together".

The book includes fifty-three photographs and line drawings.