A little less than a century and a half ago, an awkward, overgrown farmer boy entered in the little log school house that stood on the corner of the crossroads two miles east of what was then the village of Hudson. The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad tracks passed close by, ascending a steep grade to the west that later was cut and filled, to allow passenger trains to pass along the way, then many years later was abandoned. The road in front of the school, a winding, muddy lane of chuckholes over which the pioneers had plodded their way from Lake Erie to Michigan, was destined to become a principal artery in a widened network of state highways, but it knew no improvement then. Virgin woods surrounded the little log building, except for the occasional clearings where sturdy frontiersmen eked out an existence from the unworked soil.

The boy in the picture was Will Carleton, William McKendree Carleton, as he was named. Yet, the boy was to go far from home, even though, in a sense, home never left him, though. he spent the last half of his life far from Hudson

The modern historian of Carleton, Dr. Jerome Fallon, wrote, "Carleton's life was like something out of a Horatio Alger novel. Born October 21, 1845, on the farm which his father had painfully carved out of the wilderness that was Southern Michigan, he rose from total obscurity to become of of the nation’s most widely loved and read poets. Painfully shy as a youth, he developed into one of the most well-polished and most sought after platform lecturers of his generation. As a young man, he worked for almost nothing as a newspaper reporter and editor, but eventually established a magazine, published in New York City, which enjoyed a large national following. At the height of his incredible career - from 1880 to 1910 - he frequently associated with such luminaries as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, and was well acquainted with scores of other leaders of that era which historians have labeled ‘The Gilded Age'. When he died in 1912, some of the most prestigious newspapers in the nation ran the kind of front-page and editorial coverage that was ordinarily reserved for the social, political, or military elite . . . but rarely, if ever, for a poet."

Some say that Carleton could already read by the time he started school, in the old one-room schoolhouse just across the muddy road from his log cabin, but there is no doubt about his love of books from early childhood. "His record in the country school as a boy was exemplary," Fallon writes. "He was usually regarded, year after year, as the best scholar there. His attitude toward education was certainly unusual compared to the typical boy - he used to say that he could go to school in five minutes, but it took him half an hour to get home."

When he was older and had completed the country school, Carleton went to the District School in Hudson. Byron Finney, writing in 1921, remembered Carleton in these years: "My home was in the village, and his was the old homestead, two miles directly east of Hudson, and in the interchange of our boyish visits, I slept many a night with him in the old house . . . this comradeship was kept up during our school life in the village of Hudson, to which he was in the habit of walking daily to school in good weather, the round trip from the school house making it about five miles a day."

By this time, Carleton was already writing poetry, some of it published in the Hudson Gazette, founded by William T. Schemerhorn two years earlier. At fifteen, he wrote and read at the funeral of his sister a poem he had written, entitled, "The Fading Flower".

At the outbreak of the Civil War, he tried to enlist in the Union Army, but was turned down, not once, but many times, so he turned his attention back to school. In 1862, at least partly due to the influence of a splendid teacher, Frank B. McClellan, he left for Hillsdale College, but remained there for only a year, before going out to teach in a one-room school until 1865, when he returned to the college, graduating in 1869.

"The poems which Carleton had written during his college course and shortly after were gathered into a small volume and published by the Lakeside Publishing Company, Chicago, in 1871," Finney recalled. "They attracted little attention; not so much, perhaps, as one which had not been included in the volume. This was a political, satirical poem, which was delivered by the author at Republican mass meetings during the presidential campaign of 1868. It was quite popular, and was published under the title, "Fax".

While in school, Carleton had been contributing items to various newspapers, with the idea of taking up journalism for a career. One of these items. was a poem, published first in the Toledo Blade, that Carleton later admitted, ‘Many a more elaborate poem, with which was taken ten times the care, has failed to produce as much impression upon the public heart."

"The poem exploded like a bombshell upon the American psyche," Fallon wrote. "Its twenty-one verses and eighty-four lines reverberated across the American intellectual landscape following its ‘first appearance in June, 1871 . . . after it appeared in a volume of poetry called "Farm Ballads" in 1873, it seemed to have a life of its own and was clearly a major factor in the record sales of well over 100,000 copies of that volume." Fifty years later, it would be made into a movie, which would play the length and breadth of the land until the advent of the talking movie.

Carleton might have remained an obscure poet, newspaperman and farmer, but this one poem, "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse", changed all that. It is a simple poem, the story of an elderly woman, abandoned by her children and forced to take the long, lonely walk up the hill to the nearby poorhouse. It made Carleton famous.

Over the following years, Carleton was to write several more volumes of poetry, most largely forgotten by comparison to "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse". Perhaps the next best known, ‘’Betsey and I are out", about a couple’s divorce, actually preceded the more famous poem by a few months.

Over the next several years, these poems and others were collected in Carleton’s second book of poetry, ‘’Farm Ballads". This was followed in later years by other poetry collections, "Farm Legends" and ‘’Farm Festivals", and later, after his move to New York, by "City Ballads", "City Legends", and "City Festivals".  Others followed: "Rhymes of our Planet" in 1895, "Songs of Two Centuries", in 1902, and his last, "A Thousand and More Verses", in 1912.

Carleton died in 1912, at the age of 67, following a bout with pneumonia, in Brooklyn, New York; copies of his works continued to sell well through the 1920s, then faded.

His work mirrored a time of great change in the country. Fallon writes, "During these turbulent years of growth, the seeds of America’s greatness were sown. Carleton’s contribution was in helping to develop the American conscience. As poet of the common man, he reminded those in positions of power that no nation, however strong, can afford to neglect the aged, the hungry, or the downtrodden. The flood of progressive legislation which was cresting at the time of his death owed much of its momentum to Carleton and his friends on the lecture circuit."
                                                               To:  'Over the Hill to the Poorhouse'