Just before the new millennium, Kentucky’s agrarian cultural institution, Wendell Berry, presented a short biography of a friend who’d died a decade earlier. In some important ways, this friend—Harlan Hubbard by name—was cut from the same cloth as Berry. Living in Northern Kentucky by the Ohio River, creating artworks and essays that described and advocated for a simple but cultured rural life. Keeping traditions alive and nature sustained, and showing how that rewarded the body and soul of individuals, and communities in turn.
Hubbard’s personal artifacts, museum-piece watercolors, and even the riverside rough-hewn house and farm he shared with his remarkable partner and wife Anna, have been recognized and held in esteem regionally, and wider in certain circles (e.g., the back-to-basics movement). But now a new, scrupulously researched biography has appeared, and it’s invaluable for providing a more thorough assessment, and hopefully generating a deepening appreciation, of Hubbard’s legacy and cultural merits. “Driftwood” is the product of many years’ work by Jessica K. Whitehead, who is also a curator for the Kentucky Derby Museum.
Whitehead’s book offers a detailed tracing of Hubbard’s lineage, and of his gradually blossoming personal philosophy even as he restlessly experienced considerable education and opportunities in the arts when his family moved from the Ohio Valley to New York. When Harlan and Anna were newly married Kentuckians in the 1940s, their lives took a turn with a remarkable long sojourn—in the unique subculture that undertakes its own form of homesteading via houseboats. Harlan Hubbard’s very successful book “Shantyboat” covered years of letting the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers take him and his young bride from the Cincinnati area all the way to New Orleans and beyond.
Biographer Whitehead will appear at Carmichael’s to discuss the boats, waters, and shorelines Mr. Hubbard rendered with various media, and sometimes with startling experiments of style. Also his refinement into an Appalachian ascetic who developed and shared visionary perspectives on the interfaces and liminal landscapes where civilization and nature meet—and can serve each other. LEO recently asked Whitehead a few questions via email exchange:
LEO: So much of Harlan’s spirit seemed at its strongest when a river could carry him along, or he could see life’s flow from a bank. What might he have been like had he not chosen a close association with riverine life?
Jessica K. Whitehead: [I]f not a river, what other defining characteristic of place would Harlan have found himself drawn to? It seems to me that, river or no, some natural landscape would have called to and shaped Harlan.
LEO: What was your earliest encounter with the legacy of Harlan and Anna Hubbard? What’s the first thing you tell people who haven’t heard of their legacy?
JKW: I discovered Harlan and Anna when studying art history at Hanover College. [P]art of what is so exciting about the Hubbard story—especially for folks like me who love so many different forms of creative expression—is that there are so many ways to get people’s interest piqued about them. Depending upon who I encounter—a gardener, a writer, an artist, a musician, a historian, a paddler, a hiker—I have something I can share about Harlan and Anna that is remarkably relevant to their interests.
LEO: Which of his watercolors do you admire the most? What does it say to you?
JKW: My favorite of Harlan’s watercolors is actually one in my collection. It’s a very simple study of a distant boat passing on the Ohio River and mere suggestions of the surrounding sky and landscape. But what is special about it to me is that, on the edges of the study, Harlan has practiced writing some words in the Greek alphabet. To me, this can tell me so much about the way Harlan’s mind works—constantly flitting from the beauty of scenery to the beauty of language and writing, all within a small, unassuming space.
LEO: Is there anyone of the current generation whose lifestyle blend of the ascetic and artistic you’d liken to Harlan Hubbard?
JKW: A really cool example of life as art is actually someone who has been directly inspired by Harlan’s work. Check out Wes Modes and his “A Secret History of American River People” project. I think Harlan’s example is visible all around us, once we know to look for it. Any one of us who chooses to do something countercultural, founded in the deep authenticity of our unique self, is living out the Hubbardian example.
LEO: With all you’ve come to know of this renaissance man and his adventures, do you have any desire to put in time on a houseboat, or whatever you can find that’s nearest to a shantyboat?
JKW: Well, unfortunately, I am prone to motion sickness, so a shantyboat life would be disastrous for me. But I have absolutely put time into incorporating other parts of the Hubbard life into mine—namely, organic gardening and trying to learn about and respect the natural world around me.
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This article appears in Feb 14-27, 2025.