“This book deserves careful attention. . . . Lemon is a professional geographer, but historians will read his book as an imaginative approach to social history. . . . He demonstrates that geography, quite as much as demography, child psychology, or the sociology of the family, can organize and interpret data that has remained intractable to more conventional methodologies. . . . The Best Poor Man’s Country is a distinguished and important book, a fitting addition to the recent Chesapeake studies of Aubrey Land and the New England efforts of Greven, Lockridge, John Demos, and Sumner Chilton Powell.” ―John M. Murrin, American Historical Review In many respects early Pennsylvania was the prototype of North American development. Its conservative defense of liberal individualism, its population of mixed national and religious origins, its dispersed farms, county seats, and farm-service villages, and its mixed crop and livestock agriculture served as models for much of the rural Middle West. To many western Europeans in the eighteenth century life in early Pennsylvania offered a veritable paradise and refuge from oppression. Some called it “the best poor man’s country in the world.” The Best Poor Man’s Country was the winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Society.