Historic Marker for Pearl Buck

On December 7, 2024, FHIA had a short ceremony to install an historic marker near the Chapel in memory of Pearl Buck who lived in Forest Home in 1924-25.

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was born in West Virginia but raised in China, where her parents were Presbyterian missionaries and Chinese her first language. She developed a keen interest in the lifeways of the rural peasantry, which she drew upon in writing one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century, The Good Earth (1931). Effectively banned in China after 1949, the book is today better known there than here (though interest was revived when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2004). As Nanjing University’s Liu Haiping put it to the New York Times, Buck was a “revolutionary . . . the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals. Many of us feel we should include Buck as part of Chinese literature.” Buck went on to write scores of other books, novels, non-fiction, translations, biographies, young adult and children’s books. She died in 1973.

The marker recognizes the formative time that Pearl, her husband J. Lossing Buck, and daughter Carol lived in in Forest Home, mainly at the Chapel parsonage.  Lossing was assistant pastor. Each was enrolled in a master’s program at Cornell: she in English (studying with Martin Sampson), he in agronomy (studying with George Warren). Lossing, who helped found the Department of Agricultural Economics at Nanjing University, later carried out the earliest comprehensive survey of crop production in China (Chinese Farm Economy, 1930). Pearl’s help was vital; she interviewed hundreds of farmers in Chinese for the project. The family returned to Cornell in 1932 for Lossing to pursue his PhD, residing this time at 614 Wyckoff Road. Buck had just received a Pulitzer Prize, and six years later was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China.”  

The initiative to create the Pearl Buck marker was led by Forest Home resident, Thomas J. Campanella.  It was funded by a grant from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, awarded via community partner Historic Ithaca.   This is the second marker in Ithaca that was funded by a Pomeroy grant.  The first marks the 212 Cascadilla Street birthplace of Verdell L. Payne, a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen.