First published 1975
Chancey Wheeler works as a journalist in southeastern Ohio during the decades before the Civil War. The youngest son of frontier matriarch Sayward Luckett Wheeler, Chancey witnesses his hometown's rapid transformation from rural settlement to bustling industrial center. Where his mother once raised orphaned siblings in wilderness cabins, factories now rise and railroads cut through former farmland. Chancey chronicles these changes through his newspaper work, but struggles to find his place in a world that bears little resemblance to the frontier his family carved from forest. His mother Sayward, now elderly, watches her life's work evolve into something she barely recognizes. The story captures three generations of American expansion as wilderness becomes civilization, examining what gets lost and gained when progress reshapes a community beyond recognition.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, american, 19th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-saga, fish-out-of-water, generational-conflict
Setting: Southeastern Ohio
Period: Before the Civil War
286 pages · Paperback · Bantam Books