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In nineteenth-century London, Will Clipson runs a betting house. When his customers accuse him of cheating, and the threats become dangerous, he decides a move is in order. After all, his friend Henry Jones left England for America three years ago.
Henry Jones is a successful gas fitter who has lit the lamps of London parks, theaters, and shops. But he is ready for a change, and there is promise of much opportunity across the Atlantic.
Will joins Henry and other English families-the Puzeys, the Bentleys, and the Churches and their friends and extended families-who have crossed the dangerous Atlantic Ocean to New York, and then made the eight hundred-mile journey inland to central Illinois to a place they know as Grand Prairie. It's a story history has forgotten: how this determined group settles in, and perhaps overwhelms, what becomes the township of Catlin.
Henry's wealth earned in London allows him to relish his new situation as he buys up swaths of land. The Puzeys, Churches, Bentleys, and their friends also accumulate land, build houses, and break the tough, matted prairie soil. Will gathers land too, perhaps with ill-gotten gain. A few years after their arrival, the escalating Civil War threatens to take the immigrants' sons. What surprises lie around the corner?
Discover the true narratives of these strong families' struggles, failures, and successes, in an immigration experience that has been waiting one hundred fifty years to be told.
About the author
Karen Cord Taylor grew up on a farm in central Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois, and today lives with her husband, Dan, in downtown Boston. She is the founder of
The Beacon Hill Times,
The Charlestown Bridge, and
The Back Bay Sun weekly newspapers and served as their editor and publisher through 2007. Currently she writes the column "Downtown View" for four weekly Boston newspapers and two websites, including www.Bostoncolumn.com. Prior to publishing newspapers, she produced newsletters and corporate communications as well as hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on topics spanning banking, business, real estate, travel, and design.
Taylor is author of
Blue Laws,
Brahmins and Breakdown Lanes: An Alphabetic Guide to Boston and Bostonians and
The Lady Architects with Doris Cole, Her latest book,
Legendary Locals of Beacon Hill, was published in fall 2014 by Arcadia Publishing.
