Civil War Railroads

A true story of a fugitive slave named Jim Baker that has gone unpublished for over a hundred years. I was touched by the stories recounted by this unknown fugitive and sadly reminded of how our nation once oppressed a people based on the color of their skin. This story is about Jim’s upbringing, his escape to Indiana and his eventual attempted return to Tennessee, recounted by a pastor named Thomas Addington. Jim found both friend and foe on his journey but yearned to bring his family into the freedom he had experienced. Jim Baker’s story is a reminder that we must both love God and ...

They came by boat from a starving land, and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains, seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe, as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

After four years of marriage, Virginia and Angus still have no children. When an opportunity to adopt a child arises, the couple seize it, believing it to be an answer to their many prayers. The hatred and violence that follows makes them question if they made the right choice. Would the child be better off with her father, or do they stand against racism and hatred and raise her as their own?

Follow a seventeen year old mercenary from Germany in this fiction/fantasy novel as he travels to America, fights in the Civil War by spying and blowing up ammunition trains. Then, through his experience with the newly patented dynamite builds railroads across America. Meet the woman he marries, who he saves from a renegade Indian attack on the western plains. As he settles in the town he established in the hills of Pennsylvania, he discovers a cave with a magic elixir, "Fountain of Youth" and builds a national tourist attraction. All this in a page turner that will keep you cheering for an...

Rachel Benton and her daughter embark on a pleasant country drive to research her ancestors when a sudden storm drives them in an unexpected direction. Stranded and alone, an isolated cabin seems to offer refuge, but within those timbered walls more threats await. Rachel’s troubles in the present are woven together with a family embroiled in the Civil War and the lives they touch on their journey to freedom. Lives are imperiled, and a dawning realization changes Rachel’s life forever. Dual time lines skillfully woven together draw readers into the action-filled story. And true details ...

In April of 1843, Phoebe’s family hears about a murder while they are traveling to their new home in the Shenandoah Valley. They arrive to learn the victim attended her father's new church and the crime took place on a leading church member’s plantation. Eager to make new friends, Phoebe forms a unique relationship that propels her into the middle of the mystery, and she begins to question several acquaintances’ motives. Will she uncover their secrets before the plantation owner’s charming son discovers hers?

In 1850 in Massachusetts, Whittaker House stood as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It’s where two freedom seekers, Little Annie and Clementine, hid and perished. Whittaker House still stands, and Little Annie and Clementine still linger, their dreams of freedom unfulfilled. Now a fashionably distressed vacation rental in the Berkshires, Whittaker House draws seekers of another kind: Black women who only appear to be free.

A knock came on the door in the dead of night. On the verge of Civil War, such a summons meant trouble and danger. To ignore it offered momentary reprieve for the Ward family: it also meant shirking duty. Such was not in their make-up, for the Wards, otherwise known as the landlocked "Kansas Pirates," had taken the buccaneer's oath to protect one another, and, by association, the oppressed, against tyranny and injustice.Their help was urgently needed to guide runaway slaves from "Bleeding Kansas" across the river to safer ground. Barbara Nelander-Ward, former first mate aboard the Bottom ...

Praised by Alice Walker and many other best-selling writers, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is an award-winning debut novel with incredible heart about life on the prairie as it's rarely been seen. Reminiscent of The Color Purple as well as the frontier novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather, it opens a window on the little-known history of African American homesteaders and gives voice to an extraordinary heroine who embodies the spirit that built America.

Before the rails bound a nation, before love defied all barriers, there was a foundation laid in quiet longing and impossible dreams. Xiulan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants serving the Hastings family, has grown up in the shadow of wealth and privilege, her every day intertwined with the grandeur of the estate. But within her heart lies a secret: an unspoken affection for Robert Hastings, the heir who left for the Civil War when she was just a girl. Now, as the household eagerly anticipates his return, Xiulan’s quiet admiration blossoms into something deeper—something dangerous. ...

A novel memoir that dreams of a time where all people are equal. Callie Brandonfeld once lived on a beautiful plantation in southern Virginia, where tall oak and magnolia trees offered shade. In the spring, blossoms perfumed the air. Yes, it was an idyllic place to grow up, except when it wasn't. It was early summer of 1858 when eighteen-year-old Callie ran away from her family home. She was desperate to find a place where all people are treated like people, not possessions. Would she ever find such a place? And could she survive the long journey to get there?

It’s May 1863. Outgeneraled and outgunned, a demoralized Union Army has pulled back with massive losses at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fort Sumter, hated symbol of the Rebellion, taunts the American navy with its artillery and underwater mines. In Beaufort, SC, one very special woman, code named Moses, is hatching a spectacular plan. Hunted by Confederates, revered by slaves, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers.

In the tumultuous landscape of 1859 North America, Rose Goodwin, a sharp-witted shopkeeper’s wife with a gift for sweet talking, finds herself thrust into an unexpected mission when she’s given the assignment to nurse Judith, a frail refugee fleeing to Canada in search of liberty. Initially skeptical and unprepared, Rose believes Judith will succumb to her illness, but a promise to her husband to simply try soon ignites a fierce determination within her. Rose's initial dread transforms into an obsession. She will do whatever it takes to nurse Judith back to health, to help her ...

On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad's eastbound New York Express derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers

Oliver and Eleanor move into a strange old house full of secrets. They start to uncover clues about the house's long history and begin to piece together the secret lives of the people who lived there in the past. Being new kids can be hard, but especially new kids from the city moving to rural Ohio can be tough. Together they meet locals and make friends with Stella, Hannah, and Maverick who help uncover evidence to suggest their house was part of the Underground Railroad. Before they know it, they are knee-deep in secret tunnels and the pages of a journal that connect the people of the ...

Thomas B. Allen’s expertise in military history and strategy is combined with Roger MacBride Allen’s knowledge of technology to reveal a lesser-known yet fascinating side of the 16th president of the United States. Their authoritative narrative reveals Lincoln as our nation’s first hands-on commander in chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology plays a critical role in the North’s Civil War victory over the less-developed South.

When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad's leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can't bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Twelve-year-old Ann Maria Weems works from sunup to sundown, wraps rags around her feet in the winter, and must do whatever her master or mistress orders—but she has something that many plantation slaves don't have. She has her wonderful family around her. To Ann, her teasing brothers, her older sister, and her protective and loving parents are everything. And then one day, they are gone. Separated from her family by her master and shipped off as a housemaid, Ann learns something about independence and about love before the opportunity for escape arrives.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, notwithstanding its merits as a feat of exploration, was also the first tentative claim on the vast interior and the western seaboard of North America by the United States. It set in motion the great movement west that began almost immediately with the first commercial overland expedition funded by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company and would continue with the establishment of the Oregon Trail and California Trail. That quest would reach its ultimate expression ...when the last spike was driven into the Union Pacific Railroad.

SOMETHING'S DIFFERENT ABOUT JONAH Other Civil War re-enactors thought all along there was something different about Jonah the way he corrected the placement of a line of Confederate riflemen, the way he took apart and reassembled an old cannon with ease, the way he walked over the battlefield like he'd been there before. Their suspicions were confirmed when he started firing live ammo into the Yankee lines. Find out if there are any additional casualties at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads more than 150 years after the last shots were fired. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? In the deepest mud at the...