When James Everett Kibler purchased a dilapidated South Carolina plantation in 1989, he had no idea that his rehabilitation of the distinguished but deteriorated property would include the unearthing of a remarkable saga about the land and the people who had lived on it. But as he refurbished the Great House and restored its nineteenth-century garden, he felt the pull of the place to uncover and record its past.

Kibler faithfully took part in an act of cultural reclamation, piecing together the story of the Hardy family, who purchased the tract along the Tyger River in 1786 and farmed it for two centuries. Part epic, part history, part memoir, the resulting tale is a comprehensive, ambitious, and eminently readable chronicle that spans six generations of a family in pursuit of the agrarian ideal.