This collection holds the lives — the men and women who built the mills, worked the water, and shaped the valley and its creek through the end of the 1800s.
Every story here is drawn from the record: deeds, wills, censuses, court papers, and the newspapers of the day. What the record cannot prove is printed as unproven, in the open — and every story begins by saying plainly where its subject stood in the valley, and on what water.
The first seven stories are finished and are being set in their rooms. Each name becomes a link as its page opens; a hundred more lives are being researched behind them.