Five Dollars and an Axe

Travel back to the heart of Michigan farming country at the beginning of a new century and meet the good (and sometimes not so good) people of Leroy. Ralph is the son of “that sheriff from Benzonia who murdered his own wife”. He possesses an axe which he knows how to use, and five dollars of his own money, enough for a down payment on some scrubby wooded acres (shack included) around a swamp. He also owns enough temerity to court Hattie, the pretty young schoolteacher from a respectable family. Follow Hattie and Ralph’s fight to build and hold onto Maple Grove Farm and bring their family safely through the perils, large and small, that beset a rural family. Their saga, based on true events and written in the parlance of the times, includes blizzards, drought, plague, epidemics, and influxes of relatives. You’ll meet mad dogs, mean girls, marauding Tom turkeys, scandalous stepmothers and a farm boy with an unlikely knack for flower arranging.