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In 1932 the families of the small Cumberland Plateau mining town of Wilder, Tennessee, struggle for survival as the Fentress Coal and Coke Company reduces wages and refuses to bargain with the miners. Caught in the grips of the Great Depression, the company is in a fright for its survival. As the threat of a mining strike hovers over the community, Lacey Conners must deal with conflicts of her own: the growing burden her family has placed on her, the pressure to marry the stable, hardworking John Trotter and her terrifying, yet captivating, attraction to the dangerous young rebel, Coy Lynn Wilson. As conditions in Wilder are brought to a crisis when company-hired thugs murder striker leader Barney Graham, the community must face its worst fear, and Lacey, too, must come to grips with forces that compete for her loyalty.
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The year is 1934 and the country is caught in the grips of the Great Depression. Desperate and almost without hope, John and Lacey, along with hundreds of other displace families, are brought by a New Deal project to the Cumberland Homesteads to start a new life. Trouble soon develops as the independent mountain people accustomed to their own way chafe under the increasing control and ever changing rules of the government. As John desperately tries to hold on to the only thing he feels he has to offer Lacey—a home of her own, Lacey struggles to hide a dark secret that haunts her. Suddenly, they must both confront the past as Coy Lynn Wilson roars back into their lives like a runaway train threatening to destroy everything in his path.
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Mallie Hamilton returns to her beloved Smoky Mountains, after six years, to teach school at Elkmont. In 1912 and the Little River Lumber Company and the logging industry have changed the face of the quiet, rural life that has been a part of the mountains for generations. Angry with her pa who has sold the family farm to become a logger and worried about her brother Cole who has disappeared into the mountains after a logging accident, Mallie struggles to find her own way. Mallie, guarding her independance, has vowed never to fall in love but she soon finds herself pursued by two men, the rich and powerful industrialist, Pierce Gerard, an investor in the Little River Lumber Company and the charming young botanist, Will Stenson. Against the backdrop of the Smoky Mountains, Mallie must find a way to forgive, to open her heart and to discover her place on earth.
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The year is 1920, Claire Blackburn leaves a life of privilege to teach at the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Searching for adventure and a life of her own making, she begins a wondrous journey set against the stunning backdrop of the Great Smoky Mountains Claire soon discovers a beauty in the mountains and its people as richly textured as the coverlets the women have been weaving in their isolated mountain cabins for a century. In time her adventure will tear the threads of her young life apart and weave them into something far more complex and beautiful than she could ever have imagined. As an artist, Claire is quickly caught up in the stunning beauty of the mountains but when she meets Shade Morgan, a true man of the mountains and not someone Claire considers a potential suitor, she is challenged to confront her own prejudices. As Claire’s love of the mountains and the mountain people grows, she feels the shield of aloofness she has spent much of her young life building, break and fall away. But will her new found sense of belonging endanger her dream of becoming an artist.
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