Louis E Tagliaferri

Cracker Landing Louis E Tagliaferri

It is the early 1800s and Adam Beckham is an overseer on an indigo plantation in southern Georgia. One day, Adam becomes involved in the death of a fellow overseer who he prevented from raping a Negro slave. The incident caused Adam to flee from the plantation with his wife and young children. Determined to make a new life for his family, Adam purchases a river front homestead north of St. Augustine he names Cracker Landing. In the years that follow, Adam and his wife Stella settle down to a pleasant life at Cracker Landing with their four children. Then tragedy strikes - Adam's oldest son Benjamin is killed in a massacre during the second Seminole War. Soon afterward, Samuel, the second oldest son, leaves Cracker Landing to stake out his own homestead in the fertile Apalachee country north of Tallahassee. When both Adam and Stella die in a yellow fever epidemic while visiting Benjamin, their youngest son, Jessie, and his younger sister, Ellen, are left to run the homestead. A few years later, Jessie meets and marries Millie Sutter, the daughter of Tom Sutter, a sawmill foreman, and his wife Sarah. As time passes, Jessie and Millie have two children, Tucker and Tammy. Together with Jessie's sister Ellen, the small family continues to work the homestead, coping with droughts, illness, the arrival of a runaway Seminole Indian family and devastating hurricanes. Then, the clouds of secession from the Union darken the skies over Florida and soon Civil War breaks out, bringing division and new hardships to the Beckhams and other Cracker families. Yankee blockades of northeast Florida ports choke off supplies of foodstuff and other needed commodities, while in St. Augustine, the occupying Union commander demands loyalty oaths to the Union from all residents. Refusing to take the oath, Tucker joins the crew of a blockade runner and helps smuggle goods and supplies to Confederate troops fighting under the command of the War Eagle, Captain John J. Dickinson. While the rest of his family struggles to keep their homestead, Tucker enlists in a Confederate cavalry unit as a sharpshooter and is seriously wounded in battle. With the war drawing to a close, Tucker is brought back to health by Ellie Westcott, who with her mother was forced to leave St. Augustine when they, too, refused to take the Union loyalty oath. Tucker marries Ellie and returns with her to Cracker Landing to rejoin the Beckham family. Then one day, Jessie's brother Samuel unexpectedly arrives at the homestead, bringing with him a tragic story and a stolen treasure that changes the future of Cracker Landing for generations to come.