Word: sayward
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...trilogy of Ohio from post-Revolutionary War times to the Civil War (the first two: The Trees, The Fields), and starts after the War of 1812. Richter picks up his story at the point where pioneer Ohio, its woods cleared and safe, is becoming a town society. Sayward Wheeler, a hardworking, sweet-souled "woodsy," and her lawyer-husband, Portius, could now relax and enjoy life. With loping, casually connected episodes, Richter tells how the nine Wheeler children grow up, how Sayward reluctantly agrees to leave her cabin for a fancy house in Americus (new, high-sounding name for Moonshine Church...
...Sayward is one of those magnetic women who holds her family in an unbreakable hoop of love. She forgives Portius' drinking and wenching because she is awed by his education and believes in his essential goodness; she closes her eyes to the fact that little Rosa Tench is Portius' child, and she expands with pride when Portius makes a fine speech. Portius is a stout character himself. He survives the cholera, though his only medicine is red pepper and asafetida pills, because he is too "preserved in alcohol to die." When he becomes a judge, agnostic and prankster...
...Most of Sayward's brood are a lusty, hard-working lot. The oldest son marries well and eventually becomes governor of Ohio; one daughter takes a fancy to a red-haired furnaceman, and runs naked in the night to the house of her chosen; another daughter becomes a school teacher. Sayward's son Chancey is the family disappointment; he turns out a priggish reformer and a Copperhead, but he shows up at his mother's deathbed, impressed in spite of himself by her hardy pioneer virtues...