Garnet's friends are a lively assortment of country personalities and many of her adventures stem from the natural happenings of a farm summer; barnraising and threshing and harvest.

Young Jethro Creighton grows from a boy to a man when he is left to take care of the family farm in Illinois during the difficult years of the Civil War. A young boy's experiences during the Civil War in the backwoods of southern Illinois. One brother joins the Union forces, the other the Confederacy, and the family is divided. Annotation. The unforgettable story of young Jethro Creighton who comes of age during the turbulent years of the Civil War....

The journal of a fourteen-year-old girl, kept the last year she lived on the family farm, records daily events in her small New Hampshire town, her father's remarriage, and the death of her best friend.