Central Kansas Library System

Set in Creek's Crossing, Pennsylvania, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the novel follows Dorothea Granger's passage from innocence to wisdom against the harrowing backdrop of the American struggle over slavery. She discovers that a quilt she has stitched for her uncle Jacob with five unusual patterns of his own design contains hidden clues to guide runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad. The heroic journey she undertakes leads to...

While tension over slavery grows in Kansas Territory, causing the Underground Railroad to shut down, and Papa is away, hiding from a false arrest, Charlie and his family risk everything to hide a runaway slave girl in their cabin.

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...

Having settled on the Kansas frontier, young Bill Cody and his family try to make a home for themselves, coexist with their Kickapoo neighbors, and stand up as abolitionists in spite of their neighbors' pro-slavery beliefs.