How Old Were They? Experience and our Nation's Founding Fathers

 

There's an awful lot of fuss going on about who the incoming president is selecting for his cabinet. While various degrees of mud is dug up and slung, one of the biggest and loudest complaints by the opponents of his choices has been that they are either too young or lack experience, which seems to mean they aren't politician enough. The old guard sure doesn't like being shaken up!

So, let's take a look back at the ages of our founding fathers when they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence. Let's think about their experience or lack thereof. Consider that most of them weren't politicians at all, but farmers, soldiers, lawyers, printers, and usually held more than one type of vocation.

 

Finally, let us ask ourselves whether or not they knew what they were about. I say that rhetorically, as I believe they clearly did know what they were about, and we've now 250 years behind us as the greatest nation in the world to prove it.

The Declaration Committee, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, John Adams - Library of Congress

HOW OLD WERE THEY?

Signatories of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, by Age Group

20s and 30s: 

Thomas Lynch, Jr., 26
Edward Rutledge, 26
Thomas Heyward, Jr., 30
Benjamin Dr. Rush, 30
Elbridge Gerry, 32
Thomas Jefferson, 33
Thomas Stone, 33
James Wilson, 33
Hooper William, 34
Arthur Middleton, 34
Samuel Chase, 35
William Paca, 35
George Walton, 35
John Penn, 36
George Clymer, 37
Thomas Nelson, Jr., 37
Charles of Carrollton, Carroll, 38
Francis Hopkinson, 38
Carter Braxton, 39

40s:

John Adams, 40
John Hancock, 40
William Floyd 41
Button Gwinnett, 41
Francis Lightfoot Lee, 41
Thomas McKean, 42
Robert Morris, 42
George Read, 42
Henry Richard Lee, 44
Samuel Huntington, 45
Richard Stockton, 45
Robert Treat Paine, 45
William Williamson, 45
Josiah Bartlett, 46
George Ross, 46
Joseph Hewes, 46
William Whipple, 46
Caesar Rodney, 47
William Ellery, 48
Oliver Wolcott, 49

50s:

Abraham Clark, 50
Benjamin Harrison, 50
Lewis Morris, 50
George Whythe, 50
Lyman Hall, 52
John Morton, 52
Samuel Adams, 53
John Witherspoon, 53
Roger Sherman, 55
James Smith, 57

60s+

Philip Livingston, 60
George Taylor, 60
Matthew Thornton, 62
Francis Lewis, 63
John Hart, 65
Stephen Hopkins, 69

Benjamin Franklin, 70

As to their backgrounds, there were merchants, shippers (including a sea captain), farmers, at least one printer, one iron master, and doctors. While some of them were land owners and landed gentry, one of them came to America as an Indentured servant.

Many were trained in the law, but did not all become lawyers. Also, many were trained in theology, and four became ministers. Although there was one Catholic and a few Deists in the group, nearly all of them were Protestants.

Only Samuel Adams pursued politics as a vocation.

To satisfy our curiosity, let's take a look too at the signers of the Constitution, eleven years later.

Signatories of the U.S. Constitution, Sept. 17, 1787, by Age Group

20s and 30s:

Jonathan Dayton, 26

Richard Dobbs Spaight, 29

Charles Pinckney, 29

Abraham Baldwin, 32
Alexander Hamilton, 32

Rufus King, 32

Nicholas Gilman, 32

David Brearly (Brearley), 32

James McHenry, 33

Jacob Broom, 35

Gouverneur Morris, 35

James Madison, Jr., 36

Jared Ingersoll, 37

William Few, 39

40s:

Gunning Bedford, Jr., 40
William Paterson (Patterson), 41

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 41

Thomas Fitzsimons (FitzSimons; Fitzsimmons), 41

Pierce Butler, 43

Thomas Mifflin, 43

Richard Bassett, 45

James Wilson, 45

John Langdon, 46

John Rutledge, 48

Nathaniel Gorham, 49

George Clymer, 49

50s:

Hugh Williamson, 51

Robert Morris, 53

John Dickinson, 54:

George Read, 54
John Blair, 55

George Washington, 55

Daniel Carroll, 57

60s+
William Samuel Johnson, 60

William Livingston, 63

William Blount, 63

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, 64 (approximately)
Roger Sherman, 66

Benjamin Franklin, 81

I find the youth of our forefathers amazing to consider. It really makes one pause to think about the value and what kinds of "experience" belong to great achievements. 

So don't let the white wigs fool you! Think of a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson drafting our marvelous Declaration!

From the Library of Congress view:

Thomas Jefferson's Rough Draft of the Constitution of the United States

________________

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Thanksgiving Through the Years

 By Sherri Stewart

 

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, I thought it useful to consider how our modern-day traditions correspond to those of the first Thanksgiving and even the Thanksgivings of the first few centuries. It is easy to celebrate when everything is going well in one’s life, but if any of us have experienced losing a loved one before a major holiday, the word thanksgiving doesn’t flow so glibly off the tongue. Indeed, in that first Thanksgiving of 1621, only four women of the original eighteen who’d reached the new world survived to cook the three-day celebration for the remaining fifty men and children, and the Wampanoag. The disparity in numbers may have been due to the fact that the women had to remain on the Mayflower while the men went ashore to build shelters. Susan Hardman Moore. Yale Books. November 2014  

www.history.com

While Washington and Adams (the first two presidents) were in favor of celebrating the national holiday of Thanksgiving, Thomas Jefferson was adverse to the idea of the government legislating a national holiday. In his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, he said there should be a “Wall of Separation between the Church and State.” Note that this was in a letter, not in the Constitution, but because of a bigamy case, Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), the Supreme Court ruled that Jefferson’s letter should be used to interpret the First Amendment of the Constitution. For the next sixty years, Thanksgiving was relegated to the jurisdiction of the state or the colony.

www.monticello.org

It wasn’t until 1863 that Abraham Lincoln instituted Thanksgiving as a national holiday, in part because the president wanted to unify a country that was badly broken after the Civil War. He was also moved by an impassioned letter written to him by Sarah Josepha Hale, who was editor of Godey’s Lady Book, a ladies’ magazine. She also wrote, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Her lobbying effort to make Thanksgiving a national holiday can be traced back to a passage of her 1827 novel Northwood. “We have too few holidays,” she wrote. “Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be a national festival observed by all the people … as an exponent of our republican institutions.” Olivia B. Waxman. Time. Nov 2016

Although most Americans consume turkey on Thanksgiving Day, the first Thanksgiving in 1621 most likely featured deer or fowl (partridge, quail), due to the fact that chickens, turkeys, and cattle were not  slaughtered because of their ability to produce eggs and milk. Advertisements, menus, and cookbooks show that the traditional turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie meal hasn’t changed much since the early part of the twentieth century.

whatcomtalk.com

Many of the origins of Thanksgiving’s modern traditions may surprise the reader. While Thanksgiving may be a huge day for food consumption, it’s also the most popular day of the year to run in a race. “Turkey trots” have been around since 1896 when the Buffalo YMCA hosted their first holiday 8K. These days, more than 14,000 runners will run in turkey trots all over America. For those Thanksgiving revelers who prefer to play “armchair quarterback,” the first official Thanksgiving NFL game took place between the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears in 1934, but playing football on this particular holiday can be traced back to 1869.  Although the dismal origins of Black Friday go back to 1869, only in the last decade have stores begun to open on Thanksgiving Day. Erin Johnson, MakeItGrateful.com So, what traditions do you keep with your family? Your answer, please.

peachridgeglass.com

Selah Award finalist Sherri Stewart loves a clean novel, sprinkled with romance and a strong message that challenges her faith. She spends her working hours with books—either editing others’ manuscripts or writing her own. Her passions are traveling to the settings of her books and sampling the food. She traveled to Zürich for Secrets Dark and Deep. A widow, Sherri lives in Orlando with her lazy dog, Lily. She shares recipes, tidbits of the book’s locations, and other authors' books in her newsletter.

Subscribe at stewartwriting.com/newsletter

An Uncommon Gift

Ella Davis’s papa always told her there’d be no class difference in Heaven, but Ella has years to live on God’s green earth until she reaches her reward. She’s content to be a maid on the Huntington Estate, as long as she has her books and her kitten. But when her ladyship, Amberly Huntington, coerces Ella to take her place on the Mauretania, the fastest ocean liner in 1910, Ella’s worst nightmare has come to pass. She must pretend to be nobility for the eight days it takes to reach New York. In other words, she must live a lie—and this just before Christmas! https://bit.ly/47MTvYX

Wedding Cake in a Library?

__By Tiffany Amber Stockton__



In June, a few wedding traditions received the spotlight focus. One of them was about saving the top layer of a wedding cake, and since this month is *my* anniversary, I thought I'd share a little about a piece of wedding cake from over 150 years ago!

Library of Congress, Not Only for Books

America’s Founding Fathers loved reading. What a fantastic pastime. :) I'd say our writers and readers on this blog are in good company with them. To encourage and support this love, Congress funded its own library. Philadelphia and New York City housed some of the earliest American libraries. When Congress moved to Washington, D.C., President John Adams created the Library of Congress in 1800 to help keep legislators informed. The library started with 3,000 books, mostly legal texts, but British soldiers destroyed it in 1814 when they burned parts of the city. President Thomas Jefferson helped rebuild it.

Today, the Library of Congress holds over 173 million items and adds nearly 10,000 new materials every day. Can you imagine the task of cataloguing all those materials? And not all of them are books. This might be hard to believe, but the Library of Congress also has a piece of wedding cake from the 1800s.

For many reasons, celebrity weddings have always fascinated Americans. Take Charles Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb, for example. Known for his small stature at only 3 feet 4 inches tall, Stratton had a successful career singing, dancing, and acting. He worked with the famous showman P.T. Barnum, who called him the "smallest man alive."

In February 1863, Stratton married Lavinia Warren, also diminutive in stature, in a grand New York wedding to which Barnum sold several thousand reception tickets. Given the inflation rate from then to now, the total take from the sales would be in the millions today. Those with tickets could meet the newlyweds and receive a boxed slice of brandy-soaked wedding fruitcake as they left.

After Stratton's death in 1883, Lavinia's career struggled. In 1905, she sent a then 42-year-old slice of her wedding cake to an actress and her editor husband with a letter saying, "The public thinks I'm not alive." Lavinia continued to perform into her 70s, even starring in a silent film with her second husband, "Count" Primo Magri.

Today, two pieces of their wedding cake still exist—one at the Library of Congress and another at the Barnum Museum in Connecticut.

Other celebrity weddings have also drawn massive crowds. In 1956, thousands gathered to watch the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco. More recently, the 2011 royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton attracted millions of viewers worldwide, with thousands lining the streets of London.

Fun little facts:

• Charles Stratton began performing for audiences at the age of 5.
• It cost $75 to attend the Stratton-Warren wedding in 1863.
• Queen Victoria's wedding cake weighed 300 pounds.
• The most expensive wedding cake slice sold at auction for $29,900.

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN:

* What do you think makes celebrity weddings so fascinating to the public?

* If you could ask Charles Stratton or Lavinia Warren one question about their lives and careers, what would it be?

* If you could submit an item to be housed in the Library of Congress, what would it be and why?

** This note is for our email readers. Please do not reply via email with any comments. View the blog online and scroll down to the comments section.

Come back on the 9th of each month for my next foray into historical tidbits to share.

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BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has been crafting and embellishing stories since childhood, when she was accused of having a very active imagination and cited with talking entirely too much. Today, she has honed those skills to become an award-winning, best-selling author and speaker who is also a professional copywriter/copyeditor. She loves to share life-changing products and ideas with others to help improve their lives in a variety of ways.

She lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two children, one dog, and three cats in southeastern Kentucky. In the 20+ years she's been a professional writer, she has sold twenty-six (26) books so far and is represented by Tamela Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads.

Babies In the White House

by Jennifer Uhlarik

 

In the history of the United States, quite a few children have been born at the White House. However, only one of those was the child of a sitting president. Do you know who it was? If the rest weren’t a sitting president’s children, who were they? Let’s dig in and find out!

 

Thomas Jefferson

I think it is fair to say that Thomas Jefferson’s time in the White House saw the most children born. The very first baby born in the White House was Asnet Hughes, the son of 14-year-old Ursula Granger, a slave girl Jefferson brought from Monticello with the intention that she study under the White House’s French chef, so that he could enjoy delicious food once his presidency was over. However, young Ursula gave birth to her child in the early part of 1802, and by mid-August, the sickly child died. She returned to Monticello soon after her baby’s death, married Asnet’s father, and had a dozen more children with him.

 

Another slave girl, Edy Fossett, was brought from Monticello in 1802 with the same intention—to have her study under the French chef for the White House. But Edy was also pregnant upon her arrival, and in January 1803, she delivered a son who lived until 1806 and passed away from illness. Around this time, Edy’s enslaved sister-in-law, Fanny Hern, also came to the White House to help Edy with kitchen duties. Despite the fact Edy’s husband Joe and Fanny’s husband Davy, also slaves of Jefferson’s, remained at Monticello, they all saw each other often enough that the women went on to have more children. Edy bore two other children during her time in the White House—and several more after her return to Monticello, and Fanny had two children with Davy while in Washington.

Peter Fossett,
one of Edy Fossett's children

Also in 1806, James Madison Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s own grandchild, was born. With his wife Martha, Jefferson had six children, but only two—the eldest (Martha) and the fourth child (Mary)—survived into adulthood. Since Jefferson was a widower, the duties of First Lady often fell to his two daughters. After Mary’s death in 1804, those duties fell largely to Martha who, with her husband and children, moved into the White House. On January 17, 1806, James Madison Randolph was born. The boy grew up, never married, and died of illness days after his twenty-eighth birthday.

Mary Louisa Adams,
grandchild of Pres. John Quincy Adams

After this, there was a span of roughly twenty years where no children were born in the White House. It wasn’t until John Quincy Adams won the presidency that another child made an appearance—and this child was Adams’ granddaughter, Mary Louisa. She was born on December 2, 1828, to newlyweds John Adams II and Mary Catherine Hellen. Mary took little interest in her marriage and only slightly more interest in her child, so little Mary Louisa was greatly influenced by her doting grandparents, John Quincy and Louisa Adams. The First Lady is said to have paced the floor with her teething granddaughter in the middle of the night, and the President tutored her regularly in math and languages.

 

President Andrew Jackson had been recently widowed before his time in the White House, so he brought his nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson with him to act as his private secretary. Donelson and his wife Emily already had one child together, but soon after they moved into the White House, Emily realized she was again in the family way. Mary Emily Donelson was the first of three children they would have while residing in the White House. She was born August 31, 1829. Her next younger brother, John Samuel Donelson, came along on May 18, 1832, followed by the youngest child, Rachel Jackson Donelson, on April 11, 1835. Mary lived a good long life, staying connected to Washington politics for most of it. At the outbreak of the Civil War, John joined the Confederacy and died at Chickamauga in his early thirties. And Rachel eventually moved to Texas and lived a quiet life, though she was ill for much of it and eventually died of illness in her early 50s.

 

Emily Donelson, daughter-in-law
of Andrew Jackson, who served
as First Lady and gave birth to three of
Jackson's grandchildren in the  White House.

Martin Van Buren was another widower who assumed the role of U.S. President. His son, Abraham, married Angelica, and after their European honeymoon, moved into the White House to act as private secretary and first lady respectively. In 1839, Rebecca Van Buren was born—but tragically died soon after from an unknown illness. Some sources say it was as few as five days, some say six months, and still others fall somewhere in between—but regardless, little Rebecca survived only a short time.

 

President John Tyler saw two grandchildren born in the White House—granddaughter Letitia Tyler on April 13, 1842, and grandson Robert Tyler Jones on January 24, 1843. Both would go on to support or fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In fact, Robert was in the midst of Picket’s Charge, and when the man carrying the regiment’s flag was killed, Robert picked it up and advanced to the stone wall where he was severely wounded but survived.

Daguerreotype of James K. Polk

As several former presidents did, James K. Polk asked his nephew Joseph Knox Walker to act as his private secretary. Walker’s wife, Augusta Adams Tabb, gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Sally Walker, on March 15, 1846. In December 1847, Joseph Knox Walker, Jr. was born to the pair. Both children were doted on, although precocious Sally was known to barge into cabinet meetings and other important moments of her grandfather’s presidency. Unfortunately, Joseph Jr.—better known as Knox—died at age 10 after falling off a horse.

 

Almost another twenty years passed after Knox’s birth before another child made an appearance in the White House. This child was granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, Julia, born on June 7, 1876. Despite being just an infant or toddler, she was allowed to be in Presidential receiving lines at official White House events during her time there. She later lived in Europe, married a Russian prince, divorced him after thirty-six years of marriage and three children. Julia returned to America where she stayed involved in politics nearly until her death at age 99.

Esther Cleveland

The only baby to be born in the White House to a sitting president is Esther Cleveland, second daughter of President Grover Cleveland. She was born September 9, 1893. President and Mrs. Cleveland did have another child while he was still president, but that daughter (Marian) was born elsewhere. Esther married a British Army officer, had two children, and lived to be eighty-six.

 

The last baby to be born in the White House—and the only one born in the 20^th Century—was Woodrow Wilson’s grandson, Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. He made his appearance on January 17, 1915, and went on to become an Episcopal reverend, dean of Washington D.C.’s National Cathedral, and fought for Civil Rights in the 1960s. Sayre lived to be 93, after a long and influential life.

Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. with his parents.

 

It's Your Turn: Were you aware that so many children were born on the White House premises? Would you have wanted to give birth in the White House if such an option were available to you? Why or why not?

Award-winning, best-selling novelist Jennifer Uhlarik has loved the western genre since she read her first Louis L’Amour novel. She penned her first western while earning a writing degree from University of Tampa. Jennifer lives near Tampa with her husband, son, and furbabies. www.jenniferuhlarik.com

 

 

AVAILABLE NOW

Love’s Fortress by Jennifer Uhlarik

 

A Friendship From the Past Brings Closure to Dani’s Fractured Family

 

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. There, she finds a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek museum curator Brad Osgood’s help to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it another forgery?

 

Brad Osgood longs to provide his four-year-old niece, Brynn, the safe home she desperately deserves. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

 

Broken Bow is among seventy-three Plains Indians transported to Florida in 1875 for incarceration at ancient Fort Marion. Sally Jo Harris and Luke Worthing dream of serving on a foreign mission field, but when the Indians reach St. Augustine, God changes their plans. However, when Sally Jo’s friendship with Broken Bow leads to false accusations, it could cost them their lives.

 

Can Dani discover how Broken Bow and Sally Jo’s story ends and how it impacted her father’s life?

 

 

 

The Making—and Controversy—of Mt. Rushmore

By Jennifer Uhlarik

 

Most everyone is aware of Mt. Rushmore, the South Dakota monument memorializing four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt—on the face of a granite mountainside. But do you know the history—and controversy—of this monument?

 

Doane Robinson

It was in August of 1924 when a historian from South Dakota, Doane Robinson, came up with the concept of a large stone monument to bring attention of tourists to his state. His initial concept was to memorialize western heroes such as Red Cloud, Lewis & Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody. To accomplish this monumental goal, he contacted Gutzon Borglum, who had been working on carving the face of Robert E. Lee at Stone Mountain, Georgia, at the time. Borglum came to South Dakota twice to discuss the project, first in 1924, when he initially agreed to the project, and again in 1925, when he searched out which mountain he would carve. Upon finding Mt. Rushmore, he convinced Robinson that the faces of western heroes were too limiting—if he hoped to draw national attention, he needed to memorialize national figures. American Presidents.

The son of Danish immigrants, Borglum had little formal training in his early life, but eventually was placed in a private school in Kansas where he received some initial exposure to art. As an adult, he went to Paris where he studied at the Julien Academy and other prestigious schools. He lived for several years in various European countries and gained small amounts of success. But it was after he returned to the United States that his career truly began to take off. His artwork appeared on the Gettysburg Battlefield, in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the Cathedral of St. John the Devine in New York among other places. But it was his large bust of President Abraham Lincoln, carved from a block of marble and put on display in a New York shop window, that ultimately led to his work on Stone Mountain, and later Mt. Rushmore.

 

Gutzon Borglum

Construction on the famed Mt. Rushmore began on October 4, 1927. The first face to be carved was George Washington’s, and Borglum roughed in a simple egg shape to begin with, eventually adding his detailed features later. Washington’s face was completed in 1934, seven years after it was begun. During that time, work was also begun on Thomas Jefferson’s face, situated to the right of Washington, but two years into the process, his visage was badly cracked, so the rock face had to be blown off with dynamite and started again to the left of Washington. His sculpture was completed in 1936. One year later in 1937, Lincoln’s portion was completed, and the final face—Teddy Roosevelt’s—was finished in 1939. Borglum had intended to add a carving of the early history of the United States to the monument, but he died on March 6, 1941, leaving his son Lincoln to assume the remainder of the project. But as World War 2 was ramping up, the United States decided the money allotted for Mt. Rushmore’s completion was better spent elsewhere, so the project was deemed complete on October 31, 1941.

 

During all the years of carving, nearly four hundred men and women worked on the Mt. Rushmore project in capacities from the blacksmiths who created the tools used in the process, to winch operators who lowered workers down the rock face, to the skilled men who blasted the rock face with dynamite. Nearly ninety percent of the project was completed by blasting with explosives, which got the rough features of each president within three to five inches of the finished carving. The rest was done with small jackhammers in “honeycomb fashion”—where small holes were drilled into the rock, often close enough together that the pieces of rock would just fall away, and the faces could be buffed smooth. All told, over 800 million pounds of rock were removed to create the faces of the memorial, and according to the National Park Service website and the Smithsonian, there were no known fatalities of any work crew members during the monument’s fourteen-year creation.

The final work crew to work on Mt. Rushmore in 1941, with the monument in the background.

 

THE CONTROVERSY

 

Of course, in any venture, you can’t please all the people all the time, and Mt. Rushmore is no different. From the start, environmentalists opposed the idea of blasting away the natural beauty of a mountain to memorialize men. Ultimately, Robinson and Borglum won out, and the project went forward, despite this criticism.

 

Worse, the Native Americans took great issue with the project. The United States government had given The Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux as part of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but in the 1870s, gold was found in this area, and settlers flooded the area in search of wealth. War ensued, and by the later 1870s, the government took back what had been willingly given only a decade before. So to not only lose their ancestral land, but then to have four white men’s faces blasted into the rock face was a great afront. In the 1930s, during the carving of the monument, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear contacted Borglum by letter, requesting that the face of Crazy Horse be added among the American Presidents, but Borglum never responded. Chief Standing Bear later contacted another artist to create a separate monument, which I’ll discuss next month.

 

To counter the largely white perspective of Mt. Rushmore, the first Native American superintendent, Gerard Baker, who served between 2004 and 2010, encouraged park rangers to include the Lakota point of view in their tours, presentations, and in answering visitor’s questions. 

 

It’s Your Turn: Have you ever visited Mt. Rushmore? If yes, tell us what you enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy) about the memorial. If no, would you like to—why or why not? 

 

Award-winning, best-selling novelist Jennifer Uhlarik has loved the western genre since she read her first Louis L’Amour novel. She penned her first western while earning a writing degree from University of Tampa. Jennifer lives near Tampa with her husband, son, and furbabies. www.jenniferuhlarik.com

 

Love’s Fortress by Jennifer Uhlarik

 

A Friendship From the Past Brings Closure to Dani’s Fractured Family

 

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. There, she finds a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek museum curator Brad Osgood’s help to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it another forgery?

 

Brad Osgood longs to provide his four-year-old niece, Brynn, the safe home she desperately deserves. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

 

Broken Bow is among seventy-three Plains Indians transported to Florida in 1875 for incarceration at ancient Fort Marion. Sally Jo Harris and Luke Worthing dream of serving on a foreign mission field, but when the Indians reach St. Augustine, God changes their plans. However, when Sally Jo’s friendship with Broken Bow leads to false accusations, it could cost them their lives.

 

Can Dani discover how Broken Bow and Sally Jo’s story ends and how it impacted her father’s life?