Robert Allison Ragan

"... the story of a New South family, yeoman farmers in the backcountry of antebellum North Carolina, who returned from America's devastating Civil War to emerge as builders of the Carolinas Piedmont. It is a biography that focuses primarily on two men, a father and son, their antecedents and descendants, whose history extends from the time of their eighteenth century arrival in America up to the present." -- dust jacket flap.