This story carries one through four generations of the Coleman family, beginning with Sam Coleman, who married his young wife, Jeannette Freer, in Illinois. They moved by wagon to Virginia before it split into the northern state of West Virginia and the southern state of Virginia. The Thurmond family with its 13 children is also followed through four generations. Much of the story is centered on the years that the Civil War was fought, some of its major battles, and activity in the vicinity of the border of the two Virginias. It also portrays the post-war lives of both heroes, James Willard Coleman and William Dabney Thurmond, sons of the Virginias who became engrossed in the Civil War.