Trumpets of the Morning

In 1856, a newly married couple from Pennsylvania set out to build their future in Iowa, known then as the "Great Wilderness." They found a challenging but good life, making friends and helping each other - building, planting, harvesting, having babies, attending parties and dances.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, the men went off to fight, leaving their wives and children on the prairie to tend to their land, anxiously waiting for letters from their soldier husbands. When the war ended in 1865, some of the men returned home. Others never did. Those who did return were forever changed by the horrors they had witnessed.

Trumpets of the Morning was written by the daughter of a Union soldier who enlisted in 1861 and survived many battles to see the end of the war in 1865. She wrote it as a fictionalized account of the loneliness, anxiety and difficulties she believed her parents endured. Some of the passages are derived from the letters her father wrote during the war and which are being published separately as Bull Run to Appomattox: The Letters and Diaries of Private Oney F. Sweet, 1st Penn. Light Artillery.

Marian Sweet was unable to see her manuscript published. It has now been published by her grandchildren in her honor.