Recounts the events surrounding the dramatic post-Civil War trial of a young African American sawmill hand who was accused of ax murdering a white woman on her Virginia farmyard and who implicated three other women in the crime.

Grayson County is famous in southwestern Virginia as the cradle of the New River settlements--perhaps the first settlements beyond the Alleghanies. The Nuckolls book is equally famous for its genealogies of the pioneer settlers of the county, which, typically, provide the names of the progenitors of the Grayson County line and their dates and places of migration and settlement, and then, in fluid progression, the names of all offspring in the direct and sometimes collateral lines of descent. Altogether somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 persons are named in the genealogies and indexed for ready reference.