Mills Higgins Flack, a leader of the Farmers' Alliance and Rutherford County's first Populist in the state House, was murdered on August 28, 1900, by Avery Mills, an African American. This work documents the murder and lynching of Avery Mills.

This is the story of Collett Leventhorpe (1815-1889), an Englishman and former captain in the 14th Regiment of Foot. Leventhorpe came to North Carolina about 1843, settled there, and later served the Confederacy as a colonel in the 34th and 11th N.C. and brigadier general commanding the Home Guard in eastern North Carolina. Though he trained as a physician at the College of Charleston in the late 1840s, he never practiced and was a restless man, endlessly in search of fortune--before the war in the gold fields of North Carolina and Georgia, and after it in the pursuit of lost estates, art...