The Entailed Hat by George Alfred Townsend

Description

George Alfred Townsend wrote as “GATH” for the great Civil War newspapers, and his 1884 novel The Entailed Hat is the book he is best remembered for — a sweeping, unflinching romance set in the pine country of Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the decades before the war. Three stories braid together around the money-lender Meshach Milburn and his strange, inherited hat: the rise and ruin of Judge Custis and his bog-iron furnace, the tangled fortunes of an old colonial county, and the kidnapping gang of the notorious Patty Cannon, whose real crimes Townsend turns into a dark engine of the plot.

Townsend fills the book with the place itself — cypress swamps, oyster boats, iron forges, country lawyers and race-track talk — and treats the region’s cruel history with a journalist’s eye for fact and a novelist’s ear for dialect. The result is a book that reads like a documentary novel before the term existed: local history, melodrama and social portrait all in one.

Why readers still pick it up

• A rare American historical novel about class, debt and racial injustice rather than pioneer adventure.
• Written by one of the great correspondents of the Civil War era, with all his reportorial vividness.
• A genuine piece of Delmarva lore, full of names and places you can visit today.

About This DodaBooks Edition

This edition presents the full text of all 47 chapters with crisp typography, a fully linked chapter index, and navigation honed for phones, tablets and e-readers, so the story reads as comfortably as a modern novel.