Milford, GA 1868: Milford College is in trouble. The mission to create teachers and preachers for the recently freed populations is on a shaky course because of problems between the married founders.

Mayor Virgil Smithson has been away to the constitutional convention in the newly established state capitol in Atlanta for almost five months. He’s late in getting back home. Worried about her husband, Amanda Smithson manages the crowded and growing school by herself. How they will pay the taxes on the school property if Virgil doesn’t return from Atlanta?

More problems: The Milford daughters-in-law arrive in town, determined to wrest what they see as their rightful inheritance from the Smithsons.

Amanda has hired an old school chum from Oberlin to teach the older students. And he’s a tad too affectionate with Amanda for Virgil’s liking.

Just when it all seems impossible to resolve, the Smithsons must endure another crisis that threatens to tear them, and the dream of their school—apart. 

When life becomes difficult, it will take all of God’s love and mercy for the Smithsons to come together to fight within the bonds of holy matrimony that united them less than two years before.

It will be the mission of the mayor, and his wife, to do what it takes to keep the new and coltish educational tradition that they began together going—to keep their love alive.