The Cradle and the Cold Ground

By: Owensby, Rachel

On the last night of February, 1851, four men came for the wrong home.

They meant to rob a wealthy stranger, but instead they found a tenant and his family. By morning six people were dead or dying, among them an infant left sleeping in a cradle, his father rocking until his last breath. Three men hanged that Fall. A year later, a dying man in a Philadelphia prison yard confessed to a crime that wasn't his alone to confess, and named a fifth man Kent County never caught.

A hundred and seventy years later, writer Owen Marsh moves into a rented farmhouse two miles from the empty field where it happened. Determined to finally tell the whole story only to find a county has spent a century and a half deciding exactly how much of its own history to remember, and a woman named Ruth Anne Furlong who has spent her whole life guarding the rest.

The Cradle and the Cold Ground moves between the last ordinary days of a family about to lose everything and a present-day search for the truth a town has always quietly known but never fully told.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HF51V52T
• ISBN13: 9798191044880
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"