A Good Place

In the late summer of 1622 seven people lived on a hopeful plantation they called Powell’s Fifty. The owners, the Powell family, were a war-weary soldier, a girl raised in the colony's wilderness and an English baker's daughter. Their indentured servants were a younger son of an old Catholic English family, an undersized eight-year-old orphan of Welsh servants, and an embittered Puritan prisoner who had been transported against his will. The Powells also had a slave, Isaiah—a Mannahoac Indian who had been enslaved since he was a small child.

About 6,000 European settlers came to Jamestown between 1607 and 1624. Less than a quarter—1,200—remained by 1625. Each of those hopeful settlers faced the same question: what would it take for them—for anyone—to make the struggling Virginia colony a good place?

A story of settlers building lives where Hampton Roads, Virginia is today, A Good Place is about taking terrible risks by facing known and unknown dangers and old prejudices. It’s a view of personal strength and growth pitted against both the vast wilderness of the New World and the Old World’s strains and biases. It brings to life the incursion of English settlers onto native lands and the widespread use of indentured and slave labor in Virginia’s earliest years.

The book is based on the documented story of Thomas Prater, who left his well-established family to come as an indentured servant to Virginia. A Good Place is populated with colorful characters—some documented, some fictional—who provide compelling perspectives of life at the beginnings of English history in America.

A Good Place is Volume III of the Helena's Stories series, which brings personal points of view to documented history. Volume IV, Promise, will complete the series with stories set in America from colonial times into the twentieth century.