Drop in on the Darling family, pioneers and princes of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Harriet Fisher interviews the friends and employees of Elmer Darling, who was as attentive to the needs of his mountain community in Vermont as he was to the lodgers of his luxury hotel in Manhattan. Not content to halt there, Fisher tracks the family all the way back to its arrival in America and its hard-earned settlement of the rugged Vermont wilderness. The resulting family portrait provides glimpses of everything from the stately manor of Burklyn Hall to the signed note to Alfred Darling that President Lincoln wrote the day before his assassination.