In 1865, the small Southern town of Walesburg has become so dangerous that Parson Josiah Doziah Gray gives his sermons while holding a gun.

It's the post-civil war era in the frontier town of Walesburg. No religion effectively existed there until the arrival of who would become the town's parson, Josiah Gray. With an effective manner of communicating to most people, he would become the town's moral center, regardless of one's religious conviction. His own house would consist of his wife, Harriet Gray, the church organist, and her orphaned nephew, John Kenyon, their ward, who, as an adult a few decades later, tells their collective story as a remembrance. Despite being that moral center, not all was always harmonious in the parson's life. While he would do almost anything for the parson, the one thing farmer Jed Isbell wouldn't oblige the parson was to attend church services. While he had a good rapport with old Doc Harris, Josiah didn't have as good a one with young Doc Harris, his son, who would take over doctoring in town upon his father's passing. Young Doc Harris, who felt like an outsider in Walesburg and thus contemplated leaving for good, didn't see religion playing a role in health care. That divide would hit a fever pitch when typhoid started spreading around town, the parson feeling he needing to provide comfort to his parishioners in no one knowing the source and despite having close contact to some infected. And in addition to considering him a friend, the parson would have to come to the aid of Uncle Famous Prill, a freed former slave, when store owner Lon Backett tried to push him off his land for his own benefit and using whatever means, including intimidation through white nationalism, placing the parson too in potential danger at Backett and his cohorts' hands.—Huggo

Civil War veteran Josiah Gray comes to a small town to be a gospel minister. In time he has a family and many friends, but he also finds friction with a few of his parishioners. A young doctor grates at what he feels is the parson's interference in the scientific treatment of patients, and a mine owner resents Gray's protection of an old sharecropper whose small plot of land stands in the way of his continued mining. Gray must face a public-health crisis and a lynch mob as a result, all seen and described through the eyes and memory of Gray's young nephew John.—Jim Beaver <[email protected]>