Mac Laird

Author

Williamsburg, Virginia

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About the Author

Mac Laird left his life on a small farm in the Louisiana Kitsatchi National Forest and joined the Navy in 1944. He served in Asiatic Pacific and Philippine war zones as a radioman in the amphibious forces. After a career in telecommunications with the U.S. Navy, taking a degree in business from University of Maryland and doing graduate work in business management at George Mason in Washington, D.C., Mac Laird found his niche in America’s Eastern Woodlands and began to build with the natural materials from  the land in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He a charter member of the Williamsburg Writers group, six people with like minds of appreciation of the writing craft and highly diversified on all else. With their help, he has self-published two print-on-demand books:

About the Book
 

Here is a chronicle of one man's life- changing experiences as he immerses himself in a decades-long labor of love constructing a unique cabin from natural materials in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. The book introduces us to a fascinating array of characters, including greenwood craftsmen, colorful mountain folk—one of whom is actually a water witch—as well as to skillful (and not so skillful)fishermen and poker players.

This book informs us that “ If you build it, it will be immensely satisfying, whether they come or not.” But they came, in great numbers. Who could not? After all it is a cabin of logs on a friendly mountain in the heart of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

About the Book

2012 Interview

First visit the pristine beauty of the Eastern Woodlands in the fall of 1700, then follow seven frontier braves running toward
Williamsburg. Meet a tough, wilderness-wise, white Shawnee warrior, a beautiful young Nahyssan woman who fights and loves with the same intensity, and a young gifted Saponi brave who learns fast and deals with the dangerous differences between his people and the relentless waves of European
strangers. Fold in a murderous attack on a peaceful village, a chase to the mountains, a raging battle of sharp-shooting and hand-to-hand combat and you have Mac
Laird's action-packed novel set in colonial Virginia.

Click Book Jackets to buy from Amazon.com or voisit Mac's website to order signed copies

Coming Soon: CHRISTANNA - a sequel to Dangerous Differences

A tale of the settlers and Indian tribes of North Carolina and Virginia and their combative quest for land and peaceful coexistence. 1713 to 1718

AUTHOR'S NOTE

They were not settlers by choice, those first three shiploads of English. Even the leaders, educated and well off, were focused on gold and a short-cut to India. The The 104 all male passengers, neither educated nor well off, were in for disappointment and serious trouble when they stepped ashore at Jamestown in 1607. Most did not survive the sicknesses or starvation or the Indian attacks. But a few did and others came and within ten years the English migration swarmed over the Virginia peninsula by the thousands, and in 1617, began sending their tobacco, the treasure they did find, to England.

At one point in the first half of the seventeenth century, tobacco sold in England for three shillings per dry weight pound . The English units of currency were the pound, shilling, and pence, 20 shillings/pound and 12pence/shilling. One man could grow 200 pounds of tobacco in a year: six hundred shillings or thirty pounds sterling for a year's labor, a princely sum by most measures of the time. By the end of the century it had fallen to three pence per pound and still the Virginia growers were shipping.