The crisp Northumberland English landscape of the high moorlands, with its vast undeveloped landscapes, stretches along the eastern borders of the Anglo-Scottish line and is the ancestral land of the Truitt family.  With their persistent beginnings, this families fascinating adventures focus on a culture full of personal struggles, religious identity, and national pride.  From these Northern English roots grew a cultural line whose adventures would eventually cross the great Atlantic Ocean to participate in the founding of the Virginia colonial experience.  The consequences that follow stretch from the virgin tobacco fields of this new wilderness, through struggles of religious hardships, and culminates in a war for a new Nations identity.  The story that surrounds this family is entwined in the birth of the American Experience and the foundation of a Nation.

     The Battle of Culloden[i] was fought in the spring of 1746 between the forces of King George the II of England, led by his son Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, and the Scottish forces led by Charles Edward Stuart, commonly referred to as Bonnie Prince Charlie.  This was the last great engagement fought on either Scottish or British soil between these two contentious forces, and is known for its determined ferocity, vicious brutality, and rapid British victory.

     The conflict was spurred by an attempt of Scottish loyalists to restore “The House of Stuart” (or Stewart) to their hereditary and rightful place as rulers of the British Isles, which encompassed Scotland, England, and Ireland.  Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788) was an exiled Jacobite[ii] who persisted in his rights to the throne after his grandfather, King James II of England, was deposed in the Revolution of 1688, more commonly referred to as the ‘Glorious Revolution.’  As a result of this claim, Charles was labeled by those favoring British rule as “The Young Pretender.”