Canal Town

by Samuel Hopkins Adams
Category: "Fiction - Historical"
Pages:471
Year of Publication:1945
Date Added:02/18/2021
Date Read:12/13/2022
Notes:Armed Services Edition

Horace Amlie settles in Palmyra, New York, as the Erie Canal is being dug through the region. Horace is a physician, and he suspects that the lack of cleanliness causes the fevers that rage through the area every summer. He gains some credibility when Latham, the richest man in town, backs him. Horace also makes friends with Dinty, a young irrepressible girl who hangs around his office. Dinty goes away to school and comes back a woman. Horace discovers, to his amazement, that he loves her, and they get married.

Dinty's friend Wealthia is Latham's daughter. She gets pregnant by a canal boat captain and asks Horace to give her an abortion. He refuses. Afraid that she'll get one somewhere else, Horace tells Latham about his daughter's condition. Latham gets angry and does all he can to ruin Horace's career—with success when Wealthia doesn't have a baby. She dies of fever, and Horace, out of options, digs up her body and proves to her father that she had been with child but that the baby had died and not miscarried. Horace is restored to his career and he and Dinty live a happy, successful life.
My Rating: 8

Reviews for Canal Town

Review - Canal Town

The first half of the book, which centered on the relationship between Horace and Dinty, was excellent. The second half, about Wealthia's pregnancy, went on too long and involved a lot of sequences about characters in the story finding out things that I, as the reader, had figured out long before.

Still, it was an enjoyable book and the first one that prompted a reading jag on my part since I moved to Arkansas.
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