Beneath Pennsylvania Skies

A story of: A Steel Town, New Discoveries, Building a Community, Unexpected Friendships, Immigrants Longing for Home, Faith, Family, Navigating a New Country, Racial Discrimination, Survival Against the Odds, Pennsylvania Wheat Farming, Social Injustices, Underground Railroad Movement, and more.

PHOENIXVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA 1878

Amidst a bitterly cold winter, Ivan and Misha Yurkovich, two young Ukrainian immigrant brothers, have completed their arduous journey from Ukraine to America. They have arrived safely in Phoenixville, a borough in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Immediately, the brothers are drawn to the thriving steel town situated at the junction of French Creek and the Schuylkill River. Yet they are not here to work at the Phoenix Iron Works factory, which most immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have come there to do. Ivan and Misha will begin their new lives on the western outskirts of Phoenixville by growing wheat, as they were contracted to do by the American government.

Yet on the first day, as they explore their new land of one hundred and sixty acres, which they will one day own after five years of hard labor, the two men soon discover something they least expected.

There is evidence of others afoot on their property, lands that have been abandoned for ten years,

Will these two brothers be forced to fight for what is rightfully theirs?

The choices they make from the start will determine their future in America. One wrong move, and they could be sent back to Ukraine quickly.

MAY THEY CHOOSE WISELY.