Mounthaven is a multi-layered tale. Four generations and a hundred years of a Virginia family that, having survived the Civil War, acquires a derelict mansion and surrounding acreage called Mounthaven. The year is 1903. The place is already over a century old when Mary Carter Stokes, wife of a failed Yankee gentleman farmer and daughter of Major Moses Carter, late of the Army of Northern Virginia, first sees the property - no plumbing, no electricity and the grounds a total disaster -- and it begins to sink in that this is to be where she will eventually die. Thus it becomes the story of Mary's elder son, Edmund Carter Stokes and his Yankee but wealthy bride, as Ed, using Mounthaven as a base, struggles to complete the mission laid upon him by his mother-- to restore the family to the place in society it occupied before the war - while Ed's own son, Carter, flounders to free himself from these very values, for most of which Mounthaven serves as a decaying metaphor.