A rambling, repetitive history, whose audience was clearly intended to be limited to people living in Paxton in 1889 and people who'd grown up there prior to that time and still followed its gossip and real estate transactions. There's a good genealogy of the town's founding families at the back (interestingly, some of their descendants still live in town, 120 years later). I'd like to reread it with a contemporaneous map, because from the text it's difficult to match the town as it was in the nineteenth century with the town I grew up in in the 20th. Entertaining if you're from Paxton; not worth it if you've no interest in hyperlocal history. ( )