The main character and narrator, Louisa Barrett, is headmistress of the Macaulay School for Girls, inspired by The Buffalo Seminary and is a very influential woman in a time of male predominance.

The first major event in the book is the death of Karl Speyer, an engineering hero that designed the generators for the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls.

However, conditions in plantations were inhumane and black were subject to physical and verbal abuse, and many more undesirable actions (treated like animals etc.)

Franklin Fiske is an undercover writer for the World News - his alibi is that he is a photographer (capturing the scenic sites of Niagara).

Louisa returns home, where she sees Bates and Susannah get sent to jail (for bombing the power plant), receives a letter from Francesca requesting her to go to the hospital/ asylum.

A conservative dresser, she socializes easily with the rich and powerful men of Buffalo, especially those on the Maculay Board Of Trustees, and is not to be considered a 'typical' women of the time.

It was her goal as well, for a time, to travel to Europe to finish her schooling and become a geologist like her father, but personal ties and her desire to keep a secretive watch over her daughter, Grace, kept her in Buffalo.

She volunteers at the Fitch Creche, set up by Maria Love as the first daycare center in Buffalo, and is asked to escort Grace home by Mrs. Atkins, Principal of the lower grade school, because of her color.

He is in his mid-forties and is over six feet tall, with pale brown hair, a clean shaven fave, and angular cheekbones.

Tom came to America and was working at a Pennsylvania railroad telegraph office when John J. Albright saw his potential and decided to sponsor him through college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He is portrayed as a caring employer, paying for the medical expenses of his employees doing high risk jobs, but Louisa still suspects him of having a role in Karl Speyer's death, after overhearing an argument between the two of them on the night he died at the Sinclair mansion where Tom was heard yelling the phrase "don't threaten me Speyer."

Her grandmother allowed her to study to fill the years before marriage, but when Margaret was accepted at Vassar, Mrs. Winspear decided to take her on escapade across eastern Europe, visiting Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Malaya an India.

When they returned, Margaret no longer wanted to attend college, but disregarded her grandmothers wishes all the same in deciding to marry Tom Sinclair.

Maria Love and Ansley Wilcox, Christian charity reformers, were strongly against giving aide to just anyone without evaluating them to see if they deserved it.

Margaret accepted once she had been assured that the child came from a good family, which Louisa lied about, creating a fictional situation for Grace's background story.

Speyer works on the hydroelectric plant at Niagara, but is with the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, He is in Buffalo for a consulting job.

He is killed by Susanah Riley, the art teacher at Maculay, who lures him onto the thin ice of the ornamental lake at Delaware Park and lets him drown once he's fallen through.

His and Maddie's family lives in Echota ('village of refuge' in Cherokee) which was designed by Stanford White as community for the power station workers.

She is in charge of designing the addition to the Maculay school after Louisa receives the million dollar endowment from Tom Sinclair.

She is responsible for killing Karl Speyer, whom she lured onto thin ice and then let drown, and James Fitzhugh, whom she pushed into the Niagara River.

She can be considered a radical conservationist, after being seen as a close confidante to Daniel Henry Bates, and is eventually sent to the Buffalo Asylum.

Daniel Henry Bates is a radical conservationist who gives a lecture on the evils of the hydroelectric plant at Lyric Hall one night.

He is old and thin, with a white beard and wild hair, and proclaims to have a list of New York State inspectors that are being bribed to overlook how much water is being used by the hydroelectric plant.