At Christmas 2003, New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire is visiting his family in North Carolina when his cousin Charlie Silver tells him something startling. Charlie inherited Midway Plantation, the ancestral home of his and Cheshire's extended family, and has been its devoted caretaker. But now Charlie and his wife Dena have made a decision: They want to move Midway - the antebellum manor house and several outbuildings - to a new location to escape Raleigh's encroaching sprawl. Can you really transplant a plantation? Will the "place" be the same if it is uprooted from the soil in which it has stood since 1848? Charlie's plan provokes immediate controversy in Cheshire's tradition-minded family. For Cheshire, it brings back memories of the wild, strange and magical place Midway seemed when he was a child, and of the stories he heard there - stories of his mother's family...