Pocantico
Set in the 1890’s, Pocantico is an American Downton Abbey, a historical novel based on the Rockefeller family’s relationship with the various people who worked for them on their Pocantico estate outside New York City. In the early days of the oil industry in America, John D. Rockefeller and his cronies at Standard Oil are employing devious schemes to monopolize the industry, making Rockefeller a billionaire and a target for anarchists who are seeking to assassinate leading industrialists of the time. One of those anarchists poses as a laborer at Pocantico and undertakes to rig the main Rockefeller home to explode.
At the same time, Rockefeller is facing threats from J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and other competitors who are pursuing their own plans to ruin the Rockefeller business. In his idle time, Rockefeller is supervising the complete re-landscaping of the grounds at Pocantico, bringing him into daily conflict with Warren Manning, a landscape expert from Frederick Law Olmsted’s company, which designed New York City’s Central Park. Working for Rockefeller and managing the landscape project for him, John Billings is a Civil War veteran with terrible secrets he will do anything to preserve. All of these elements combine to generate the drama and excitement that the collision of vast wealth with social aspirations in a changing society often produce.
