Thomas Cole climbed Mt. Holyoke in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1832 and made a sketch of the oxbow curve in the Connecticut River to the southwest. He used the sketch and his field notes three years later when creating his iconic oil painting of the Oxbow. It embodied his artistic techniques and his philosophy of man's role in nature, thereby epitomizing the Hudson River School of art.

It is hard to imagine when driving across the Oxbow today on Interstate 91 in Northampton that this is the same landscape. Instead of pastoral farmland, there is a cardboard-manufacturing plant, the largest marina on the Connecticut River, and a community of homes-not to mention the highway itself. And the island is now on the Northampton side of the river, not the Hadley side, as in Cole's time. While exploring how these changes occurred, the author and his wife became involved with an oral-history project, interviewing residents of the Oxbow. Those interviews became the impetus for this book, interweaving quotations from the interviews with photographs and a well-researched historical narrative. It tells the story of how nature and man changed the island and the remarkable resilience of the Oxbow community.