It looked like an ordinary root cellar, the kind of place where you'd store canned goods and winter vegetables. If twelve-year-old Rose hadn't been so unhappy in her new home, she probably never would have fled down the stairs to the dark cellar. And if she hadn't, she never would have climbed up into another century, the world of the 1860s, and the chaos of the Civil War. There she makes her first friends - and they desperately need her help!