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At the age of eleven, John Hiram Beckley became an apprentice on a neighboring farm to supplement his family's income. One year later when his mother died, John Hiram was adopted by the family he had been working for, and he provided them with ten more years of labor. He was invited then to work for the Brooks brothers on their large tracts of land on Irish Hill. Showing efficiency for managing larger farms, John Hiram was assigned to the independent management of a farm in the Palermo community. Each step along this path led John Hiram to his ultimate goal of farming his own piece of land. And just as he started to do so, things began to change. The age of machinery brought steam-power onto the farms. Other inventions changed the way people worked, socialized, communicated with one another, and traveled. John Hiram's mother, Susannah, instilled in him the principles of hard work and seeing the good in everyone he met. And yet, America had changed. How could people assassinate, engage in political corruption, and unscrupulously build trusts that made the rich richer and the disadvantaged poorer? It appeared to John Hiram that covering this layer of graft and greed was a thin layer of gold. Gilded! Is a story of how a principled man lived his life in an unprincipled time.