On 11 April 1862 Mary Anne Cruse watched Union troops march through the streets in her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to begin an occupation that lasted--except for an interlude from September 1862 to July 1863--through the end of the Civil War. Her two-story brick home, located at 600 Adams Street, proved a useful vantage point from which to view history in the making. General Ormsby Mitchel took 517 Adams Street as his residence and headquarters, and Union troops set up tents in open spaces all along the avenue. Set in the mythical hamlet of "Hopedale, Virginia," Cruse's only novel for adults, Cameron Hall: A Story of the Civil War (1867), presents in fictional form the harsh realities of the Huntsville occupation. As Cruse (or "M.A.C.," as she signed her books) wrote in her preface, Cameron Hall "claims to belong rather to truth than to fiction."

Cruse's personal story is intertwined throughout Cameron...