Caleb Whitcomb is an eleven-year-old boy living with his mother and father in pre-Revolutionary Maryland. His abusive father is a sharecropper scrabbling to raise tobacco on the outskirts of the plantation of a kind and considerate Quaker family.

Caleb suffers almost daily beatings from his father, and is forced to do the work of a grown man in the tobacco fields. He can only stand by helplessly when his father’s rage is occasionally focused on his talented and obviously educated mother, who suffers in silence. During a trip to the port of George Town on the Potomac River to sell the harvested tobacco, Caleb’s father is shanghaied by some sailors to fill their ship’s crew and Caleb must return home alone.

After his father’s disappearance, life on the farm is more bearable for Caleb and his mother in the form of assistance from Mr. Townshend, the plantation owner, who presents Mrs. Whitcomb with a business deal – for her time spent teaching Zeb, one of Mr. Townshend’s field hands, Zeb will in turn provide an extra hand to help with the work around the Whitcomb’s farm. Things run smoothly for a while, then tragedy strikes, when Caleb’s mother succumbs to complications from childbirth and since his father has never returned, Caleb is left a virtual orphan. He is taken in by the Townshends and grows quickly and strongly, both physically and spiritually, under the guiding hands of the considerate Quakers.

The Fathers of Caleb Whitcomb takes you on an exhilarating ride through Caleb’s growth to manhood, love and marriage, and becoming a father himself and considered a Quaker elder. Then Caleb is once again faced with the reality of what his father has become when he comes begging Caleb for help in his last days. Then, quite by chance, Caleb finally learns the truth about his heritage.

Ned Bayley was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1918. He graduated in agriculture from Michigan State College, and following World War II, obtained a PhD in agriculture from the University of Wisconsin. After short periods of teaching at Wisconsin and at the University of Minnesota, in 1955 he moved with his wife, Joyce, and their three children to Colesville, Maryland.

For the rest of his professional career, he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a leader of research in the Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, and in the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. While in the Office of the Secretary, he served four and one half years as the Department's Director of Science and Education. He retired in 1981.

His interest in local history developed during his participation in community affairs of Colesville, Maryland, an unincorporated community located a few miles north of the District of Columbia. Following his retirement from the federal government, he explored the local and state land and genealogy records pertaining to Colesville. From those studies, he published a book in 1997 entitled, "Colesville, the Development of a Community, Its People and Its Natural Resources Over a Period of Four Centuries"

Although framed in a period of Coleville's history during the Revolutionary War, the people and events related in The Fathers of Caleb Whitcomb are fictional.