Upon inheriting his father’s fortune, John Whipple Slater, owner of Slatersville, becomes an absentee landlord and embarks on extravagance. His excursions on multiple grand tours, big spending and bad behavior makes the national headlines, while his nephew Rufus Waterman III is invited to take over the family business and manage a mounting pile of problems on the home front.  Through Rufus’s thorough record keeping of diary entries and family letters (hidden for over seven decades), this period is dramatically reconstructed.  With dying relatives, striking workers and negligent supervisors, the village descends into chaos and ruin as the Slater and Waterman families struggle to hold onto the foundation built by their fathers, leaving the future of Slatersville in peril.  (75 minutes)