This Month in N.C. History – Page 8

May 1925: Carolina Coal Company Mine Explosion

This Month in North Carolina History

Coalglen1 — News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.

At 9:40 in the morning on May 27, 1925, a massive explosion shook the town of Coal Glen, N.C. “All at once, we heard this big noise, like booooom, and black smoke just boiled and rolled up in the sky,” recalled Margaret Wicker, who was a young girl at the time. The blast came from the Deep River Coal Field, where local miners were working nearly a thousand feet underground. The explosion, probably touched off by either coal dust or natural gas, was devastating: fifty-three miners were killed.

Ben Dixon McNeill covered the catastrophe for Raleigh’s News & Observer as a correspondent and photographer. His first-person accounts appeared on the newspaper’s front page for five straight days and included a retelling of his descent into the mine on May 31st. Seven photographs accompanied his articles on May 28th and 29th; the two images displayed here appeared in the latter issue with a caption that stated the photographs “need no explanation.”

The tragedy helped to speed passage of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Act, passed in 1929. North Carolina was the forty-fourth state to pass such legislation.

Coalglen2 — News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.

Historical Background

The presence of Deep River coal was first noted in print in 1820 in a letter to the American Journal of Science by Professor Denison Olmsted, chair of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the University of North Carolina. Olmsted, and later H. M. Chance in an 1885 report, noted that earlier uses of coal to meet local needs most likely dated to before 1775. The Deep River Coal Field is the only noteworthy source of coal in the state. There are some “sporadic deposits,” as Chance described them, in the Dan River region from the Virginia border southwest to Germanton on the border between Stokes and Forsyth Counties.

Attempts to develop commercial mining efforts in the Deep River Coal Field began during the early 1850s, and had a rocky history. The Western Railroad, chartered in 1852, was the first railroad to reach into the region. Completed in 1863, its purpose was to connect the coalmines centered at the village of Egypt (renamed Cumnock in 1895) to the riverside port of Fayetteville on the Cape Fear to the southeast. Coal was mined at three towns within a four-and-a-half mile band, all within close proximity of the Deep River: Egypt, Gulf (upstream to the west of Egypt) and Farmville (downstream and directly to the east of Egypt).

The mine at Egypt closed down in 1870 and remained flooded until 1888. Three years earlier, in 1885, H. M. Chance submitted his “Report on an Exploration of the Coalfields of North Carolina,” which identified two coal beds between Egypt and Farmville that might be worthy of thorough exploration, but doubted the likelihood of large scale production. Furthermore he did not believe further expenditures would be justified outside of the limited area. When Chance described Deep River Coal Field, he listed eight “Obstacles to Successful Mining,” he wrote:

In the Richmond coalfield great trouble has been caused by what is called spontaneous combustion. Judging from the similarity of the coals it seems possible that this same difficulty may obtain here. While this is a mere supposition, it is one that cannot safely be ignored.

The Egypt mine reopened in 1888 and ran continuously through 1902 after sizeable gas explosions in 1895 and 1900, and financial difficulties once again forced closure. In 1915, Norfolk Southern Railroad obtained the property and ran the mine under the name of Cumnock Coal Company, the word Egypt having become synonymous with explosions and failures. The company supplied coal primarily for railroad purposes and was a small operation. In September 1922 the Erskine Ramsey Coal Company purchased the company with plans to significantly enlarge the enterprise and its output. Around 1921, the Carolina Coal Company developed a mine on the site of the old Farmville village on the Chatham County side of the Deep River, less than two miles east of the Cumnock Mine.

There is some confusion over the name of the event. The News and Observer called the event the “Cumnock Mine Disaster” in its initial coverage and a negative envelope in the Ben Dixon McNeill Collection carries the same title. The Cumnock Mine, however, was not the mine where the accident occurred. Farmville was later renamed Coalglen, or alternately Coal Glen at a date not readily available. The disaster has since been referred to in association of one of these three nearby locations. The dateline in the New York Times is from Coal Glen.

Printed Sources:

“Red Sand Stone Formation of North Carolina: Extract of a letter from Professor D. Olmstead, of the College at Chapel-Hill, North-Carolina, dated Feb 26, 1820.” American Journal of Science, 2:1 (April 1820), 175-176.

Wilkes, Charles. Report on the Examination of the Deep River District, North Carolina. Caption title: Report of the Secretary of the Navy, communicating the report of officers appointed by him to make the examination of the iron, coal and timber of the Deep River country, in the state of North Carolina, required by a resolution of the Senate. [Washington, 1859.]

Report on an Exploration of the Coal Fields of North Carolina: made for the State Board of Agriculture. Raleigh, N. C.: P. M. Hale, state printer and binder, 1885.

Campbell, Marius R. and Kent W. Kimball. The Deep River Coal Field of North Carolina. Prepared by United States Geological Survey, in cooperation with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey, 1923.

Coal Deposits in the Deep River Field, Chatham, Lee, and Moore Counties, N.C.: Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1952.

Reinemund, John A. Geology of the Deep River Coal Field, North Carolina. Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1955.

World Wide Web Sources:

Margaret Wicker: The Coal Glen Mine Disaster

The Coal Glen Mining Disaster

Image Source:

News & Observer. [Raleigh, N.C.] 29 May 1925.

Photographs cropped as they appeared in the newspaper. Originals in the Ben Dixon McNeill Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, North Carolina Collection, Photographic Archives.

April 1947: Journey of Reconciliation

This Month in North Carolina History

In 1946, the United States Supreme Court declared that the racial segregation of passengers on interstate buses was an “undue burden on interstate commerce” and could no longer be enforced. Encouraged by the decision, but dubious as to whether it would be followed, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored a two week “Journey of Reconciliation” through the upper South to test the effectiveness of the Court’s decision.

In April 1947, sixteen people — eight African Americans and eight whites — set off on a tour of cities in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. They traveled by bus with the express purpose of challenging existing Jim Crow laws.

The freedom riders entered North Carolina on April 11 and made stops in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem. Bus drivers and police officers challenged the passengers at nearly every stop, resulting in arrests in Asheville and Chapel Hill.

One of the riders arrested in Chapel Hill was Bayard Rustin, who was on his way to becoming a prominent Civil Rights leader and is now perhaps best known as the organizer of the 1963 march on Washington where an estimated quarter of a million people gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Rustin was sitting in the front seat of a Trailways bus in Chapel Hill on April 13, and was ordered to move to the back. When he refused, he and the white man sitting next to him were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and for refusing to obey the order of the bus driver. Two more riders were arrested and all four were released on bond and taken to the home of Charles Jones, a local Presbyterian minister who agreed to host the travelers for the night. Before they could leave, a taxi driver assaulted one of the freedom riders, striking James Peck, a white man, in the head. Two cars filled with angry men followed the group back to Rev. Jones’s house where they made several threats before leaving. Wary of more violence if they stayed in Chapel Hill, Rustin and the others left for Greensboro that night.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1946 decision overturning segregation on interstate carriers, the arrests of the freedom riders were upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court. The North Carolina Court argued that because the passengers were not travelling outside of the state that day, they were not interstate travellers and thus the Supreme Court decision did not apply to them. Bayard Rustin spent twenty-two days on a prison chain gang in Roxboro.

Sources

George Houser and Bayard Rustin. We Challenged Jim Crow!: A Report on the Journey of Reconciliation, April 9-23, 1947. Congress of Racial Equality, [1947].

“4 Men Testing Law Against Segregation Placed Under Arrest.” The Chapel Hill Weekly, 18 April 1957.

“Race Incidents Arise After Bus Seating Arrests.” Daily Tar Heel, 14 April 1947.

Jim Peck, “The First Freedom Ride, 1947.” Southern Exposure, vol. 9 no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 36-37.

“State v. Andrew S. Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko and Joseph A. Felmont.” North Carolina Reports 229, pp. 701-707. North Carolina Collection call number C345.4 N87 v.229

March 1863: The Salisbury Bread Riot

This Month in North Carolina History

On the 18th of March, 1863, the streets of Salisbury, North Carolina, were invaded by a group of about 50 determined local women, identified only as wives and mothers of Confederate soldiers. The women believed that local merchants had been profiteering by raising the prices of necessary foods and demanded that the merchants sell these goods at government prices. When the merchants refused the women broke down one shop door with hatchets and threatened other storekeepers. What a local newspaper described as the “Female Raid” netted the women twenty three barrels of flour as well as quantities of molasses, salt, and even twenty dollars in cash.

The Salisbury “Bread Riot,” and the more widely known food riot in Richmond, Virginia, also in 1863, are dramatic evidence of the stresses on local life brought on by the Civil War. Volunteers for the Confederate army from Salisbury and surrounding Rowan County at the beginning of the war were by and large young, unmarried men. In 1862 demand for fresh troops brought about the increasing enlistment of older men with wives and families. In a county such as Rowan, with a large number of small farms, the absence of a husband and father was a serious economic loss. The failure of the county’s attempt to provide for soldiers’ families also contributed to the hardship. The fact that the women involved in the incident were never prosecuted is evidence of the understanding and sympathy of their neighbors. The Carolina Watchman, which reported the incident, extended its most scathing criticism not to the women, but to the county commissioners who failed to provide adequate aid for soldiers’ families and who should “go, all blushing with shame for the scene enacted in our streets on Wednesday last.”

Sources
Graham, Christopher A. “Women’s Revolt in Rowan County,” Columbiad: a quarterly review of the War Between the States, vol. 3:1 (Spring 1999); pp. 131-147.

Brawley, James S. Rowan County: a brief history. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1974.

January 1958: The Lumbee Face the Klan

This Month in North Carolina History

On the night of January 13, 1958, crosses were burned on the front lawns of two Lumbee Indian families in Robeson County, N.C. Nobody had to ask who was responsible. The Ku Klux Klan had risen again in North Carolina, its ranks swelling after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education calling for the desegregation of public schools. While the Court instructed schools to proceed with “all deliberate speed,” the Klan fought — often in the form of anonymous nighttime attacks — to slow the process of integration.

Robeson County in the 1950s had a uniquely tri-racial population. There were about 40,000 whites, 30,000 Native Americans, and 25,000 African Americans, each group with its own separate school system. Although the Klan had typically targeted African Americans, in early 1958 a group led by James W. “Catfish” Cole of South Carolina began harassing the Lumbees. One of the crosses burned on the night of January 13 was on the lawn of a Lumbee family that had recently moved into a predominantly white neighborhood, while the other was intended to intimidate a Lumbee woman who was said to have been dating a white man. Not content to leave it at this, the Klan planned a rally in Robeson County to be held just a few days later.

The rally was scheduled for the night of January 18, 1958, in a field near Maxton, N.C. The stated purpose of the gathering was, in the words of Catfish Cole, “to put the Indians in their place, to end race mixing.” The time and location of the rally was not kept secret, and word spread quickly among the local Lumbee population.

Reports vary about the number of people gathered on that cold night, but there were thought to have been around a hundred Klan members. They brought a large banner emblazoned with “KKK” and a portable generator, which powered a public address system and a single bare light bulb. When the meeting began, the arc of the dim light didn’t spread far enough for the Klansmen to see that they were surrounded by as many as a thousand Lumbees. Several young tribe members, some of whom were armed, closed on the Klan meeting and tried to take down the light bulb. The groups fought, and a shotgun blast shattered the light. In the sudden darkness, the Lumbees descended upon the field, yelling and firing guns into the air, scattering the overmatched Klansmen. Some left under police protection while others, including Catfish Cole, simply took to the woods.

News photographers already on the scene captured the celebration. Images of triumphant Lumbees holding up the abandoned KKK banner were published in newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Simeon Oxendine, a popular World War II veteran, appeared in Life Magazine, smiling and wrapped in the banner. The rout of the Klan galvanized the Lumbee community. The Ku Klux Klan was active in North Carolina into the 1960s, but they never held another public meeting in Robeson County.

Sources:
Gerald M. Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Adolph L. Dial, The Lumbee. New York: Chelsea House, 1993.

December: Old Christmas

This Month in North Carolina History

The Outer Banks town of Rodanthe has long maintained a custom once observed in many parts of North Carolina: the celebration of “Old Christmas.” After observing modern Christmas on December 25th, people in Rodanthe and a few other places on the Outer Banks enjoy another Christmas Day on January the 5th.

Historians agree that Old Christmas arose from a change in calendars. In 1752 the government of Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar to replace the less accurate Julian calendar. To make the change, eleven days were dropped from the month of September 1752 in Britain and all of her colonies. This made Christmas day fall on December the 25th, but many North Carolinians continued to celebrate Christmas on the old date in January.

Ultimately, only on the Outer Banks was the day preserved. One feature of Old Christmas in Rodanthe is the appearance of “Old Buck,” a four-footed creature looking something like a bull which is said to roam the forest during the year. At Christmas he appears to dance and frolic among the celebrating children and adults. Music, bonfires, and oyster roasts also mark this unusual North Carolina event.

Sources
Kane, Harnett T. The Southern Christmas Book: The Full Story from Earliest Times to Present: People, Customs, Conviviality, Carols, Cooking. New York : D. McKay Co., 1958.

Image Source:
“Dare County: Rodanthe: Old Christmas, circa 1920s-1930s,” P0078_0181, Ben Dixon MacNeil Photographic Collection (P0078), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

November 1920: Exum Clement

This Month in North Carolina History

On November 2, 1920, Lillian Exum Clement of Buncombe County was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives, becoming the first woman in the history of the state to be elected to the legislature. Although only twenty-six years old at the time, it was not the first of Clement’s firsts.

Clement was born near Black Mountain, and raised there and in Biltmore. She attended local schools and the Asheville Business College. After her formal schooling was done, but still eager for education and experience, she began work in the Buncombe County sheriff’s office while studying law in her spare time. Clement was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in 1917, the first woman in the state to open her own practice. One of the local judges gave her the nickname “Brother Exum,” which stuck with her for the rest of her career.

Clement quickly gained a reputation as a competent criminal lawyer and after several years of a successful practice, she decided to run for office. This was a bold decision, considering that at the time of the Democratic primary, the 19th Amendment had yet to be ratified and women would not vote in the election. Running against two men in the primary, Clement won by just 83 votes over her closest competitor. With the Democratic party firmly in control of the state, the general election was a mere formality, and Clement was swept into office by a commanding margin.

Once she reached Raleigh for the 1921 legislative session, Clement was not content with just being there. She was an active participant in the House, introducing at least seventeen bills, many of which were passed. Although one of her first bills — proposing private voting booths for elections — was defeated (some argued that other legislators opposed the bill because it would be impossible to bribe or intimidate voters if you couldn’t see them cast their ballots), Clement was successful in passing bills requiring testing of dairy herds and sanitary dairy barns and decreasing the number of years of abandonment required for a decree of divorce.

After her marriage in 1921, Clement decided not to run for office a second time. She was active in local civic groups and was a director of the state hospital in Morganton. Clement died of pneumonia in 1925.

Sources
Alice R. Cotten, “Stafford, Lilliam Exum Clement.” In Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 5. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

“Woman Legislator Travels Long Way To Capitol.” Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, N.C.), May 8, 1960. In North Carolina Collection Clipping File through 1975: biography, vol. 28, pp. 753-755.

Image Source:
News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), January 6, 1921.

October 1954: Hurricane Hazel

This Month in North Carolina History

Fifty years ago this month, North Carolina was hit by Hurricane Hazel, at the time the greatest natural disaster in the state’s history. On the morning of October 15, 1954, Hazel slammed into the coast near the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, a strong category four storm packing winds of 155 miles per hour. Beachfront property along the southeastern coast was decimated, leaving entire sections where not a single structure was left standing. The storm moved due north, continuing to inflict damage. In Wilson, there were gusts of up to one hundred miles per hour and even in Chapel Hill, more than 150 miles from the coast, the storm remained strong, bringing sixty-eight mile per hour winds, uprooting trees, destroying homes, and dumping about four and a half inches of rain on the town.

The damage done by Hazel was catastrophic. Nineteen North Carolinians were killed, fifteen thousand buildings were destroyed, and thirty-nine thousand more were damaged. Thirty North Carolina counties were affected by the storm. Although some recent hurricanes have rivaled Hazel in the amount of damage measured in financial terms, none have topped its strength. In the fifty years since Hazel, no other storm at a strength of category four or higher has reached North Carolina.

Suggestions for Further Reading
Jay Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History. Third edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

“Hurricane Hazel Was Biggest Catastrophe Ever to Hit N.C.” Durham Morning Herald (Durham, N.C.), October 24, 1954.

“Town Pulls Through Hurricane, But Damage is Heavy.” Chapel Hill News Leader (Chapel Hill, N.C.), October 18, 1954.

Image Source:
Chapel Hill in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel. Photograph by Roland Giduz, 1954. Roland Giduz Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

September 1987: The Blue Ridge Parkway

This Month in North Carolina History

The dedication of the last section of the Blue Ridge Parkway, including the spectacular Linn Cove Viaduct at Grandfather Mountain, in September 1987, marked the completion of one of America’s most popular scenic roads.

Running 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great SmokyMountains National Park on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, the Parkway was a notable public works project of the Great Depression and the fulfillment of a dream first promoted by Joseph Hyde Pratt, State Geologist of North Carolina.

Pratt advocated construction of a “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway” and between 1909 and 1912 surveyed the North Carolina portion of a road that would run from Marion, Virginia, to Tallulah Falls, Georgia. The photograph on this page shows a car on the “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway” in 1911. Pratt was ahead of his time in recognizing the potential economic impact of automobile tourism and foresaw the scenic appeal of the mountains of western North Carolina for vacationing Americans. The one short portion of the “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway” which was actually constructed was later incorporated into the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Pratt’s surveys are remarkably close to the final location of the great mountain road.

Suggestions for Further Reading
Jolley, Harley E. The Blue Ridge Parkway. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1969.

Buxton, Barry M. and Stephen M. Beatty, eds. Blue Ridge Parkway: agent of transition: proceedings of the Blue Ridge Parkway Golden Anniversary Conference. Boone, NC.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1986.

Image Source:
“On the Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway, the Grove Road, Up the Mountain, East of Asheville, N.C.” In Southern Good Roads, January 1912, p. 8.

August 1751: North Carolina’s First Newspaper

This Month in North Carolina History

It took a long time for the news to reach North Carolina.

The first American printing press began operation in Massachusetts in 1638, with the first newspaper in the colonies published in Boston in 1690. North Carolina, which lacked the busy ports and bustling commercial centers of many of the other colonies, was a littler slower to develop. Early eighteenth-century North Carolinians had to wait weeks and in most cases months for their news to arrive in papers from Northern cities or from England. Even when newspapers were established in South Carolina in 1732 and Virginia in 1736, North Carolinians did not rush to establish a press.

It was not until 1749, when the legislature decided that the colony needed a press of its own to print currency and laws, that James Davis, an experienced printer from Virginia, was hired and brought to set up shop in New Bern. Later that year Davis issued his first title, “The journal of the House of Burgesses of the Province of North-Carolina,” the first work to be printed in North Carolina.

Davis served as official printer of the colony for thirty-three years, though his work was not limited to official publications. In August 1751 he published the first issue of The North Carolina Gazette , North Carolina’s first newspaper. Although it looks very different from the papers we’re used to today, the Gazette was a typical eighteenth-century newspaper. It contained a wide range of articles, many reprinted from other papers. Essays, laws, and unsigned or pseudonymous editorials took up the first couple of pages.

Local news, if it was included at all, was often relegated to inside pages, and advertisements and announcements appeared throughout. Although the Gazette offered, according to its masthead, “the freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestic,” the freshness of the news was debatable. A typical issue might include stories reprinted from other papers as many as four or five months old.

After the Gazette was established, newspapers began to appear slowly across the state, with other papers founded in the larger eastern cities of Wilmington, Fayetteville, and Halifax. By the end of the eighteenth-century, Hillsborough, Raleigh, and even Salisbury, in what was then considered the far western end of the state, had newspapers.

James Davis originally published the North-Carolina Gazette from 1751 until around 1760. He began a new newspaper, The North-Carolina Magazine; Or Universal Intelligencer in 1764 and published this until around 1768. In May 1768 he started over again, this time returning to his original title. The new North-Carolina Gazette lasted until 1778.

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Robert N. Elliott, Jr., “James Davis.” In Dictionary of North Carolina Biography , vol. 2, edited by William S. Powell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Robert N. Elliott, Jr., “James Davis and the Beginning of the Newspaper in North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review 42, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 1-20.

Watson, Alan D. “The Role of Printing in Eighteenth-Century North Carolina.” Carolina Comments 48, no. 3 (May 2000): 75-83.

Image Source:

North-Carolina Gazette, August 1, 1777. Masthead.

July 1833: Frankie Silver Hanged

This Month in North Carolina History

One of the few certainties about Frankie Silver is that she was hanged for the murder of her husband Charlie in Morganton, North Carolina on July 12, 1833. Many of the other facts surrounding their married life, the murder in 1831, the reasons for the crime, and the drama leading up to Frankie’s death are shrouded in 170 years of myth and folklore. The story has been told in ballads, “true-crime” magazine articles, plays, ballets, books, essays, documentaries, and countless newspaper articles. The story continues to hold the imagination of many.

According to the most common version of the story…

Frankie killed Charlie in a fit of jealous rage three days before Christmas 1831. She suspected him of infidelity with another man’s wife and decided to exact her revenge as he lay sleeping on the floor with their baby girl. Quietly removing the child from his arms, she then struck Charlie’s head with an axe. The first blow, however, did not immediately kill him and he thrashed around the house mortally wounded. Frankie hid under the covers of their bed, eventually coming out when she heard his body hit the floor. She then took another swing with the axe, this time completely severing his head. Frankie attempted to conceal the evidence of the murder by chopping the body into pieces and burning them in the cabin’s fireplace. Following this all-night affair, Frankie went to a relative’s house the next morning to announce that Charlie had gone hunting and had not returned.

A search of the frozen river and surrounding countryside did not locate Charlie. A distressed Silver family brought in a slave “conjure man” from Tennessee to divine the location of Charlie. Using a glass ball dangled from a piece of string, the conjure man determined that the missing man was still in his cabin. A thorough investigation of the home and surrounding area revealed bits and pieces of charred bone, a heel iron from Charlie’s shoe, and a pool of dried blood under the puncheon floor. Frankie was immediately arrested.

Frankie was tried, convicted, and sentenced to die by hanging. After a failed appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court, she broke out of jail with the help of her family. The sheriff and his posse eventually caught up to Frankie, who was disguised as a man and walking behind her uncle’s wagon. She was returned to prison and her execution was set for July 12, 1833.

When the day arrived, she was led to the scaffold. The sheriff asked if she had anything she wanted to say. Before she could answer, her father yelled, “Die with it in ye, Frankie!” However, she told the sheriff that she did have something to say, but she wanted to sing it instead. After she finished her lonely ballad, the noose was placed around her neck, and she became the first woman to be hanged in North Carolina.

How much of the Frankie Silver legend is true? No one is quite sure. According to recent research, only a few of the commonly accepted bits of the story can be told with certainty. Charles Silver was murdered sometime before Christmas in 1831. After a search of the home, evidence indicated that Frankie had committed the crime with the possible help of her mother and brother. All three were arrested, but only Frankie was indicted for the murder. On March 30, 1832, Frankie was found guilty. The case was immediately appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, but the appeal failed. Frankie was to be executed during the county court’s 1832 fall term.

The fall term came and went without the judge showing up, so Frankie was spared until the spring of 1833. At that session of court, the judge sentenced her to die on June 28, 1833. On May 18, however, she escaped from the jail in Morganton, only to be caught in Rutherford County and returned to prison a few days later. As the date grew near, the governor postponed the execution for two weeks, but petitions to save her life failed and on July 12, 1833, she was hanged in Morganton.

Frankie’s tale–fact or legend–continues to inspire storytellers. From Sharyn McCrumb’s novel The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998) and a Swiss dance company’s ballet by the same name (1996), to William Gregg and Perry Dean Young’s play Frankie (2001) , the legend lives on.

Suggestions for further reading/viewing:
Daniel W. Patterson. A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Perry Deane Young. The Untold Story of Frankie Silver: Was She Unjustly Hanged?. Asheboro, N.C.: Down Home Press, 1998.

Clifton K. Avery, ed. Official Court Record of the Trial, Conviction and Execution of Francis Silvers. Morganton, N.C.: The News-Herald, 1969.

The Ballad of Frankie Silver: Reflections on a Murder: With an Epilogue, The Making of a Ballad Singer [videocassette]. Directed by Tom Davenport; Produced by Dan Patterson, Beverly Patterson. Delaplane, Va.: Davenport Films, 1990.

Additional online resource:
Haines, Don. “Tragic Ends: Frankie and Charlie Silver,” Blue Ridge Country. July 1, 2001.

Image Sources:
Lenoir Topic (Lenoir, N.C.), March 24, 1886. Please click on the image for a larger view.

Star and North Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, N.C.), August 2, 1833.