Cover photo: Laura Foster’s ghost visiting Tom Dooley’s grave.
Photos and photo montage by author.
Emily Baker, Director Iredell Museums, models as Ghostly Laura.
© 2020 Jan Kronsell
Forlag: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, København, Danmark
Tryk: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Tyskland
ISBN: 9788743081708
Friday, May 1st, 1868 was a spring day like so many others in the years following the American Civil War. The birds were singing, and while it was a little too hot in the sun, it was rather pleasant in the shade in the small town of Statesville in Iredell County in western North Carolina. However, there were far more people in the streets than on an ordinary day. The streets were actually crowded from around 11 am. Most people were gathered outside the prison on Broad Street and at the railway depot south of town. A large number were women and children, and many of those present were farmers from the hills of the neighboring counties and their families.
18 minutes to one pm, a horse drawn cart was pulled through the streets from the prison to a field next to the railway depot, where a simple gallows had been erected. On the bed of the cart was a coffin, and on the coffin a young man wearing chains on his hands and feet was seated. Next to him sat another man and a woman walked next to the cart. The cart was accompanied by the local sheriff. The woman who walked next to the cart was the sister of the condemned man, and the man next to him, was her husband, his brother-in-law. Deputies on horseback had to keep the crowd at bay in order to make way for the cart. As the "procession" approached the depot, the crowd tried to get closer to the cart. Several of the spectators wanted to see the condemned man up close, and many had climbed the few trees to get a better view of the gallows.
A few minutes past one pm, the cart stopped under the gallows. The man was allowed to speak his last words. He spoke of his childhood, his parents, and his service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and of local politics. The only thing he didn’t talk about was what the crowd was waiting for; the murder he was convicted of having committed. The speech lasted for about an hour. He said a warm farewell to his sister and brother-in-law, who descended from the cart. The end of the rope that the man wore around his neck was tied to the crossbar of the gallows. The man stood quietly on the cart and didn’t say anything further. 18 minutes to three pm, the cart was pulled away from under the man. Five minutes to three, the attending physician declared that the convicted man was dead. The body was allowed to hang for another twenty minutes before it was cut down and placed in the coffin, which was turned over to the sister and her husband.
Thus ended the life of Thomas C. Dula, better known to the world as Tom Dooley, but the story still attracts attention today, more than 150 years after the hanging.
Why is a man from Denmark so interested in a murder and the following trial and execution that took place on another continent more than 150 years ago that he wants to write a book about it? In fact, I have no other explanation than the case is fascinating. Perhaps it is because it was immortalized through songs, or because so many legends arose around it that it is still interesting and not only to me but to lots of other people both locally and globally as well.
My own fascination with the case started way back in 2000, almost 20 years ago, and I started seriously researching the case in 2002. So this book has been more than 18 years underway. As I am not a professional historian, I have only been able to use part of my spare time for research, and I keep learning new things about the case all the time, but at one point I had to stop researching and start writing or it would never be published. I will continue my research though, even after I complete this book.
In the summer of 2000 I was on a road trip in USA with my family and on that occasion I visited western North Carolina for the first time. Along the way my wife told me about some of the things, she had experienced the first time she visited the Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of years earlier. On this trip she had made a stop at one of the many rest areas off the parkway. At this particular place she had seen a sign post that told about the Tom Dooley story. Up until that time I, like probably most other people at least in Denmark, had believed that the song I had known since my early childhood was pure fiction, so now I wanted to see the sign as well. Unfortunately, we never found the sign on that trip, as my wife didn't remember the exact location, where she had seen it. But when we returned to Denmark, I looked it up on the internet and located the place, and we agreed that on our next visit, we would find the rest area. In the year following the visit I started reading different internet pages about the case, but they were not very helpful, as most of them told very different stories.
In 2002, we were back on Blue Ridge Parkway, and this time we did locate the sign, which is actually located at a rest area called "The Lump" at milepost 264.4 north of the town of Boone, with some nice views of the Yadkin River Valley. Unfortunately, at the time we located the sign, we were busy getting north, as we had to get to Vienna, Virginia to visit family before returning to Denmark. But after having read the sign, I decided to do some more research into the story and its background.
On the sign you can read the following:
TOM DULA
”…HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD.”
IN 1868 IN NEIGHBORING WILKES COUNTY, N.C., THE NEWSPAPER
PRINTED THE FOLLOWING:
”THOMAS C. DULA SUFFERED THE EXTREME
PENALTY OF LAW BY HANGING…
CONVICTED OF MURDER…” DURING HIS LAST DAYS IN JAIL TRADITION
SAYS HE COMPOSED
HIS TRAGIC AND STILL POPULAR SONG, IN WHICH HE CONFESSED
STABBING HIS SWEETHEART.
BUT THE SONG DIDN’T REVEAL THE OTHER
WOMAN WHO MAY HAVE DONE THE DEED.
”POOR BOY YOUR BOUND TO DIE…”
Unfortunately, it turned out that it was quite difficult to find information of any substance about the case in Denmark other than different versions of the song, and that didn’t make me any wiser. Fortunately, the internet was invented, so the net became my helper in my continued search. But the information that I found on the web quickly became just as unreliable as what I found before our 2002 trip, or at least the websites that told about the case often conflicted with each other.
In the summer of 2004, I returned to western North Carolina, once again as part of another road trip in the southeastern US. On this trip we, my wife and I, managed to visit both Statesville, where Tom Dooley was hanged and Wilkesboro, where he was first incarcerated. Unfortunately, it was too early in the day, so the museum including the old jail had not yet opened. In the small settlement of Ferguson, where the murder took place, I paid my first ever visit to a small open-air museum Whippoorwill Academy and Village, which has a nice Tom Dooley collection. After our visit here, we spent too much time trying to locate Laura Foster's grave, and as we once more had a long drive north ahead of us, we didn’t visit other sites on that occasion. But I have visited “The Village” several times on later occasions, and on my many later visits, I have visited Tom Dooley's grave as well as Ann Melton’s and the graves of several of the witnesses, and also some of the places, that were mentioned in the testimonies. I have been trying to figure out, where everybody lived, and have succeeded with some of the characters from the story, but not all of them yet.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all the people from the Caldwell, Iredell, Watauga and Wilkes counties and elsewhere, who willingly and kindly answered my questions about the case, whether they were about facts or local lore. Many of the local people have their very own "true" version of the story, which may have been told in their families for generations all the way back from ancestors, who were alive when the events took place, and who knew the people involved and maybe even knew exactly what had happened. It turns out that many of these stories are similar to each other, albeit with variations in the details, but everybody tells them with great enthusiasm. A few stories are completely different, and one is told in the first part of the book so that the readers themselves can judge its authenticity. I have let these kind people keep their anonymity in the book as well as a number of people, whose names I simply didn’t get.
Some deserve to be mentioned though. First and foremost, the late Mrs. Edith Ferguson Carter, who owned and ran Whippoorwill Academy and Village in Ferguson until she passed away in 2014. She had grown up with the story of Tom Dooley ever since early childhood. Mrs. Carter was a very distant relative of the victim, and Mrs. Carter's late husband was a descendant of the physician, who examined the victim’s body when it was discovered. Besides running the museum, Edith Carter was an excellent artist, and she has made a lot of drawings and paintings, that retells the legend in pictures. I am grateful to her, for all the help and information, she gave me whenever I paid a visit to the area. Also thank you to Margaret Carter Martine and her husband, Dick Martine for the way they received me and invited me into their home, and to both Margaret and her sister, Sharon Carter Underwood, for letting me use some of their mother’s pictures as illustrations for this book.
Thank you to Madelyn Hill, who used to run a Bed and Breakfast, Madelyn's in The Grove, in Union Grove about half way between Wilkesboro and Statesville; she was the first person from North Carolina, that I spoke with about the case back in 2004. She was a descendant of Zebulon Vance, Tom's defense lawyer, and she told me a lot about the case as her family knew it, even if most of it was legendary, more than actual facts.
Also thank you to the staff of the Wilkes Heritage Museum in Wilkesboro and the staff of Caldwell Historical Museum in Lenoir, who were all very helpful when I asked them anything and went out of their way to fulfill my wishes for information. And to some people that I only know from mail correspondence, like Ms. Rachel Anders, who told me that Carson Maguire Dula and William Carson Dula was one and the same. Mrs. Anders was a descendant of Carson. Another was Jerry Kendall, who drew my attention to Tom's "missing sister", a sister that was mentioned in the 1840 census and nowhere else. And another thanks go to Mrs. Charlotte Frye, a descendant of Eliza Anderson, one of the trial witnesses, with whom I initially had a mail correspondence, but have later met and who gave me a copy of an unpublished book about the Anderson family,
A very special thank you to Charlotte Corbin Barnes, author of the novel “Dooley” from 2019 and also the book, The Tom Dooley Files from 2016, probably the best non-fiction book I have read about the case, but very different from this one, and her husband, video producer Bill Barnes from Matthews, North Carolina. Both have been extremely helpful. They received me into their home, and introduced me to more people, who all contributed to my knowledge of the case, among these descendants of people involved, like Caroline Keller, Faye Bell and Sam Mask but also to other very knowledgeable people like Zelotese Walsh, Gatherer and Keeper of Family Records from Boomer, North Carolina, Steve Hill, founder of Statesville Historical Collection, Rob McHale, singer and songwriter (who has released an album called Tom Dooley and Friends and often works with Charlotte Barnes in sessions in which he plays his music, while Mrs. Barnes talks about her Dooley research and last but definitely not least, John Hawkins, retired Director of Caldwell Historical Museum in Lenoir and Emily Baker, Director of Iredell Museums, who allowed me to use her as a model for the cover of the book.
And finally thank you to my son, Tim for his patience and endurance when I spent too much time in Dooley-land on our road trips in USA, and also for taking part in the proofreading process.
I also excuse for any spelling or other linguistic errors in advance. English is neither mine nor my proofreader’s first language, and neither, but we have done as best we could.
And now I better get on with the book.
Jan Kronsell,
Brøndby, Denmark
February, 2020
Before my visit to USA in 2000 that briefly took me to western North Carolina, I, as I guess many others from my generation, of course knew the song “The Ballad of Tom Dooley” by The Kingston Trio from 1958. The same year a Danish cover version, “Timen er nær, Tom Dooley” (“The Hour is Getting Close, Tom Dooley” in English) by a band called Four Jacks, was released, and later other cover versions in Danish came on the market. As a kid I heard these songs a lot, and I thought that it was so sad that Tom Dooley was going to be hanged. I didn’t give much thought about the poor victim of the crime, but I believe that’s just how kids are. At that time, I didn’t realize that the song was actually based on real events and I didn’t discover that until my visit.
As mentioned in the preface, I started out my research of the case, using only different web-sites on the internet that mentioned the case. At that time, I became rather frustrated, as the websites I found told very different stories. For example, they disagreed about something as factual as when Tom Dooley was actually born, when and how the murder was committed, when and where Tom was hanged, and about the relationship between the two female "main characters", Ann Melton and Laura Foster. I wrote a few notes, and then put it all aside until I became aware of a book by John Foster West, "The Ballad of Tom Dula". This book I ordered from a US bookstore, and in this book I read a more credible version of the story. Later, using the always very service minded staff of my local library in Brøndbyvester, Denmark (thank you to the staff here as well), I borrowed West's later book, "Lift Up Your Head, Tom Dooley" from a library in the United States and later other books on the subject (which cannot be found in Danish libraries). Since then, I have bought all the books about the case, that I have been able to lay my hands on, even the ones that mention the case from a paranormal point of view, and the different websites now serves as a good helper for at least gathering some information, as long as you put in a fair amount of source criticism.
Since 2002 I have been a frequent visitor to the area, which has become my favorite part of USA and not just because of my Tom Dooley interest, but also because of the area’s natural beauty and the friendliness of the people inhabiting the land. As mentioned in the “acknowledgement section” of the preface, I have met a lot of very helpful people. I have not conducted any formal interviews, but during my meetings with all the people mentioned in that section, I have learned a lot about the case. Besides these named people, I have talked with several others that I met here and there, and some of these people have told me stories of which most have been legendary, but some also containing facts that I have later been able to verify from official sources.
During my visits I have also spent a fair amount of time in museums and libraries in Caldwell, Iredell and Wilkes counties, going through books, old records, letters and more, and everywhere the people working there have been very helpful, and have satisfied my requests as best they could, digging stuff out of archives and so on. Not all my request has been directly connected to the case, as I have also tried to track witnesses or descendants of witnesses, but still everyone have been helpful, and I even have had some great experiences with some of these people, that had nothing to do with research of any kind, but have just happened because of the friendliness of the people in question, like when I got to a museum on a day when it was closed, the director of the museum happened to be present to pick up some stuff, just as I arrived, and not only did she find the information I was looking for, she invited me on an excursion with her and her husband to a holy place from Cherokee legends. The Cherokees are another of my interests, so I happily accepted. Later she even went with me and helped me find a certain Dooley-related grave in a local cemetery.
Today a lot of the original records and newspaper articles have been digitalized and is now available online, which makes researching from abroad much easier, but still not without challenges, as I will get back to.
In 2010 I started writing some articles about the case for my website, and returning from my trip in 2012, I decided that even if many books have already been written about this case, I had to tell my own version of Tom Dooley's story, or at least what I think may have happened back then in 1866. As you can see the book has been a long time underway, because at that time, I didn’t mean to publish the story, but as it grew on me, I changed my mind, and the book that you are now reading became the result. Even when I decided to actually write it, it lasted a few years before I got to the point, because I kept discovering new things that I wanted to include (and still does), but finally my son told me, to start writing, and then do the research on the side, because if I didn’t get to it, I would never complete it. So I decided to go for it, and if I discover something new at a later time, I will disclose it on my website.
I do not claim, that this book tells the truth about what happened, as that would be a lie. The real truth will probably never be known until somebody invents a time machine. But I hope and feel that at least my own theories are based on the facts as far as I have gotten to know them, but I’ll admit that later in the book, I’ll have to throw in some speculations. But hopefully it will be transparent when that happens, to make it possible for my readers to distinguish between facts and speculation.
Research challenges
As mentioned, doing the research for this book has prompted a number of challenges, the most important one being that I live in Denmark, Europe, not in western North Carolina. This mean that I have not been able to visit places and people besides my almost annual visits to the area, but as I still have to make a living back home as well, I have typically only been able to stay in the area for one or two weeks at a time, and often even less. I therefore have had to rely mostly on the internet and the digitalized versions of different public records and of course a lot of articles and books from a later time. But there have been other challenges as well, that I share with other researchers of this case.
Only very few official records have survived
From the trial records from the case I learned a bit though not much. The few records (about 150 handwritten pages) that exist from the case in the state archives in Raleigh are all from the two appeals that were sent to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1866 and 1868, as well as a few other records from the trials in Statesville. The Iredell County archives contain more than 500 documents from the case, but those are mainly summoning of witnesses, receipts for payment of these and things like that and only a few text pages. The records from Wilkes is a little over 100 pages, most of the same kind as those from Iredell. So only a very few of the records actually reveals anything about the murder.
The records from the Supreme Court archives contain summaries of the case etc., a few selected testimonies (about 20 out of over 100 that were given) and a few other legal documents. The testimonies are not given verbatim, as no official minutes were taken during the proceedings. The testimonies that were sent to the Supreme Court were later selected in a cooperation between the judge and the court clerk, and is given as they remembered what was said. And these testimonies were only those which the judge thought would matter to the Supreme Court, when the court should consider the appeal.
In addition to the trial records, a few contemporary newspaper articles mentioned the case, but only one of them shows that the journalist was present at the execution. What else he "knows" is apparently based on hearsay – and combined with an obvious need to "create" a story that could sell some papers. Also a few private letters from around the time of the hanging peripherally refer to the execution, but not to the crime or the trial.
There are lots of legendary reports about the case, but these were initially handed down orally and first written down much later, and they have all strayed quite a bit away from the facts that we do know.
Handwriting
Apart from the few newspaper articles, the contemporary sources are all handwritten, and this goes for all the records I have used in my research, including census records, marriage and birth records, death certificates and so on. Not only are they handwritten but they are written by several different people with widely different styles of writing, and very different spelling abilities. The same word can be spelled in several different ways and other words are simply unreadable as time has taken its toll on the paper records.
The language style is often very legalese with many back references to things just mentioned and so on. A short example: "And the jurors aforesaid upon their oath aforesaid do further present that Ann Melton, late of the County of Wilkes, not having the fear of God before her eyes…"1 In some places, you must really try hard to read the records, in some places you have to give a best guess, and elsewhere you simply have to give up. That other researchers have had the same problems that I had, you will see, if you read different modern "transcriptions", which occasionally come up with a completely different wording of the same parts of the texts.
Names
The spelling of names is another source of frustration. Names were obviously spelled as the man who recorded them thought they should be spelled, which of course could give rise to misunderstandings. Occasionally, there are doubts as to whether two people are actually one and the same, and only have the name spelled differently or if is actually two different people. This uncertainty as to how names should be spelled is for instance the reason that Thomas C. Dula's last name in some records are given as Duly and Dooley and even other spellings. As many were illiterate, and thus didn’t notice that their names were spelled wrong they of course could not correct it, if they even knew how their name was actually spelled.
The distortion of an a-sound to an y- or ie-sound at the end of words when pronounced is quite common in the Appalachians. Dula becomes Duly, Laura becomes Laurie2, Carlotta becomes Lotty, not Lotta, Martha becomes Marthy and so on, just like "opera" has become "opry" in Grand Ole Opry3.
Other surnames also have spelling variations; 'e' is replaced by 'i', 'cks' by 'x' and others. Melton is seen as Milton, Kendall as Kindall, Hicks as Hix, Hendricks as Hendrix, Keaton as Keeton and so on. A few sources refer to the sheriff of Iredell County as Watson, although his name was actually Wasson. In this case however, I don't think it is a spelling error, but rather that the writer didn’t know the rather unusual name Wasson, and therefore believed that it was Watson.
Not just surnames, but first names as well are spelled differently in different sources. The witness, Pauline Foster's name is also spelled as both Pawline, Perline and Purlene, which partly reflects the spelling issue, but also that her name was pronounced differently in the mountains from where she came and in the lowlands, where the trial was held. Also, initials change in different records. In the 1880 census and earlier census records, James Melton is thus recorded as James G. Melton (or Milton), but in the 1900 census he is called James F. Melton. And that the two names represent one and the same man, can be seen from the name of his spouse and his children.
Some confusion arises because the sources that exist today occasionally are hand copied from even older sources, and this multiplies the likelihood of errors. Some letters are difficult to distinguish (especially in unclear handwriting), such as S and L (S and L), which probably is why the trial records mention a Sidney B. Walsh as well as a Lidney B. Walsh. Also, G and S (G and S.) can be confused, which can explain why Gant becomes Sant, and finally you may also confuse an unclear lower case "l " (l), with a lower case "d " (d) explaining how Manly changes to Mandy and onwards to Manda. However, it is difficult to explain why, Calvin changes to Carl, Pilkington to Pilkerton and Carlton to Carter, except if the person who wrote the record just heard or remembered the name incorrectly.
Also in other ways names can be confusing, because some people are known under one name, but recorded in official records by a different name, like diminutives. Ann Melton is seen in various sources as Ann, Anne, Anny and Annie or even Ann P, but she was actually named Angeline Pauline. Elizabeth is seen as Liz or Lizzy, but also as Betty and Betsy. One Mary was known as Polly or Polley as well as Mollie, and also an Ally (probably Allison) is seen in some records as Polly. William is shortened to Bill and Will, but also seen as Buck. At least one Martha is sometimes called Patsy, and one Sarah is often seen as Sally, and I could go on like this. The use of different names for the same person makes it difficult to keep track of the people involved in the case. But unfortunately, it's not the only challenge with names. Relationships between the different parties are also making it a bit difficult from time to time.
Marriages between family members
During this era, it was quite common to have many children. Calvin Cowles, who owned land in the area at the time of the murder even if he had moved to Wilkesboro before the Civil War (in 1858), had sixteen children (with two different wives), of whom 10 survived their childhood. Some men had even more children with the same wife or with several different wives4. Tom Dooley's grandfather, Bennett Dula, and his brother, William Dula had around 70 grandchildren between them, and more than 500 great-grandchildren. The many children in the families meant that there could be a large age difference between the oldest and the youngest child in a family. One example is Tom Dooley's cousin, Harrison Harvey Dula, who got his first child, Frances, in 1837 and his youngest, Orilla, in 1856. Between these were seven other children who survived childhood. Harrison himself was born in 1817 and therefore almost 30 years older than his first cousin, Tom, who was himself 20 years younger than his older sister, Anna. Children were often named after their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. That meant that in any given family quite a few children had the same first name. This also makes it difficult to distinguish between individual family members. Tom Dooley, the main character of this book, had at least three first cousins, also called Thomas, and several second cousins with the same name.
Another difficulty is that in several families, it was common to have more children who had the same first name, but probably were called differently in the neighborhood. Laura Foster thus had two brothers, both of whom were named James; James Thomas and James Elwood, Elger or Elbert - the sources do not agree on his middle name, by which he was most likely known in the community. Tom Dooley’s father had two sisters, both called Mary and so on.
It is thus very often difficult to determine whether two names represent the same person or two different persons. An example of this is Tom's sister Eliza, who according to several stories, was married to a son of her cousin, George Anderson Dula, also named George Anderson Dula. However, it was not George Anderson Jr. who was married to an Eliza, but his father. And he was not married to Eliza Dula but to one Eliza Stinnet or Stennet. The younger George Anderson later married Isabelle Adkins. The confusion is presumably due to information in a newspaper article which told that when Tom had been hanged, his body was handed over to his sister and brother-in-law who brought it back to Elkville. The paper didn’t mention the name of the sister, and earlier it was assumed, not only by John Foster West (The Ballad of Tom Dula) but also by other authors, maybe inspired by West, that Tom only had one sister; a sister that his mother mentioned in her testimony, but he actually had four sisters, and it was his sister, Anna and her husband Micajah Hendrix, who brought the body home. By the way, George Anderson Dula Jr. wasn’t born until 1864, making it very unlikely that he was married in 1868 when Tom was executed!
To make it even more difficult, marriages between cousins were quite common, and because of the age differences between children in the same family, marriages between uncles and nieces and aunts and nephews were also seen. A nephew could very well be several years older than his aunt or a niece older than her uncle. Francis Melton was the brother of Ann Melton’s husband, James. Francis had two children, Julius Melton and Almeda Melton who married two siblings, Julia Barlow and John Barlow, and an older sister, Sarah Melton, married the Barlow sibling’s uncle, John Barlow. Today, such marriages would probably be considered strange, but it was not the case in western North Carolina, at least not in the 1860s5. Also a few other phenomena, which are rarely seen in modern day Denmark, though they may occur, were abundant in the area at the time. For example, it was quite common for two (or more) siblings from one family to marry two (or more) siblings from another family. Children of such a relationship are called "double cousins", an expression that has no equivalent in Danish, that’s how rare it is.
Another thing that had made it a little more complicated being a researcher from Denmark is the difference between how relationships are described in English and Danish. In English a cousin can be either male or female, but in Danish we have one word for a female cousin, "kusine" and another word for a male cousin, "fætter". Unfortunately it is not always transparent from the first name, whether a person is male or female6, especially not with the use of certain short nicknames, like "Ronnie", which could both be a nickname for "Ronald" as well as for "Veronica" and even if the whole name is given, the gender is not always clear.7
It can be difficult as well to figure out the family relationships between the people who are mentioned in the story, mostly due to the fact that the official records only rarely mention these relationships, and when they do, they sometimes just talk about "cousins" or distant relatives. In Denmark a cousin is always a son or daughter of one of your parent's siblings, but in the trial records the term is used in a broader sense, and from time to time is used for second cousins or third cousins as well, while at other times these are just called distant relatives. In Denmark we have a word for ‘second cousins” (“halvkusine” which actually translates to “half cousin”). We also have a very rarely used word for first cousin once removed, “grandkusine” (great cousin). In modern Danish these terms are very rare though, as we normally only include first cousins and everyone beyond that is just a distant relative, and many times we don’t even know them, or have ever met them.
I do not know if all these relationships seem confusing? At least they did to me, when I first started looking into the Dooley case after our trip in 2000. I was quite confused then and still am today, 19 years later, writing
this. Not least because the different sources often agree that some people are related, but unfortunately do not always tell how they are related.
You cannot always trust the census records
Census records are usually considered a very good source of information, but the census records, that I have been using (from 1830 to 1900), are unfortunately rather inaccurate, especially when it comes to the age of the people recorded and the 1870 census records very much so. As American citizens of course already know, censuses are taken in the US every ten years and have been since 1790. These early records are of course handwritten as mentioned above, but erroneous readings or the handwriting cannot explain all the differences that I mention in the book. There are many people who got more or less than ten years older between two censuses. Since the actual census taking didn’t take place on the same date every time, a few people's age could differ by one year (depending on their birthday in relation to the date of the census) as only the whole number of years are recorded unless the child was less than a year old, but it cannot explain the differences of up to several years that often occur in the records.
In this book I will mention several occurrences of age discrepancies in the records, so I will not go into these at this time, but just add one example. One of the witnesses at the trial was Eliza Anderson, a younger sister of Tom's friend, George Washington Anderson. She was recorded as being a 12-year-old in the 1860 census (born in 1848), 19 years in 1870 (born in 1851) and 26 in 1880 (born in 1854), letting her get only 14 years older in a 20-year period. I have a copy of a book about the Anderson family, which I was given by Mrs. Charlotte Frye, a descendant of Eliza Anderson. This book states her year of birth as 18548, thus indicating that the 1880 census is correct. If this is true though, she was only 12, when the murder was committed in 1866, and this conflicts – at least in my opinion – with a question from the prosecution, when she was giving testimony at the trial in 1866, when he asked her if she was related to one John Anderson, a man of color, see page 1869. I believe that even considering the morals of the time and place, it was a bit too early for a girl to have such a relationship. So exactly when Eliza Anderson was born is still uncertain but in this case, I believe the census records from 1860 are most correct, which it often is for some reason, making her 18 at the time of the murder. The author of the family history may have had his information only from the 1880 census which would be understandable as at the time the book was written, you could only access the records on paper (microfilm) in the archives, not on the internet.
Many people were never recorded in a census in a certain area because they moved to that area after one census had been taken and left again before the next. If no members of a household were present, when the census takers visited, the family were simply not recorded. This may account for Tom Dooleys family being recorded in 1840 and 1860 but not in 1850.
If someone didn’t do anything else that created a paper trail, like buying or selling real estate, getting married, giving birth or dying you simply cannot see if they actually lived in a certain area. New digital and indexed databases, where you can search across counties and states have made it much easier to find such people, when you are searching for them, but you must of course know that they exist in the first place. One example is Ann and James Melton's youngest daughter, Ida Vaughn Melton, who got married in 1891 and again in 1896. She was not recorded in any census while she was married to her first husband because the marriage was cut short due to the husband's early death, but the census of 1900, shows that she had given birth to two children in that time, because they now lived with her and her new husband.
That many people moved around a lot, also mean that many "dropped out of sight" because they moved to another state, another county or just another census district10 between two censuses. If you do not know where they moved, they can be almost impossible to track and you can only conclude that they no longer live in the area. One example is one of Tom Dooley's sisters, Selena Dula. She was born after the 1830 census, and was recorded in the 1840 census as living at home, only in that census the names of the children were not recorded, only their age group and gender like: Girl, age 10-14, Boy, age 5-9 and so on. As she got married in 1848, which I only know from the marriage records, and as she and her husband moved to Georgia, she of course disappeared from the Wilkes County and North Carolina censuses, and if I hadn’t known the name of her husband, I would not have been able to locate her again. Thank you, Jerry Kendall for that piece of information.
Not only relocations can be the reason for people not appearing in any census record. Children, who were born after one census, but who died before the next, were often not recorded at all, at least not in any official records, as recording of births and deaths were not mandatory. This is why, for example, it is unclear how many children Ann Melton actually gave birth to11. Only two are recorded in censuses, and they were born in 1861 and 1871 respectively, but she may very well have had two or even three children between 1862 and the trial in 1866 who died early and therefore are not recorded anywhere, and she may have had more children between her release in 1868 and her death, probably around 1873. Rumors in the area would know that she had more children during the war, but that she killed them and threw the bodies in the pigsty, but even if these rumors were just an attempt of discrediting her morality, she may very well have had children anyway12. One last challenge is that not all census or other records exist today. Sometimes records from districts or whole counties have been lost and if the information you are looking for, was in such a lost collection you will never be able to retrieve it as copies of records were not taken in the mid-1900th century.
Finding the locations
During my visits to the area, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out where everything happened and where people lived. In the beginning I used the map, drawn by James Isbell that was used during the trial, and which he claimed “was a faithful representation of the locations designated13, that he was well acquainted with the neighborhood and had made the map himself and that the various places and the distances put down were correct.” I soon discovered that he was wrong though.
In fact, the map was not that well drawn at all. When it comes to distances and the location of the individual homes, the map is far from precise. The same goes for other details on the map, such as the direction of the Yadkin River and the tributaries. In addition, different scales have been used in different parts of the map, which makes it very difficult to read distances. For example, if you compare the distance between Linville Branch and Elk Creek with the distance between Elk Creek and Reedy Branch, you will see that on Isbell’s map, the two distances appear to be equally long, but in reality there are just over two miles from the mouth of Linville Branch (today known as Laytown Creek) to the mouth of Elk Creek, while there is only one mile from Elk Creek to Reedy Branch. This means that the western part of the map is drawn in a much smaller scale than the eastern part of the map. The Yadkin River is drawn as an almost straight line running in a south-easterly direction and Elk Creek is also drawn as a straight line running east to southeast and many of these details are wrong. You can see for yourself by looking at a modern map of the area that the Yadkin River is in fact very winding on the stretch between Patterson and Ferguson, and runs in a generally northeasterly direction, not southeast as the map shows. Similarly, with the locations of the few houses shown. If you look at the map, it looks as if Rufus D. Horton lived southeast of David E. Horton, but in fact he lived almost straight to the east of him. Not all homes are shown on the map, (no houses south of the river are shown at all and no tributaries on that side of the river either), so Isbell was not as skilled a cartographer as he himself believed.
Some locations are rather easy to find, like the jail in Wilkesboro, as it is still in the same place, but the courthouse is long gone, and has been replaced by a new courthouse (from 1902) that has once more been replaced as courthouse and now serves as Wilkes Heritage Museum. It has been more difficult to locate the sites of places that don’t exist anymore. Besides talking to people in the area, The World of My Childhood by Dr. Robert L. Isbell has been a great help, as Dr. Isbell mentions where a lot of people lived in the 1870s, only about ten years after the event. Unfortunately, the reverend doesn’t make it that easy for modern day researchers, as he located many of the places by referring to people, who was well known, when he wrote his articles in the late 1940s but are not that known today and even locals don’t recognize all of the names that Dr. Isbell refers to. But I think I managed to locate at least most of the places where the people directly involved in the case lived, like Mary Dula and her family, Lotty Foster and the Meltons, the Isbells, the Jones’ and the Carters, and also quite a few of the minor witnesses. I have also located The Bates Place even if not the exact place, where the murder was committed. I have visited the graves of Tom Dooley, Ann Melton and Laura Foster, even if it is questionable if she is actually buried where her final resting place is said to be. I will get back to that later in the book.
Many people at that time were buried in family cemeteries near their homes, so by locating these old cemeteries, you get a good idea of at least the vicinity of the place they lived. This goes for the Melton family cemetery, the Isbell family cemetery14 and the Dula-Horton family cemetery, but not for Tom Dooley who was actually buried in a family cemetery, but about a couple of miles from the place where he lived with his mother and sister at the time of the crime, and on the opposite side of Yadkin River from his grave. His grave is on land that once belonged to his grandfather and which at the time of Tom’s burial was owned by his uncle. I believe that his father as well as his grandfather and maybe his mother too is buried on this cemetery as well, but I can’t prove it, as Tom’s grave is the only one marked with a stone. In those days many people were buried without a gravestone. Typically for the not so wealthy a simple rock from the river, with no inscription on it, was placed on the grave. As it was a family cemetery no name was needed as the family knew, who was buried in which plot. The stone that was originally placed on Tom Dooley’s grave can be seen in the Tom Dooley Art Exhibition at the Whippoorwill Academy and village in Ferguson.
One last example of how difficult it can be to locate a specific place today is my attempts to locate where in Statesville, Tom’s gallows was erected.
Exactly where this place was, is not known today and there are different opinions about this. On my first visit to Statesville in 2004 I was told at the Statesville Visitor Center (then located in “The old Railway Depot” from 1906 on Depot Lane just south of the railway line) that it was close to the southern terminus of modern day South Center Street across from where the Visitor Center was then. Today the Old Depot houses the headquarter of the Statesville Police Patrol Division. Later I learned that it was the old Railway Depot that had been located near the S. Center Street terminus, but that it later had been moved to where it is now in order to save it from demolition and the even older depot, that existed in 1868 had been in the same place, where now Bartlett Milling Co. has a plant.
Next someone told me that the place of execution had more likely been east of this place past the milling plant, at Railroad Avenue close to the corner of Harrison Street and Chambers Street. But this was not on the opposite side of the tracks from the location of the old depot, so that was doubtful as well. I went there anyway even if I had some problems finding out how to get there in my car, but I managed, and I took some photos – just in case.
On my visit in 2013 I asked a police officer outside the old depot if he knew where I should go. He told me that the site of the execution was near the corner of Monroe Street and Washington Avenue, around 400 yards southeast of the South Center Street location. He even explained to me how to get there. This seemed more reasonable as at least it was on the “right side of the tracks” from the old depot. I partly got this confirmed from an article on the website of the Zebulon Vance Museum in Statesville, where it states: "... the place of execution is in the old field beyond where Kincaid Furniture Company now stands, somewhere in the Monroe Street Section."15 However, the Kincaid Furniture Company does no longer have a plant in Statesville, so that didn’t help me much and also no one could confirm that the article was correct as for the location of the execution site.
In 2018, with the help of both local historians, some old aerial photos, and guided by author Charlotte Barnes and her husband together with singer and songwriter, Rob McHale, I visited what was then thought to be the most probable location as it was the highest point near the depot and therefore might likely have been called Depot Hill. At least this was where the celebrations in honor of the 150th anniversary of the hanging had taken place on May 1st 2018. And this place is actually in the Monroe Street section of town as I was told by the police officer, though not on the corner of Monroe and Washington but some way further down Washington Avenue, at the corner of Jefferson Street, close to the railway tracks and only about 500 feet southeast of the 1868 location of the railway depot.
It didn’t stop here though. I 2019 Bill and Charlotte Barnes told me, that they had since my last visit interviewed, Mary Frances Martin, a descendant of Robert Springs Juney, who actually built and drove the cart that was used for transporting Tom Dooley from the jail to the place of execution and on which he was standing for his hanging. She had told them that the place of execution was actually on the northern side of the railway tracks, the same side as the old depot not opposite as most people believe. That was simply the best place to build the gallows as the cart didn’t have to cross the rails, which could be difficult with a coffin and two men on it, and it was also a bit uphill, which would help stop the horse, when the cart was pulled away. This brings us back to somewhere close to the present southern terminus of South Center Street, so maybe the lady who originally told me about the place was right after all even if she didn’t know this last explanation.
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter much where the exact place was, as all the possible sites are within 1,000 feet of each other. From the jail on Broad Street, Tom was to be taken a little more than half a mile to the execution site. Contrary to what is claimed in many of the songs and legends about the case, Tom was neither hanged from an old oak tree in a lonesome valley nor from the Tory Oak in Wilkesboro as at least one version of the legend will know.
I have done my best to keep track of the people and the places throughout the book, and should I fail from time to time I ask your forgiveness. So now let me get on with the story, and I will start with the folklore, before I dig into the facts, as far as I have been able to discover them.
The map drawn by James Isbell and used as Exhibit A at the trial was said (by Colonel Isbell) to be: “a faithful representation of the various locations designated…and that the various places and distances put down were correct.” It wasn’t though as stated on page 19. The text on the map is hard to read, so this is a transcription:
Below the map on the left side it says:
Path from Wilson Foster’s to Bates Place 5 miles
Road around do do 6 miles
Wilson Foster to A. Scott 1 mile
Place of murder to where rope was found 200 yds.
Place of murder to grave ½ to ¾ mile
Path to Lotty Foster’s from log 150 – 175 yds.
Dula cabin to grave 400 or 500 yds.
Lotty Foster’s to Mrs. Dula ½ mile
From where the rope was found in the bushes to Stony Fork Road 75 yds.
In lower left corner:
Annex made by
Colonel Isbell (followed by some unreadable text) R. P. Buxton
In this reverse color version of the eastern part of the map, I have typed the most interesting places.
If you compare to a modern day map, it’s easy to see that Isbells map is not very precise.
1 The Ballad of Tom Dula, p. 108
2