—Ann Moore
The following testimonies were taken from Rabun County Court transcripts.
The State v. Will Brown (Col.) (charged with the offense of murder in Rabun County Superior Court. August term 1915—Verdict of Guilty)
Charlie Williams (Col.) sworn for the State testified:
I was an eyewitness to the killing of the Negro known as Sweet. He was killed with a pistol. It was in April, I think, of this year on a Saturday night. We was having a dance. This fella that done the shooting, he just stepped inside the door. He had a bottle and both of his hands in his jumper pockets. After he had been in there a second, he just pulled out his pistol and shot Sweet, and when he did, Sweet got up and groaned a time or two and throwed his hands around this fella. Sweet run out the door and fell at the corner of the house. When I say the fella that did the shooting, I mean the defendant. The defendant run. There had been no words between them at all.
Cross-examination of Mr. Williams:
This occurred in April, as well as I remember, on Saturday night of this year. I was at the dance. I was working there at Mathis, cooking for the Northern Contracting Company. There was a dance there. The defendant was not in the house when I went in there. If he was, I didn’t see him. He was there somewhere. The first time I saw him was when he came in the house. Sweet was soundly sitting by a lady and Dave Barrett. I was standing by Dave Barrett. This fella walked in and done the shooting is what I saw. I was with Richard Rose, Dave Barrett, and Slim Roberson. I was just standing there at the time. I had been dancing. I was resting then. We were standing there laughing and talking loudly. The first thing I knew, the defendant was in the house. I seen him when he come into the room with his hand in his jumper pockets. The man that was killed was sitting. The lady was sitting there by Sweet, the fella that got killed. When the defendant walked into the room, he seemed to be like he was hunting somebody. It looked to me like he shot the man he was after. He shot him and then turned around and walked out. He stood there about one step from the door, seems like he had one foot in the door and one foot about one step from the room. He just drawed his pistol out and done the shooting. I can’t remember whether it was his left or right shoulder, but I think it was his right shoulder. I saw the place the bullet went in. It went in and come just under his left armpit. The bullet did not go upward; it went upward and lodged into his body, far as I know. I wasn’t a physician; I didn’t examine that far. There was a good many Negroes down there that night; there wasn’t so many in the house, but there was some in the kitchen and in the other room. There wasn’t any drinking there that I know of. We was having a dance there and having a very nice time in that room where we was, up until the shooting. Everybody was having a good time. Everything was going on quite well. The defendant just walked in there and shot this fella, Sweet. It wasn’t a woman with me—it was a man. I don’t know exactly what we was talking about at the time. It has been so long since this happened. I was talking to him. I wasn’t looking him directly in the face. The woman’s name that was sitting by Sweet was named Josie. They all jumped up and ran out.
Statement of the defendant Will Brown
I was down there one night standing there talking to this boy that had a girl named Elizabeth, and she come up there to get a pair of shoes, and when she walked up, we walked up to the house together. She tried on the shoes, and they seemed to be too small for her. She asked me to go back with her to get them changed. I said, “All right,” and we went on back in and she changed the shoes. When she came out to where I stood, she went on up the hill and I stopped. After a while, this here other fella, George, came out there, and we stood up there and talked. This woman called me in the house wanting me to go and sell some chicken sandwiches to the boys at the camp. Then I come back, and this girl was talking to me and had both hands on my shoulder. About that time this fella, Sweet, he come from behind the house and says, “What you doing here, got my woman barred up like this?” and grabbed me and slammed me up against the house two or three times. I says to him, “Don’t do that. You are liable to break the stitches in my side.” I had been cut in the side, and it was all sewed up. He slammed me down in the ground and says to me, “If you cross my path anymore tonight, I’m gonna kill you.” I wound up where the game was going on. A boy named Boss Nix or something like that says to me, “Let me have fifty cents on this gun, and I’ll give you seventy-five cents Saturday.” I said, “All right” and put the gun in my pocket. About that time, some of them said, “Let’s go to the dance.” I said that I didn’t care, and when we got there, this fella, Sweet, jumped up with a knife in his hand like that and come at me and says, “What did I tell you?” Just as he come at me, I shot him and backed out the door. Sweet throwed his hands up in the air and went out the door. I backed out the door and come out. I went on and told this woman that I had shot Sweet, and she said, “You’d better leave here because you are a stranger and them boys will mob you.” So, I got on the railroad and kept walking.
Although the other testimonies are very interesting, they are too numerous to include here, and we felt that the following interview by David Vinson was more insightful. The interviewee, Edward Vinson, was an eyewitness to the hanging:
It was a sad day for a ten-year-old. The hanging caused me to distrust lawmen, and I never did consider them to be a friend. It made an imprint on my mind that has never left me. Children should never have been allowed to watch hangings. The courtyard was completely covered with people from children to adults. People arrived there by train, buggies, and on horseback.
Luther Rickman was deputy sheriff and jail keeper. Luther was a kind and compassionate man, so Brown asked Luther to do the hanging. Luther told him he would do anything he could for him, but he would not hang him. Instead, the sheriff, John Beck Dockins, did the hanging.
Will Brown was standing on the gallows with his head down before they put on the black cap, when Chet Howard, the photographer, called to him and asked to raise his head. The crowd of people cursed Howard for asking him to do so.
They delayed the hanging until after the one o’clock train ran—for what reason, I don’t know, unless it was a message from the governor. I watched Brown until they jerked the trapdoor out from under him; then after so many minutes, they opened the door, so I had gone down to where I could see him hanging. One shoulder was lower than the other. I don’t know what they did with the body after the hanging. As I remember, there was not much said about the hanging afterward.
“A Hanging in Rabun County”
From The Clayton Tribune
Friday, February 11, 1916, page 1.
By Col. T. T. Twisters
There have never been but two hangings in Rabun County since the establishment of the county, a-way back in 1819. The County Courthouse at Clayton stands on the crest of the hill, which, from the southwest corner of the building, slopes rapidly downward. On this sharp slope, the gallows, built for this occasion, was erected.
The crowd was very orderly, and not at any time or anyway during the trying scene did it give the officers of the law any trouble in the performance of their peculiarly painful duties. He had not killed a resident of Rabun, but a stranger to the county, a man of his own race.
The sheriff, upon whom rested practically the entire responsibility of conducting the execution, was exceedingly restless, moving here and there about the platform and consulting his watch almost every minute. I had heard that the hanging would occur at one o’clock. When the hour of one pealed forth from the courthouse tower, everybody present became, as if by a pre-arranged signal, keyed up to the highest pitch of expectancy. At about one-ten, a white minister of the Gospel talked with the condemned man (who claimed until the end that he did the killing in self-defense), but, I understand, only stated (from the gallows) that he was ready to go to his “home in Heaven.”
The manacles were removed from the hands of the condemned Negro. His hands were tied behind his back with a white rope, apparently a pie
ce of a brand new plow line. He was led upon the trap door. His feet were tied together. With quickly nervous fingers the sheriff drew the black cap of a very soft clinging material over the Negro’s head, then quickly followed the noose of the rope, with its huge knot set under his left ear; then the drawing of the rope securely around the neck, and finally, the sheriff stepped back off the trap-door, motioned his deputies out of the way, and, with white face and a quick movement of arm and hand, sprung the trap. The Negro’s body shot downward—out of sight!
Within an hour or so, I saw a wagon being driven up Main Street on its way to the cemetery on the edge of town, bearing a neat looking coffin, all that was mortal of a criminal who had expiated his crime in the manner in which the law decreed. Rev. George W. Seay offered a prayer.
Editor’s note: Local legend says that Will Brown was buried in Clayton across the street from the courthouse. It says that he is buried on the corner beside Shadyside Drive. Supposedly, there are ten or fifteen people buried there.
“Yeah, that stuff’s a-growin’ wild up there.”
~Life and times of former sheriff Marley Cannon~
Marley Cannon was sheriff of our county during the 1960s. The job was quite different then—there were only two or three paid deputies on his staff, and though there was a much smaller population, Rabun County covered a large area with mountains and lakes to patrol, in addition to the towns of Clayton, Mountain City, Rabun Gap, Dillard, and others.
—Margie Bennett
I had in my mind for a few years there that I wanted to be sheriff. I never knew that it would materialize as it did. I got to planning and talking about it. It was not that I had anything against the sheriff who was in office; he was a good friend of mine. I’ve studied a many of a night before I went to sleep wondering whether I would run or not. I made up my mind that I would run. I understood that I could get beat easier than I could win. I made up my mind that I was going to try it. If I won, then I won. However, if I got beat, I could go hide in the woods and cry, and nobody would know! Seriously, though, I wondered how I would make out being the sheriff if I got elected. Finally, I felt like the time was right for me to run—so I did and won!
Times were different in those days. To show you the difference in the times now, as to how they were then, there were hardly any firemen on duty. Usually, unless it was Friday or Saturday night, we only had one policeman on duty. There was a button in the fire department that would set the siren off. The police department had one, too. Almost always there was one or the other of us out all the time. If someone would call the fire department and find no one there, they would call the police department, and I would set the siren off. I would run uptown and tell them where to go, once they got back from wherever they were at.
I stayed sheriff for eight years. I started out with one deputy. We did not have any base radios. We only had a radio in the car. If my wife, Lorene, needed me, she would call on the phone to the courthouse, and they would call me on the car radio. The old jailhouse was two stories. The jail was upstairs. We had old metal steps that wound around that connected the first floor with the jail. We had a bullpen up there. A bullpen is a large room that holds a bunch of prisoners. Most of the time, these prisoners were only in jail cells, but occasionally the bullpen would be used if all the other cells were full. I put an old carpet out there in the living room. The old sheriff told me when he left, “I tell you right now, you won’t keep that thing here very long. They’ll flood it out!” We kept a lot of prisoners there, and we worked long hours. We had prisoners of all kinds in jail. We had murderers, fighters, thieves, and every kind of prisoner there was. You name it, and we probably had it at one time.
The old jail was in pretty bad shape. The old courthouse was in bad shape as well. There were big cracks in the floor at the old courthouse. Everyone was wanting a new courthouse. The government was expected to pay the other half of the cost of the new jail. The vote carried. However, the government was so long in getting their part done that we had to run another vote. Everybody that was interested in the new building really had to work hard in seeing the project through. There were so many people against it because it raised their taxes. A lot of people were having a hard time making a living anyway. However, the vote passed.
I believe my wife and I moved into the new jail on December 18, 1968. At the time, we had only one deputy. We moved in really before they were quite finished with the jail. The next spring, they got the upstairs done. Then they moved the people out of the old courthouse.
I never did have any trouble much when I was sheriff. The only trouble that I really had was keeping people from taking things up to prisoners. Sometimes someone would slip a hacksaw up to them. My bedroom was directly under the old jail. One night at the jail, I woke up, and I heard sawing going on. It was up over my head. I put on my socks and slipped on my pants. I eased on up the stairs. I went up real easy. As I looked coming around the bullpen, I saw this guy with a can opener about five inches long. He was making a key! He did not see me. He never got it working. Of course, it was a little funny in a way.
In those days, we could trust some of the prisoners. I had one prisoner that I let stay out all day and help me around the jail. He would go uptown and run errands for people. Well, this one other boy had a hacksaw. We worked long hours, and sometimes you work so long, and you lay down to go to sleep, you sleep real hard and cannot hear anything. Anyway, the man used the hacksaw and got out. Four of them escaped. What was funny about that to me is the fact that one of the four men who escaped was the boy who I let out during the day to run errands for me! He escaped with the other three. It seemed like he would have left whenever he wanted to. I got them all back in jail anyway. Two of them I got back the next day. One of them went over into South Carolina, and I had to get a bench warrant for him.
We had one boy in jail who had a child about a year old. He would take pins and pinch his little baby in order to make his wife do what he wanted her to do. I went and got a warrant for him. He was that type that could not stay in tight places—claustrophobic. I think this was planned, but somebody came to the jail and wanted to talk to this man. Well, when my wife opened the door, he ran out over her. She slapped him good, though! I never did want anyone caught as bad as I did this man. I guess I tried the hardest to get him than anyone else in my life. We kept after him, and I located him, but he got away from us again. Some way or the other, we found out where he was in South Carolina. We got out after him again. He got away from us then, and we found out that he went to Florida. After a while, I found out where he was and I went after him. I was going to pick him up down there. He got away from me once again. Of course, by this time, we were all pretty hot after him because he had slipped out between our fingers so many times. So he went to Pennsylvania. He never did come back. I will go ahead and say that he married again up north, and his wife killed him up there.
One time we had a report on a marijuana field in the Persimmon community. We observed this marijuana field from the woods. We went back to Clayton to get a warrant. There turned out to be an acre of marijuana at this field. There was some corn, too! It was fertilized pretty heavily. The corn was in roasting ears—ready to eat! In the meantime, we got three or four big plastic bags. I saw the man [who had the marijuana field] coming down from his house when we were raiding his field. The man was hauling the marijuana on a jeep. He come running off down there to meet us. I told him we had a search warrant for marijuana. I’ll never forget what he said: “Yeah, that stuff’s a-growin’ wild up there. I’m trying to cut it down now and haul it off to get rid of it.” So we arrested him and brought him on to the jail.
PLATE 34 “I got the National Guard, after we bush hogged it, to bring diesel fuel to burn it.” Marley Cannon and GBI Agent Henry Dillard in the marijuana field
That was the first time marijuana was seized in the state of Georgia. I felt sorry for the family of this man. They all lived on a dead-end road going up to the house, so I put g
uards up there to keep anybody from going up in there that night. I did not know how to get rid of it legally because it was in a cornfield. So the Georgia Bureau of Investigation [GBI] and I went to the judge and solicitor and we talked to them about it. I thought we could get a court order to destroy it. He said he could not give a court order without having a hearing on it. I could not wait on that. The solicitor and I called the attorney general’s office and asked for an opinion. We have not heard from them until this day. The judge and the solicitor told me to get rid of it the best I could, and they’d back me and support whatever I did. First, I got a man with a tractor and a Bush Gog. I had the field [mowed down]. I had the deputies to pull all the corn down around the edges. I piled it up as best as I could so it would not be a waste.
In the meantime, I got to studying about the fact that this was a private road, and I did not have any legal right to stop anyone from going up in there. I went and pulled my guards off the road. People from all over the country got on the television and radio and came in there. I got the National Guard, after we bush hogged it, to bring diesel fuel to burn it. Well, the search warrant got missing. Naturally, his lawyer tried to get the case thrown out. We tried to establish a court order by a hearing from the judge. I carried that to a higher court on them—the court of appeals.
Searching through the house, I found a hundred and some gallons of liquor and some bags of marijuana. I got the liquor and marijuana out of the house. We just dropped the other case of growing marijuana against him. We figured that it would save us time if we just dropped the other case. He was found guilty of possessing the liquor and marijuana in his house.
I brought a stalk of marijuana with me to jail. I kept it in a bucket. It got out in the news that I had the marijuana. I did not do anything there for five straight days but show people that marijuana. Nobody had ever seen any of it from this part of the country. I knew where the seed had come from, and I knew who bought it, and I knew where they delivered them to. I had all the information on this stalk of marijuana.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 18