Few people ever heard of the Shelton Laurel Massacre and even fewer know that this episode of the American Civil War saddled the county with the chilling sobriquet, “Bloody Madison”.
This is wild beautiful country now, peaceful and quiet and full of solitude, but the land has known some dark and awful times.
Like the winter of 1863. This was a nest of rebellion then. Here mountain men fought under the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars, and under the “black flag”.
Out from its hidden, cloud hung coves went Yankee bush-whackers and Rebel renegades to prowl the country.
William H. Thomas, a Confederate colonel from nearby Haywood County and his army of Cherokee Indians maneuvered here.
George Kirk, the notorious Union guerrilla leader, raided it time and again from his headquarters across the mountains in East Tennessee.
Scores and hundreds who fled conscription in Tennessee holed up here. But it was the Shelton Laurel Massacre that shocked the state and made the county’s name a synonym for “bloody”.
A shortage of salt in the winter of 1863 brought about the massacre. What salt there was at the stores in Marshall, the county seat was doled out sparingly. Any many folks were down to scraping smokehouse floors for salt.
Passports for wagons and drivers to the salt works were frequently denied Union supporters, and Confederate storekeepers were not quick to sell from the small hordes. In a county divided in sentiment as no other county in North Carolina during the Civil War, something was bound to give. And it did.
Early in January, 1863, a group of angry back country men swooped down on Marshall and broke into the stores. With them were their sons, many of them just boys.
The looters struck quickly and in unison, hitting each of the stores at the same time. They had come to loot the stores of sale, but once inside and the salt in their hands – they grabbed whatever they needed or whatever caught their fancy. And then they fled the town, making their way back to their homes of hideouts in the fastness of the laurel country.
News of the raid swept through the town and beyond. A messenger was sent on horseback to the headquarters of the Confederate Provisional Forces at Hot Springs, known then as Warm Springs, a dozen miles down the river.
From the messenger’s report, the commanding officer figured there were 50 or 60 men and boys in the looting party. So he ordered a force from the 64th N.C. Regiment, including a company of cavalry and 30 Cherokee to the laurel country.
Leading the force was Major W. N. Garrett of Warm Springs. His orders were to pursue and arrest every man in the mountains of known bad character, whether they had anything to do with the raid or not. The headquarters commander wrote Gove. Zeb B. Vance in Raleigh that he intended to clean out the laurel region and allow those not implicated in any crime to leave the state. A letter came back from
Vance, a mountain man himself with a please not to let “our excited people deal too harshly with these misguided men.” “Please”, Vance counseled, “have the captured delivered to the proper authorities for trial.”
Meanwhile, the search for the looters went on. Days passed, stretched into weeks and then the latter part of February, Lt. Col. J. A. Keith of Marshall was placed in command of the field force.
With 200 men, he pushed into Shelton Laurel and began a round of men and boys suspected of looting the Marshall stores. None offered resistance, albeit a few tried to run but were caught. There were 13 of them; the youngest was 13 years old.
Three days after their capture, they were herded to a spot on Laurel River and ordered to take seats on a huge log. There, without the benefit of trial, they were shot by a firing squad. Soldiers put the bodies in a freshly dug trench and then began shoveling dirt in on them.
News of the execution swept through the mountains like wild fire. Indignation boiled up on every side. Governor Vance ordered an investigation and assigned the job to State Attorney A.S. Merriman of Asheville.
Although a Confederate stalwart, Merriman launched a fine tooth comb investigation and wrote an angry report.
Merriman said he had learned that “probably eight of the thirteen were not in the band that looted the stores. “I suppose they were shot on suspicion,” he reported to Vance. “I cannot learn the names of the soldiers who shot them.”
Merriman reported that several women had been severely whipped and ropes tied around their necks.
“One thing is certain,” he concluded, “thirteen prisoners were shot without trial or any hearing whatever and in the cruelest manner. I have no means of compelling witnesses to disclose fact to me, and I do not know that I shall be able to make a fuller report.”
Acting on Merriman’s report, Governor Vance demanded and got Keith’s resignation from the Confederate Army.
Captain B. T. Morris of Henderson County, in a history of the 64th N.C. Regiment, wrote that Keith was “intrepid and fearless,” but “he had bitter enemies among the enemies of his country.” “He did, “Morris added, “severely punish some of the enemies of his country – some say far too severely.” But, Morris wrote, “When an officer finds himself and men bushwhacked from behind every shrub, tree or projection on all sides of the road, only severe measures will stop it.
Keith was a soldier – a fighter. His first duty was self protection, protection of his people from midnight marauders.”
Morris pointed out that in addition to the native disloyal element, “score and hundred fled from conscription in Tennessee and when hunted in those mountains fastnesses they fought back, retaliated and did many outrageous things.”
Keith was arrested after the war and placed in jail in Asheville, but before he could be tried in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Western District, President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty was issued and he escaped trail altogether.
And in time folks forgot the Shelton Laurel Massacre, but the chilling sobriquet it birthed is still heard now and then.
A famous resort town was founded purely by luck.
A couple of town builders out in Kansas dreamed it up, but fate picked the site. The year was 1875, and this was nothing more than a lofty plateau, lonely and isolated, a wilderness of rhododendron, laurel and fir, home only to the owl, the squirrel, the bear and the wild cat.
Out in Kansas, a January wind whistled through the newborn town of Hutchinson, rattling the windows and doors of a house where to men bent over a map spread out on a table.
The two men were Samuel T. Kelsey and Charles Hutchinson. As they studied the chart – a map of the United States – Kelsey took a pencil and drew a heavy black line from north to south across its face. The line ran from Chicago to Savannah, and then he drew another, starting at New Orleans and moving northeast to Baltimore.
“We will build our town there”, Kelsey said, pointing to the spot where the lines intersected. “That’s where it will be”. As well as the two men could make out, the lines converged at a point where the states of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia came together, but wholly in North Carolina.
With their eyes on the main chance. Kelsey and Hutchinson figured the point of intersection would become the exact center of population between the great population centers of the east.
“It will be like the hub of a wheel,” Kelsey said. “We build a town there and people eventually will come through it to reach every point in that part of North Carolina, in northwestern South Carolina, and points in Georgia.”
They put away their map, and then started making their plans, for they were in a hurry.
Leaving homes and families behind, they set out for Western North Carolina to find the site fate had picked for their town. They arrived in Atlanta late in January. From there they headed northeast by mule-back into the rugged hill country. After wandering around through the region for days they finally climbed out of the Georgia hills and came to an elevated mountain plateau in North Carolina.
By the calendar it was February, 1875. They were deep in great wilderness. But they decided that this was the spot where their town should be built.
They did some scouting around and discovered a trail. They followed it off the plateau and down into a cover where they found their first sign of life. They came to a house and learned they were in Horse Cove and that a sizable settlement called Cashiers was nearby.
The two men from Kansas proceeded to find out who owned the land they wanted for their town site. They were told it belonged to a man named Dobson. They found a made a deal for 800 acres on the west plateau of Satulah Mountain.
About this time they ran into Charles N. Jenks, a noted explorer and miner, who happened to be in the area on a hunting and fishing expedition.
Jenks had a pocket compass. So they persuaded him to help them lay out the town. Once the survey was made, they cut a street through the center of the town to be, running east to west.
Hutchinson was given the choice of a 42 acre tract on either side of Main Street. He picked the south side. Kelsey took the north side. Both knew a trick or so about speculation and promotion. First they erected their own homes. They used massive, hand squared pine logs. They placed them upright, taking a cue from the western stockades. They were weather-boarded on the inside and clapboarded on the outside. With their homes up, they could boast that they had a town started.
It was then that they began to send circulars and advertisements to the ague-shaken folks of Kansas and adjacent states, as well as bombarding the New England states. They called their town Highlands. The response was enough to make Kelsey and Hutchinson realize they hadn’t been wrong in the gamble.
Within two years more than a dozen families had moved in and built homes. Among the first settlers was T. Baxter White. He came down from Massachusetts. He was Highland’s first postmaster. Judson M. Cobb came with his family from Wisconsin and brought the first Jersey cattle to Highlands.
All these early settlers made the journey to Highlands over the Walhalla road, then the only exit from Highlands. It ran through Horse Cove and Franklin, a full day’s journey. So Kelsey and Hutchinson began a campaign for roads, and they got the folks to chip in and build them themselves.
Meanwhile, Kelsey and Hutchinson realized they had to have a school and a church if the town was to prosper and grown. So they build a schoolhouse in 1878. And while it was under construction, a log cabin known as the “Law House” was used for church, Sunday school, magistrate’s court and school.
A few years after the town was built, Hutchinson moved his family back to Kansas and the town he had built that bore his name. But Kelsey stayed around for quite a number of years and went on to build another town in Western North Carolina – one called Linville.
