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Dead, Dead, Dead
Huntsville, Tennessee — June 12, 1889
The cry split the night like a blade through bone.
“Don’t let ‘em live a minute longer!”
Some sounds, once heard, never fully leave you. They take up residence somewhere behind the sternum, in the dark little room where all the worst things live. The men standing in that jail yard in Huntsville, Tennessee – nearly one hundred of them, broad-shouldered and mountain-hardened, their faces bare and unashamed in the glow of the summer moon – they would carry that sound the rest of their lives. Most of them, you suspect, didn’t mind.
What happened that night was not justice. But it wore justice’s clothes. And in Scott County in the summer of 1889, nobody much felt like checking the fit. What happened was the first documented lynching in this Appalachian community’s history.
***
This is a ghost story, but the ghosts are facts. It begins – as so many of the worst things do – on a moonless night, on a stretch of lonely Cumberland Plateau land near a place called Bull Creek.
Wednesday, June 5, 1889. Just past midnight.
The mountains of the northern plateau had a way of keeping secrets – just as they were harboring the secret of what had happened to the little orphan girl, Angeline Moore, near Chimney Rocks above the Big South Fork River nearly two decades earlier. Hollers swallowed sounds whole. Darkness came down thick as wool off the ridges, the kind of dark that made a man feel unobserved, untethered, free from the usual consequences of being human.
Elias Reynolds knew this dark. He’d lived in it long enough to stop being afraid of it. Maybe that was the problem.
Reynolds was forty-five years old, rawboned and deliberate, the kind of man that local newspapers would later call a well-known hard case – and mean it as a statement of fact, not metaphor. His nephew, Thomas Lloyd – “Jeff” to those who knew him – was only twenty, but he’d already started accumulating the same reputation. Two men made from the same bad clay, you might say.
They had convinced themselves that the Reverend Thomas Harness had money. Perhaps they’d heard something. Perhaps they’d told themselves a story that grew more convincing the more they repeated it. Desperate men are very good at that -- at building elaborate architecture from desire and wishful thinking, at talking themselves into doorways they ought to walk past.
The preacher wasn’t home that Wednesday night. He was away on business, which was the first of the night’s cruel ironies. Because whatever happened next, Harness wouldn’t be there to see it, and wouldn’t stop being haunted by the not-seeing for the rest of his life.
Inside the modest cabin were two people. Talitha Harness was fifty-eight years old, the reverend’s wife, a woman who had spent decades building a life in these hills. And Peter. Eighteen-year-old Peter, the youngest son, who carried his years on his body but not behind his eyes – a boy in a man’s frame, sweet-natured and without guile, with the mind of a child.
Reynolds and Lloyd knocked first.
That detail didn’t escape the press when the details of what happened were written up in smoke-filled newsrooms in cities like Knoxville and Chattanooga. They knocked. There was still, in that moment, some small membrane of civilization between what they were and what they were about to become. Talitha may have stood on the other side of that door wondering who would call at this hour, her hand on the latch, her heart doing that small, instinctive thing that hearts do when something is wrong, when the air itself has changed temperature.
Then they kicked the door in.
They demanded money.
Talitha Harness refused. Maybe she wasn’t about to give in to a pair of ruffians. More likely it was that she just didn’t have any money to give.
One of them – history has never conclusively decided which, and perhaps it doesn’t matter – pulled a pistol and shot her dead.
Peter ran.
He made it out the back door. He ran into that thick mountain darkness, and for a moment you want to believe that he got away, that the story serves into something more heartwarming. But Reynolds and Lloyd gave chase, and the hills have no mercy. They caught him before the dark could swallow him whole.
And they beat him to death with a garden hoe.
They dragged Peter’s body back to the house and dropped it on the floor, as if returning something borrowed. They looted the place, and the newspapers mentioned they found seventy-four dollars. That’s roughly seventeen hundred dollars by today’s reckoning, which was a tidy sum in those parts and in those days. The Reverend Harness had had a little money tucked away, after all. But it was hardly enough for the bloodshed it cost that night.
Then they set it all on fire and walked away into the night as if they’d done no more than blow out a candle.
By the time the sun rose on June 6, the neighbors came and found the ash and the horror. Peter Harness’s legs were still jutting out from the wreckage of the front doorway.
The Knoxville Daily Journal, when it covered the murders, reached for its strongest language and still fell short: the foulest and most unprovoked murder ever perpetrated in Scott County, the newspaper trumpeted.
***
Here is where small-town stories usually end: grief, questions, and a cold case growing colder. It’s how Angeline Moore’s story ended. It’s basically how Dan Pennington’s story ended. Sure, there were suspects named and even an arrest made, but there was never any justice to be had – not the official kind and not the vigilante kind.
But guilt tends to be obvious, and Reynolds and Lloyd, as it turned out, were not particularly good at being invisible.
A telegraph burned up and down the Knoxville & Ohio Railroad. The two men were spotted in a saloon in Jellico – drunk, flush with stolen money, spending it with the unself-conscious recklessness of men who believed themselves to be invisible … or maybe just invincible.
They were neither invisible nor invincible.
Milton Hollingsworth – a former sheriff of Campbell County; a man who had spent years learning to read the particular body language of the guilty – was the one who found them. Young Lloyd reportedly broke down and cried when he was arrested. Maybe he had some understanding, even then, of the machinery he’d set in motion.
The two men were loaded onto a train and sent south to Buckeye – a place now called Pioneer – where Scott County Sheriff Frank Hughett stood waiting with a posse.
Hughett was a practical man. He told his deputies plainly: they would not get the accused killers back to Huntsville alive.
He was only half right.
***
Reynolds and Lloyd made it to the jail and into their cells. Maybe, in those first hours, they breathed something like relief. The bars were between them and an angry public, and the law was between them and the bars. Perhaps that felt like enough distance.
It wasn’t.
On the night of June 12 – exactly one week after the murders – the dark around the old stone jailhouse in Huntsville filled with men.
There were at least a hundred of them. The Daily Journal would describe them as brawny, muscular mountaineers, which was the newspaper’s way of saying that these were not soft men – not men who flinched easily; men built from the same hard mountain stone as the jail itself. They came armed. And they did not bother to cover their faces.
That is, perhaps, even after all the time that has passed, the most chilling detail of all. They didn’t hide. They were not ashamed. A housewife and a mentally handicapped teenager had been brutally murdered and they were going to do something about it. They were, perhaps, proud – certain enough in their cause to stand in the open air and own what they were about to do.
When the jailer refused to hand over the keys, someone produced a sledgehammer.
Six locks stood between the mob and the prisoners.
Six locks.
Six blows from the sledgehammer.
Reynolds and Lloyd were dragged a quarter mile down what is now Baker Highway, the summer night pressing in close around them, the sound of boots on dirt, the breathing of a hundred men who had already made up their minds.
Beneath the limbs of an old oak tree – a tree old enough to have witnessed a great deal of human nature, but if it had formed opinions, it kept them to itself – the two men were made to confess.
Maybe in that moment, the two men felt the same thing Talitha Harness had felt in the split second the gun leveled on her face before one of them pulled the trigger.
They confessed.
And then someone said those words.
“That will do, boys. Don’t let ‘em live a minute longer!”
First one man, then the other, was hoisted up by the neck. They left them there, hanging, for the morning to find. Pinned to the bodies was a note, written in the flat, declarative words of men who had nothing to explain or apologize for:
Any man who sees this and gives it away or meddles in any way shall go the same way or be hanged until he is dead, dead, dead.
***
There was no trial. No testimony. No defense attorney rising to his feet to object to something a prosecutor said, no jury filing in from the side door, no gavel. Elias Reynolds was forty-five years old when he died. Jeff Lloyd was twenty.
The Knoxville newspaper summed up the community’s sentiment with the bluntness of an era that felt no need to soften itself for posterity’s sake: Served them right and relieves the state of a great deal of unnecessary cost.
Talitha and Peter Harness were buried together on a mountain ridge above Bull Creek, looking out over the community they had called home. They lie there still, but the graves are unvisited these days, surrounded by forest that has grown, been cleared by timbermen’s saws, and is growing again. Reverend Harness survived them by four years. The last of the Harness children, Noah, died in Briceville in 1948, carrying the family name to its quiet end.
Reynolds and Lloyd were buried somewhere, but history is not sure exactly where. Lloyd is said to rest somewhere up the river from Huntsville, possibly the old Crowley Cemetery at Winona. If so, no stone marks his grave. The earth there keeps no record and offers no acknowledgement. Just ground, silence, and the long, indifferent years.
***
The oak tree is gone now. The jail still stands, but it no longer holds prisoners. The men of that mob lived out their lives, grew old, were mourned by people who knew them as fathers and neighbors and churchgoers, and they took that midnight summer to the grave with them, tucked behind the sternum in the dark little room.
The lynching of Elias Reynolds and Jeff Lloyd was Scott County’s first. It would not be the last. In all, seven people have met their end this way in these hills – more than any other county in East Tennessee. The machinery, once started, does not easily stop.
What do you do with a story like this? You can’t fix it. You can’t sand the edges off the truth until it’s comfortable to hold. You can only look at it the way you look at a scar – tracing the shape of the old wound, understanding that something happened here, that the skin closed over but the event itself is permanent.
The fire that consumed Talitha and Peter Harness burned out by morning. But the flames of vengeance it ignited smoldered long after – a grim, glowing coal in the history of a place where justice once rode on horseback and arrived wearing a rope.
Somewhere above Bull Creek, on a mountain ridge, two people are buried together.
They had names. They had a home. Someone burned it all to the ground.
The rest is what followed, and the rest is history. Angeline Moore and Dan Pennington had gotten no justice in 1872. But in the summer of 1889, the night had teeth and a score to settle. Everybody knew it, and some of them smiled.
Dead, dead, dead.
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