Statesville Record and Landmark from Statesville, North Carolina • 135

Occupies Prominent Position 'v Published in the Heart of the Dairying and Industrial Region of Piedmont North Carolina Statesville Record Landmark Section Statesville Record Landmark 100th Anniversary Edition mR S' T' i fry wjj A fc ft trz 1 '3 WS4 'AW7 DOBBS Built in 1756 on ourth Creek about two miles east of Statesville Dobbs became the most ac tive outpost in this section It was from Dobbs shown here from an early sketch that Daniel Boone was outfitted for his famous trailblazing journey into Kentucky Today Dobbs is a state historical siteand is to be reconstructed on the original footings Tom Du la's Conviction Hanging involved Iredell Tom Dula killed Laura oster With his true love in his arms He has his trial at Wilkesboro But Armfield come Hang your head Tom Dula Oh hang your head and cry You killed poor Laura oster And now you have to die By HOMER KEEVER John Sharpe Iredell County historian of Depression days cites these verses as the first bits of doggeral sung about the Tom Dula trial and hanging They were not the last ew North Carolina folk songs have had more public exposure than the Tom Dula Ballad As late as 1958 the Kingston Trio put a recording of it at the top and kept it there for weeks reviving again the mass of tradition that has gone with the story of trial and hanging since it first took place in 1868 Tom Dula was hanged in Statesville May 1 1868 hanged for the murder of Laura oster on the upper reaches of the Yadkin River in Wilkes County some two years earlier He had been tried in Statesville twice and each time found guilty by an Iredell County jury Those trials and the hanging here have tended to make the story as much of a Statesville story as it is a Wilkes County story Laura oster Soon after Tom Dula returned from the Civil War in 1865 18 year old Laura oster disappeared from her home in western Wilkes County Suspicion fell immediately on Tom Dula known to be her lover and said to have had a good motive for killing her He had contracted a venereal disease and had threatened to get the one who had given it to him When the body was found some weeks later in a shallow grave on an ivy covered ridge Dula disappeared and it was some time before he was found in Tennessee and brought back for trial Just who was involved in tracking him down' and bringing him back is hazy It is one place the legend has grown by leaps and bounds The Nemesis There are stories of Bob Cummings a schoolteacher in love with Laura who persistently sought Dula and brought him back and pushed the trial to its conclusion A good story with but one weakness No Bob Cummings shows up in any of the court records or any other records of the day One of the more lilting lines in the ballads runs been for Grayson a been in and it became a fad to say that Bob Cummings was ac tually Bob Grayson keeping intact the story of an avenging Nemesis That story has a weakness too a different kind of weakness Grayson was a real character He did bring Dula from inside Tennessee to the North Carolina authorities without any extradition papers There is no evidence that he was an avenging lover of Laura oster In fact he was a member of the Tennessee legislature and one trial in Statesville had to be put off because he was involved in the meeting of the Senate He lived at Trade just across the state line from Boone and he did go further down into Tennessee and arrest Dula and brought him back to the sheriff of Wilkes County but that is the extent of his in volvement The ballad is right the legends about Grayson are made of whole cloth Ann Melton Arrested with Dula was another mistress of Mrs Ann Melton If there is one bright spot in the whole sordid story it is that Tom consistently refused to involver her and there is evidence that he was in love with her But many of the public thought she was the real murderer and had stabbed Laura while she was in the arms of Tom She too had a motive Tom Dula had passed 1 1 A tMI I I I 'TOff pu I Ik Tn I Ao "UM 1 1 9M Mi I VW I' i 'DULA'S HANGING Right up until he was hanged according to legend Tom Dula played his fiddle or maybe it was a guitar or perhaps a banjo This drawing by Mrs Hill (Edith) Carter of erguson depicts Dula protesting his innocence on the gallows the disease on to her or two years she was in jail at Statesville John Sharpe says of her Melton created a favorable im pression and made a domestic and disarming picture as she sat knitting by the fireside in the ward situated just back of the three small stores at the corner of Broad and Cooper Streets She was a brunette about 25 years of age with brown eyes and hair becoming short on education but with a The picture of Ann Melton brought out during the trial was hardly as compli mentary The chief witness Pauline or Pearline oster told of covering for Tom arid Ann in a continuing in which husband was too blind to see or too disillusioned to care Much of the circumstantial evidence brought out in the second trial and used as a basis for an appeal centered around getting the whiskey to get Tom drunk enough to up his Ann was far from satisfied that anyone Iredell had as complimentary an opinion of her as John Sharpe recites The court records at Statesville contain an af fadavit ofwhomsheis charged as an accomplice has twice been tried in the county of Iredell that the accusation against said Dula herself has been greatly canvassed in said county and a large number of witnesses for the state have been in attendance at the court for almost two years have talked much with the citizens of said county about the case and she believes that by these means the public mind has been so prejudiced against her that she cannot have a fair and impartial trial in Iredell Her appeal was granted Her trial was shifted back to Wilkesboro and she was soon set free In a few years she died some kind of violent death which is as much a subject of tradition and exag geration as the story of arrest Trial Dula had two of the best lawyers in the state to defend him One was the field who Robert Armfield of Yadkinville who later moved to Statesville and became a Congressman from this district The other was Zebulon Vance governor of North Carolina during the Civil War and again when the Democrats took over in 1876 tied closely to the history of Statesville by his arrest here following capitulation and the break down of the Confederate military forces Their first move was to have the trial moved from Wilkesboro to Statesville Their second move was to separate the trials of Dula and Ann Melton In both of these they were successful They were less successful with an Iredell County jury Dula was found guilty and sentenced to be to the common prison of Iredell County and there remain in close custody until riday the ninth day of November 1866 upon which day between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm he be take to the place of public execution and that he there be hung by the neck until he be Dula was not hanged on Nov 9 1866 Vance was successful in getting an ap peal and from the appeal a new trial The judge had let in evidence that when an old washerwoman the last to see Laura oster alive said that Laura told her that she was going to meet Tom Dula and be married to him The Supreme Court said that was hearsay evidence of the rankest kind that the remark was such as almost any young girl would make to some prying old woman answer may have been true or it may have been false After that first trial the case was put off by one means or another until January 1868 when Gov Jonathan Worth appointed a special judge to hold a court of and which translated means the thing and get it over (Continued on Page 2) Dobbs Remains Link With rontier By HOMER KEEVER Dobbs has been for the past 200 years or more the symbol of Iredell frontier period That fort stood on the ridge between the two prongs of ourth Creek about two miles north of where Statesville was later built It was home base for the frontier rangers of the colony of North Carolina during the rench and Indian War from 1756 until 1764 What happened after it was abandoned is hazy There are hints that it was lived in until Revolutionary times It was not used much after that There is one story that it was burned Another story is that its logs were removed to build the McLelland Schoolhouse nearby Indian Troubles The earliest settlers were in southern Iredell in 1749 and they were well settled in central Iredell by 1752 By the summer of 1754 the rench and Indian War had broken out and the North Carolina frontier was involved The closest Indians to the settlers were the Catawbas a Siouan tribe which lived in six villages down the river that bears its name The land here was the hunting grounds The settlers had misunderstandings with them but a 1754 pow wow cleared away some of those misunderstandings and during troubled times ahead the Catawbas were firm allies of the settlers Not too far away were the Cherokees just across the mountains They were a large tribe with potential for trouble At the first they were allies of the English but by 1759 they were attacking the settlements and giving more trouble than anyone else They were the ones who actually attacked Dobbs urther away across the Ohio were the Shawnees or rench Indians They were the allies of the rench when George Washington led Virginia militia against Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio in 1754 and were involved in his defeat at Necessity It was thought the Shawnees were the Indians who raided the frontier of North Carolina that fall and killed 16 settlers in the Broad River country near the present town of Shelby Ten more were missing and supposed to have been taken captive The Catawbas followed the raiders but failed to catch them but it was generally thought that the raid was the work of rench Indians Dobbs and Waddell A new governor had just come to North Carolina Arthur Dobbs from northern Ireland a gentleman with large land grants in western Carolina He hurried a company of rangers to the frontier headed by Hugh Waddell Waddell too was from northern Ireland and had showed up in North Carolina just in time to take a military commission and go with Col James Innes to the aid of George Washington They failed to reach Washington before his surrender and while Innes stayed in Maryland to take command of the troops Waddell came back to take command of the rangers rangers and the Catawba Indians gave the frontier the protection it needed There was no more trouble with the rench Indians even after the defeat of Braddock on his way to Duquesne in 1755 A ort Planned In the summer of 1755 just as the news of defeat was filtering down Dobbs came to the frontier to examine his land grants which lay to the south of Rowan County He went on up to Third Creek to meet Waddell and upon a proper and most central place for the rangers to winter and erect a barrack and afterward if proper there to build a They picked a site on Third Creek that seemed suitable and then Dobbs left Back in Brunswick Dobbs recom mended to the Assembly that it provide small fort or strong barrack for the lodging of the company and security for the The Assembly responded by voting 1000 pounds proclamation money build a barrack or fort on the Western A ort Built The next year the fort was built presumably under the direction of Hugh Waddell It was not easily built Dobbs noted that labor was dear and laborers scarce at any price By December it had been finished and rancis Brown and Richard Caswell as commissioners had visited it and reported their findings to the Assembly They did not find it at the Third Creek site picked by Dobbs Instead it was scituated in the ork of ourth Creek a branch of the Yadkin It was built on land owned by John Edwards a land speculator from eastern North Carolina and it had already been named Dobbs after the governor who had planned it It was described as a building with the square fifty three by forty the opposite angles twenty four feet and twenty two In height twenty four and a half feet The thickness of the walls which are made of oak logs regularly diminished from sixteen inches to six It contains three floors and there can be discharged from each floor at one and the same time about one hundred What Was It Like? ew forts have that good a description And yet there are questions about the appearance that have not been satisfactorily answered What were the opposite angles of 24 feet and 22 feet? How were the walls diminished from 16 to six inches? Were they able to find arid use oak logs 53 feet long or even 4 feet long? Or did the usual 18 and 20 foot logs have to be woven together in some way? Such questions need to be answered before a dreamed of restoration can be un dertaken There was a plan attached to the report to the Assembly It has been lost Search has been made through North Carolina records and even through the English records in London but no plan has been found That plan if ever found might answer some of questions but the chances are all too likely that it has been lost forever In 1914 Leonard White a Statesville native studying architecture drew a scaled sketch of his concept for an article to be published in the DAR magazine or years that sketch has been a kind of semi official picture and has found its way into our school textbooks That drawing leaves most of the questions raised by the commissioners report unanswered This is especially true of what the opposite angles were A more recent study made by Jerry Cashion a Statesville native working for the State Department of Archives and History makes a strong case for the idea that at that time could have meant only Devauban angles so popular in fortification at that time He also in sists that Leonard idea of a block house building is wrong because that kind of fortification had not yet developed on the American frontier Recent archeological excavations made at the site have revealed a cellar and a powder magazine that would have fit well under one end of a 53 by 40 foot building And they have disclosed a well defined dry moat around the building site with comers like for defense Such moats were customary in front of palisades around the forts of the time A closer study of available papers of Arthur Dobbs has revealed that he customarily spoke of the fortification on the frontier as a palisaded fort near the and that his advice on building fortifications was that a palisade be thrown up first and then the fort built It should be no surprise to find a moat around Dobbs even if the commissioners failed to note it The Ranger Company The primary purpose of Dobbs was as a barracks for Hugh ranger company The original strength of that company was to have been 50 men In 1756 Brown and Caswell found in the fort the command of Captain Hugh Waddell 46 effective men and officers well and in good During the last days of the Cherokee wars Dobbs reported a contingent of 30 Troops barracked there were never many Brown and Caswell attached a list of the troops to their report Like the plan of the building that list has been lost Only here and there do we catch hints of who they were Second in command was Andrew Bailey from Donoho in northern Ireland When Waddell was given charge of the North Carolina provincials Bailey was promoted to captain Third in command was Walter Lind say He joined Waddell at the very first as an ensign In 1764 when the fort was abandoned Lindsay was a captain and caretaker of the fort With the wars over Waddell went to the Cape ear for his later activities Bailey went to Georgia Lindsay stayed in Rowan and for years was commander of the Rowan Militia and magistrate for the Dobbs district maybe living in the fort until he joined the Continental Army as a private during the Revolution Two other interesting rangers peep at us from the old records One was Robert Campbell a private who was scalped and wounded during the attack on the fort in 1760 He was paid enough by a grateful Assembly to care for his passage back to Europe Another was Dr John ergus a surgeon of Brunswick who went to the frontier after a confrontation with some of the members of the assembly in Brunswick He was surgeon for Dobbs Duquesne Interlude In 1858 the fort was left in the hands of Jacob ranks as caretaker while the rangers who had been stationed there marched north to Pennsylvania under Captain Bailey There they were joined by Waddell who was bringing other troops from eastern Carolina Hie whole North Carolina contingent under the command of Waddell who had been promoted to colonel became part of the army that took Duquesne When that campaign was over all the troops were brought back to eastern Carolina where they were discharged and mustered out of service To all in tents and purposes Dobbs had been abandoned Cherokee Wars Then trouble really broke out with the Cherokees On their way home from the capture of Duquesne friction developed with the Virginia settlers The Cherokees some horses and the settlers retaliated as if they had been horse thieves killing some of them The incident aggravated to the breaking point troubles that had already been developing In the summer of 1759 several young Cherokee warriors from the village of Settico slipped over the Blue Ridge on a and killed 15 helpless settlers on the Catawba and Yadkin Rivers One of those attacks may have taken place in the very shadows of the fort Troops were again rushed to Dobbs and the western frontier Things went from bad to worse and early in 1760 the whole Cherokee nation swarmed over the Blue Ridge onto the North Carolina frontier Their first move was against Dobbs which they at tacked eb 27 Hugh Waddell was there and directed the defense The Cherokees were beaten back with heavy losses just how heavy is not known since they carried away their dead during the night (Continued on Page 2) ORT DOBBS Ml PLANS OR RESTORATION The Dobbs site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and restoration efforts will be funded through a matching grant from the Department of the Interior National Park Service nil Olr.