The Index-Journal from Greenwood, South Carolina • Page 14

14 A The Index-Journal, Greenwood, S.C., September 11, 1994 Humganasi touTsis thsive for a decade before pjoMbition 'A report made in 1901 by the Georgia Department of Agriculture stated that 500 vineyards covered 5,000 acres in Haralson County that year. Approximately 75 percent of the graped were used to make wine, creating revenues of $100,000 creating revenues of $100,000. Just as there were signs that the industry was taking off and permanent wine colonies were being made, political disaster struck. Prohibition was passed in Georgia in 1907 and the entire wine-making industry became illegal. Just as quickly as they came, the settlers of the communities began to leave.

Most had never overcome the language barrier and had no other way to make a living. Some returned to Pennsylvania, others to area cities to find work. The church in Nitra burned. The fate of Janishek is unknown. The church in Budapest, known as St Joseph's, continued to serve as the area's only Catholic church until 1952.

The property was sold to help pay for new facilities in Carrollton. The church became a hay barn and burned in 1975. The last symbol of the communities, the Nitra priest's house, was sold to the Key family. By the late 1980s, the house needed extensive restoration although its grandeur was still apparent Recently, heirs have completed modern improvements to the house, but have little interest in its historical value or the people who do. bouse was remote and empty have given the owners good reason.

The Catholic cemetery in Budapest, now overgrown and abused, is best located by "out next to the landfill" off Highway 78. It is the only remnant of a community which once had a church and gingerbread cottages. There are three limited historical studies which describe the settlements, all of which can only be found at the public library in Bremen. The first is a history of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Carroll ton by Laurraine Goreau and printed in 1987. The second is an unpublished paper on the history of Tallapoosa by Lee S.

Trimble in 1952. The third is a well-documented paper by Glenda Hannah, "Hungarians and Winemaking in Haralson County," written for a Tift College history class in 1970. It is from these three sources that a sketch of the villages can be drawn. With the advent of the Georgia-Pacific Railroad line, a promoter named Ralph Spencer from Connecticut and northern investors bought 5,000 acres of land around Tallapoosa in 1886. Spencer laid the groundwork for a brief industrial and population boom based on mining.

BREMEN, Ga. (AP) With eastern European names like Budapest, Nitra, and Toka, it is difficult to envision Haralson County. But at the turn of the century, these were a suing of communities between Waco and Tallapoosa. Starting in 1893, they were settled by an estimated 400 hopefal Hungarian and Slovak families who cultivated grapes and made wine. For more than a decade, these people worked diligently, the vineyards were productive, and the supporting industries flourished.

But the 1907 prohibition law in Georgia put a stop to that The history of the communities is so brief and out of place with the rest of the region, that it would not likely survive without Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Cairo 11 ton. The church's origins are traced to this time. The elegant former home of a priest Nitra is the only building left standing in the three communities. Today it is encased in aluminum siding and guarded from trespass by a non-church-af filiated shotgun. The present owners are trying to fend off decades of local curiosity-seekers motivated by history and haunted-house folklore.

Damage by the latter when the These immigrants spoke no English and were Catholic. They probably looked far different from anything seen by the Protestant farmers of Scot, Irish, and German descent in the area, and may have been treated with considerable intolerance by the same. Whether through desire or necessity, they kept to themselves, worshipped together in a former schoolhouse made into a church in Budapest, and worked soil that promoters failed to tell them was poor. Meanwhile, Spencer and Summerlin lost no time in establishing nine new corporations in four years which sold shares to investors. These companies would sell land, build houses, establish wineries and canneries, make baskets, vats and other winemaking necessities.

Grape cuttings were brought from Hungary, a language interpreter for the immigrants was hired, and French wine experts were consulted. Janishek had recruited another 200 families of Slovaks from the coal mines, fulfilling his obligation to Spencer. Although this second group was also from eastern Europe, their culture conflicted with the Hungarians. They established a separate community, Nitra, three miles away. It was here that a house of fine materials and grand proportions was built for the priest This rectory had 13 large rooms on two stories, a cupola, and a large wine cellar.

The mantels were made of cherry and the furnishings elegant. A reserve cellar was dug in the side of the hill where thousands of gallons of wine could be stored. The house overlooked the village where a church, store and about, 60 buildings eventually stood. A smaller Hungarian community was planned called Toka, and a few Nitra residents moved out to it. This area was mainly settled by the Estavanko family, on larger farms.

A report made in 1901 by the Georgia Deparment of Agriculture stated that 500 vineyards covered 5,000 acres in Haralson County that year. Approximately 75 percent of the grapes were used to make wine, A few days after the murder of Dr. Walter Loch and his wife, Mary, last month in Baltimore's well-to-do Guilford neighborhood, the family hired Barnes to get rid of the mess left in the second-floor bedroom where the couple's 30-year-old grandson allegedly took a baseball bat to their frail bodies. "It was just gruesome," said Homer Pennington, one of the homicide detectives on the case. "It was the worst scene I've ever seen in my career." Barnes, his wife and three friends he hired for the job pulled up the blood-spattered wall-to-wall carpeting and the matting underneath.

They dismantled the bed where the Lochs supposedly spent their final minutes, and took the mattress to an incinerator. They disposed of the-bloodstained antique chairs and 0 Wealthy don't live on Cleaning up bloody crime scenes is Baltimore man's business wiped away the fingerprint dust detectives had left After three hours, the crew left the family with terrible memories but fewer tangible reminders of their tragedy. "In speaking with the family I understand he did an excellent job," Pennington said. "It's hard to find somebody that will do something like that" Barnes has cleaned up a dozen other scenes of death the result of either murder, suicide, or natural causes. Cleaning a room can sometimes mean pulling down wallpaper and tearing up carpeting.

He uses a variety of sponges, mops and air fresheners. To get rid of bloodstains, Barnes uses "odor digester," an enzyme that "will eat that blood right up. I tell you that stuff works great," he said. BALTIMORE (AP) After the last fingerprint has been lifted, the last cigarette butt or strand of hair carefully bagged and tagged, it's Ray Barnes' turn. He's not at this Baltimore estate to investigate the bludgeoning deaths of the elderly couple who lived here.

He's here to make it all go away. Barnes saw opportunity in the gruesome murder scenes he came upon as a forensic investigator in the state medical examiner's office. So eight months ago, he and his wife started Crime Scene Clean Up Services, specializing in getting rid of the bloodstained evidence of an increasingly violent society. And business isn' bad. "I don't know too many people who would want to go in and clean up the remains of their loved ones," Barnes said.

"One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata of this society," U.S. Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, uniting in 1972. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) It is a pretty good bet that if OJ. Simpson and Erik and Lyle Menendez are convicted, they will not wind up on Death Row.

It is not a place for the rich. In California, every one of the 384 men and four women awaiting execution as of July 1 was poor enough to qualify for a lawyer at state expense, said Lynn Holton, spokeswoman for the state Judicial Council. Nationwide, no one seems to have made a systematic study of the finances of the executed, or of the 2,700 condemned prisoners. But veteran practitioners and scholars agreed they'd never heard of a wealthy person on Death Row. "I don't know of any affluent people who have been sentenced to death," said Walter Berns, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of the 1978 book "For Capital Punishment" "The death penalty is for poor people," said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and a defense lawyer in capital cases for IS years.

Wealthy people have faced capital charges: Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, young sons of wealthy families and the "thrill killers" convicted of murdering a young boy, were spared the death penalty in 1924 after an epic defense by Clarence Darrow that focused on their mental states. Texas oilman T. Cullen But in a short time many of the corporations which were formed as a result of Spencer's promotions failed. He left leaving an assistant from Whitesburg, William Summerlin, a former wild west show performer, in charge. In 1892, Spencer came back to salvage investments with vineyards.

In order to make it work, he needed laborers who knew something about growing grapes and making wine. He had arranged with the Rev. Francis Janishek, a Catholic priest in the North, to recruit 400 Hungarian families familiar with winemaking. They could purchase 10-acre vineyards in a town platted east of Tallapoosa, eventually known as Budapest. In return Janishek would receive a 30-acre estate, a house, and carriage with two black horses.

death row death in the 1978 rape and murder of a 6-year-old girl, was represented by a lawyer who had never tried a capital case, was paid $13 to $20 an hour and had no investigator or experts. His closing argument was 255 words long. Later, new lawyers, working at their own expense, found that crucial prosecution evidence, a hair on the victim's body, could not be validly compared to Nelson's hair a fact mentioned in an FBI report that had never been disclosed. Nelson was freed after 1 1 years on Death Row. But in California, for example, defense lawyers exaggerate the extent of ineffective representation in death cases, said state Deputy Attorney General Dane Gillette, death-penalty coordinator in San Francisco.

Probably the chief reason rich people aren't sentenced to die, Gillette said, is that "they, for the most part, don't commit these kinds of violent crimes." Maybe so. Capital crimes are mostly street crimes a killing during a robbery or burglary. But some defense lawyers say they've seen wealthy defendants spared despite evidence that would doom a poor person. Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer with the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center for 10 years, described the case of two wealthy sisters charged with killing one sister's spouse. The prosecutor, who sought the death penalty in other cases, asked only for life imprisonment despite considerable evidence, Stevenson said.

"Much of their (district attorneys') support comes from affluent members of the community who want someone who will protect them from the criminal element," Stevenson said. testified for the defense that Jason died from sudden infant death syndrome and exhibited no characteristic signs of methamphetamine poisoning: shaking, agitation or crying. They added that because only a minuscule amount of the drug was in his system .039 nanograms Jason couldn't have died of a drug overdose. But the prosecutor argued that Jason had a high temperature that was characteristic of methamphetamine use but not SIDS. Green added that three days after birth, Jason was hospitalized lor withdrawal of the drug.

Green's superiors are pressing for a conviction, but Green has mixed feelings about trying the case again. "Has she been punished?" Green asked. "Yes, her baby's dead. Maybe that's punishment enough. If our goal was to get the message across of not taking drugs whih breast-feeding, I think we've accomplished that Call News Talk 24 (or Specials from Area Merchants! CwnyUM 4irtry piiUiiM daily InTtuMtx-iturnrt KNOWS KITCHEN CABINETS! Davis, charged with seriously wounding his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her lover and her 12-year-old -daughter in 1976.

Although his Wife and two other eyewitnesses identified Davis as the. gunman, he was acquitted after a defense by prominent lawyer Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, who attacked Mrs. Davis for her drug use and extramarital affairs. Joe Hunt, leader of a group of wealthy youths called the Billionaire Boys Club, convicted in 1987 of murdering a Beverly Hills con man whose body has never been found. A jury rejected a death sentence and chose life without parole for Hunt, who is seeking a new trial.

Like Simpson and the Menendez brothers, those defendants could afford to hire good lawyers. That's the chief explanation offered by defense attorneys and organizations for the absence of the rich on Death Row. "If you have money and can afford adequate counsel, you don't end up on Death Row," said Kica Matos, capital punishment research director for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "Trying capital cases is the legal equivalent of brain surgery," said Bright. In the South, he said, court-appointed death penalty lawyers are paid barely enough to cover costs, are usually inexperienced, and often don't put up much of a fight "I see cases tried with no experts for the defense, no investigator at all, and seldom one who knows how to investigate the life and background of the defendant" Bright said.

One Georgia case he described in a Yale Law Journal article was a striking contrast to the battles over evidence in the Simpson case. Gary X. Nelson, sentenced to "Does that include alcohol, which is a drug? The implications are so great that it's just astounding." Prosecutor Lisa Green disputed such reasoning as absurd. "We nover contended that talcing a glass of wine is equivalent to taking something like crank," Green said. "No woman would be opening herself up to prosecution if she took a couple of aspirins or had a glass of wine." Green contends Henderson, who admits having taken the illegal street drug since she was 15, disregarded at least three warnings from social workers not to breastfeed her baby if she used drugs.

But Henderson said social workers told her to wait at least two days before nursing her son if she used drugs. And just to make ire, she said, she waited three days. "Before, I knew drugs were illegal, but I wasn't out there robbing or stealing. I was staying home and taking care of my kids," Henderson said. She has two other children, ages 2 and 4.

Henderson had been estranged from her mother, who lived across the street. And with no job and little income except her welfare checks, she found motherhood difficult and exhausting. The high she got from methamphetamine seemed to help. "She became so worried that she might fall asleep and she wouldn't be able to take care of her children," Boyle said. "There was nobody there to help her." In the first trial, several doctors Woman charged with lolling son through drug-laced breast milk I Gall Lowe's and ask for Curtis Hodges our kitchen cabinet expert.

Leave your kitchen cabinet plans with us over night. Curtis will have your dream kitchen plans ready the next day Note: Your kitchen should be measured in inches. BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) With the pressures and demands of motherhood pulling at her, it was all Karen Henderson could do to stay awake each day. The 21-year-old woman said she soon found that a snort of methamphetamine, or "crank," every now and then was a cheap, quick way to keep from falling asleep.

Despite the occasional drugs, she breast-fed her infant son whenever she ran out of baby formula. One day last September, Henderson awoke to find her son lying still in his crib, not breathing, his hps blue. Two-month-old Jason died on the way to the hospital, and Henderson was charged with murder for allegedly poisoning her son with drag-laced breast milk. "I don't think it's fair that he's gone," Henderson said during an interview in jail last week. "I don't deserve to be put through this.

I'm the one who took care of him." Last month a iurv deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting her of murder but found her guilty of child endangerment, for which she received six years in prison. Henderson is scheduled to be retried on the murder charge Sept. 19. Defense attorney George Boyle said that if Henderson is convicted, any mother could be charged with murder if she took any type of drug and her baby died. "Does that include aspirin, which is a drug?" Boyle asked.

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