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War Memories Linger in the Laurels
by Bob Burnette
"Thirteen men and boys, suspected of Unionism,
were killed by Confederate soldiers in early 1863.
Graves 8 mi. E." - Historic Marker at Shelton Laurel
As told by Bruce Phillips, Madison County Historian
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Cold Mountain... one thing they did a pretty good job of was showing folks what the war in the mountains was like.
It was most of the men that could fight were gone. There were old men and boys who were left here. The 64th Regiment was mainly made up of people who were not physically equal to those who went to Virginia or Pennsyl-vania. They stayed here.
It was the 64th, or part of the 64th, not all of it, that was responsible for the massacre on Laurel. Of course you can't really blame it on the men. I guess you can't blame a lot of things on anybody in a war. They give credit to General Sherman who said, "War is Hell," and any effort to make anything else of it is futile. And someone else said, "The hotter the war, the sooner peace." But it was their job to patrol these various areas. It's similar to what a Home Guard would do, but they were not as low as a Home Guard.
But when they went up these creeks, like on Laurel, you can imagine what it was like for men who were not well equipped, who did not have adequate clothing, adequate shoes. Some of them didn't have any shoes. And to go up there when the road was the creek in many places. And any time you stuck your nose around the curve there was somebody taking a pot shot at you. That would tend to make you mean.
And so when there was a group of people who came to Marshall from over on Laurel - and I certainly don't blame the people on Laurel - I worked over there for a year, and I found them to be absolutely wonderful people. Many of the people who live over there now are relatives that have descended from these men who were massacred. They have the same names. Shelton, Chandler, Buckner, people like that.
I can remember when people on the farms raised hogs. But when they were little pigs they didn't try to keep them in the pen. They turned them loose like a dog. But in the wintertime, when they got some size on them, they'd put them up in the pen and feed them a little corn for a few days and then butcher them.
Well they sent to Marshall to get some salt. And they were told, according to them, "We're not going to sell salt to you people because you sympathize with the Yankees. We're saving our salt to sell it to good Southern people who know whose side they're on." Well, they came back that night, and broke into every store in Marshall, and most of the houses in Marshall.
They broke into one house that's still there, on Main Street in Marshall. It belonged to the Colonel who was the commander of the 64th Regiment. They didn't know that, of course. And he had kids who were there, and they had, I believe one of them had Scarlet Fever, and two of them had the flu. They were also looking for shoes and blankets and things of that nature. They were scarce. And they took them wherever they found them, including the beds where these kids were. And the three of them died.
They really were not on anybody's side.... Their only goal was to survive the war.
When they broke into these houses, the thing that really got them was breaking into (Colonel) Lawrence Allen's house, where those kids were sick.
...Allen was in Bristol...and he had about half the men over there. And James A. Keith was the Lieutenant Colonel, and he had the rest of them over here. He had them in Asheville. So they came over, and they went out by Jewell Hill, which is now Walnut, and up Shelton Laurel hunting for these people.
When they found one that they thought might have been among the bunch, they just grabbed him. They just grabbed them until they had about fifteen or twenty of them. They told people that they were going to take them to Knoxville for trial...
One of them got away. And they came down the creek before they got to the turnoff to Tennessee, and somehow another one got away. Jumped off a rock cliff into the creek and made away. They camped in a building of some type, probably an old barn there in Shelton Laurel, and the next morning when the time come for breakfast, another one was gone. So the Colonel made a quick decision. He had to go out and find a good deep ditch, except he couldn't find one, except one running alongside…The roads then, if they had been used a lot, they tended to be routed out and had a bank on both sides. But he had them dig as best they could a ditch along one side of the road. Digging would be slow in January, when the temperature was zero. So they didn't get it too deep.
They stood them up along the bank of that ditch they'd dug, and they chose a firing squad. And they shot them. Hauled them into the ditch, covered them up. One of them was a young boy, David Shelton. He was 13 years old. He begged not to be shot. Another one was a fellow named Wood. He was in his 70's. Both of those were probably innocent - one of them too old, the other maybe too young. Some of them were probably guilty.
But anyway, the Shelton boy --- these men who were picked for the firing squad, they really didn't want to shoot them anyway, especially the Shelton boy. He was hit in both arms, but they didn't hit him anywhere that was fatal. He begged them again: "Don't kill me. My father is gone. My brothers are gone. There's nobody left to take care of my mother and my sisters but me." Keith told them, "Get back up on the bank." He told the firing squad, "If he don't fall down there this time, I'm going to put you men over there, and I'm going to pick another firing squad." When they fired that time, they filled him full of holes. He fell in the ditch that time, and they covered him up. But not too deep, because they didn't get the ditch dug deep enough, and then they didn't have enough dirt to cover it up much. And I told you about the hogs running loose. So the hogs uncovered some of it. They'd root down in there, and when they'd find a hand, they'd eat it.
When 1866 came around, they took Keith to Asheville and tried him for murder, mostly because of David Shelton, partly because of old man Woody. But, they tried him for all fourteen. I believe there were fourteen. When you get over there, you can count. There's a block of stone there with their names on it, where they're buried there in a row on the top of the hill. But they started trying him one at a time. That's going to be fourteen murder trials!
And they started with those who were 25 and 20 and 30 - men who probably were guilty. They tried him the first day, and they found him Not Guilty. Of course, you've got to remember that the people in Asheville were Confederate sympathizers anyway. That didn't hurt his chances. They tried him the second day. They'd go all the way through a trial and get a verdict in one day. That's the way people used to do. They didn't take a year trying somebody. Well they tried him the second day and found him Not Guilty again. I think they tried him four days. It could have been three. I don't remember now. But I think it was four. They found him Not Guilty each time. Still, he hadn't been tried for David Shelton or the Woody guy.
So when they came back to his cell to get him on the fifth day, there was a big hole in the wall, and he was gone. Somebody -- who were Confederate sympathizers probably - they had him in the cell close to the ground, and even though the walls were brick, it wouldn't take too much to hook a team of horses to the bars and yank the whole wall out if you had to. So he was gone.
And that was the end of his trial. To my knowledge, he never came back. But when they looked into it long enough, they found that in 1872 he was in the Arkansas State Legislature.
Now Allen, they say he never came back, but he did, because I've got the original copy of a deed. His wife had inherited some land on Gabriel's Creek, and my grandfather bought it. And I've got the original deed, signed by Lawrence Allen and his wife.
For events in the family of the Bruce Phillips himself, click here
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Cold Mountain is a popular movie at the moment, depicting the lives and times of people from the area around Cold Mountain, North Carolina, during the Civil War. Madison County, not far from Cold Mountain, was home to many similar but real events that transpired during the Civil War and have not been forgotten, including the Shelton Laurel Massacre.
In late January, 1863, a detachment of the 64th Regiment of the Confederate Army, much of which was recruited locally set out into Madison County to find anyone who was not a Confederate sympathizer and show them the way they did business. In Shelton Laurel, many citizens did not have a position on the war because they did not have slaves, but they resented the draft and the requisitioning of horses and livestock to support the war. This caused lots of violence against them.
In early February, I went to Shelton Laurel to see the historic marker and grave site, and to visit with an extraordinary lady named Rena Shelton, whose family suffered great tragedy there.
Shelton Laurel is the name of both a valley and the creek that runs through it. It is a landscape with the Blue Ridge Mountains in clear view with many pastures filled with cows and horses in the bottoms.
A hundred and forty-one years ago, the people of Shelton Laurel were not Confederate sympathizers. In fact they wanted no part of either side. The people had to find ways to get food and staples such as salt to cure meat. This led to nighttime robberies and pillaging to survive because the Confederates in Marshall would not sell to anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Southern cause.
The 64th Regiment was based in Marshall and led by Col. Lawrence Allan and Lt. Col. James A. Keith who wanted nothing more than to round up these supposed "Union Sympathizers" and put a stop to the bushwhacking. Their purpose was to make an example of these people to show what happens to people when they would not join the fight against the North.
Today Shelton Laurel has not changed much, except that the fear of war is gone. Trees encapsulate it, giving it a hidden feel that invites exploration. With no stores or any car noise, it is very easy to forget time.
The weather was very wet and rainy as we entered the valley. Where Highway 212 forks east along Shelton Laurel Creek a historic marker reads:
"Thirteen men and boys, suspected of Unionism, were killed by Confederate soldiers in early 1863. Graves 8 mi. E."
After a little over eight miles of winding road we turned left up a very muddy and gravel road toward a white frame house. The house has a quaint feel with two porches to sit and relax on and though it has been there for over a century, it is a very well kept house. Rena Shelton designed most of it herself. She would tell us later that she and her husband cut the boards with a steam-powered saw and they built the additions together.
While waiting for an answer at the door, I notice roads leading in many directions and try to decide which one would lead to the gravesites of the Massacre. The landscape is filled with mountains and the house is surrounded by old barns. At the bottom of the road stands a chimney from a house from long ago. Off the distance cows moo and the rain is beating down on the tin roof.
View toward the graves. The killing was in the valley beyond.
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We have almost given up hope of finding anyone home when a pickup truck turns off the pavement, and a man drives up to check his cows in the pen behind the house. Rena Shelton's son-in-law, Maurice McAllister, assures us that she is indeed at home but is hard of hearing, McAllister led us in as the rain really started coming down.
We waited for Mrs. Shelton on the back porch, and she made quite an entrance. She is full of energy and is very accepting of us. We all gathered around in the kitchen to sit and talk. Although she herself refused to be photographed, her house is filled with pictures of grandchildren, children, and many other members of her extended family. She began to refer to them and to people from over a hundred years ago like they were all still present.
She spoke of being a little girl and listening in as her relatives spoke of past events and really being intrigued by them. She gave us many anecdotes of growing up and of people she was related to, but she often went on too many tangents for us to keep up with, leaping whole centuries in a single bound when the name of a person or place unlocked another memory.
After all the talking and storytelling, we sat down and broke bread with her and her son-in-law as she showed me her pictures. For a woman of her age, it was amazing to see the energy that she had showing me the pictures. We went upstairs and all over the house as she dug through hundreds of pictures and many photo albums.
As we prepared to leave, Rena Shelton's son-in-law McAllister, who knows all Madison County from his years as agricultural extension agent said, "I know families in this county that are just as proud of (being decended from) the ones who killed those men as the people out here are of those who survived."
Mrs. Shelton's house is not even a mile from where 13 of her kinfolk were shot down, and the graves where their neighbors reburied them are still there. We looked out to the horizon as McAllister pointed us in the direction, and it was no more than short walk to where this massacre happened.
As we drove around to the back of the small knoll where the graves are, we found a new house sitting 50 feet from the site. The house was very modernized and we noticed that the owner had two brand new BMWs out in the driveway. This seemed ironic due to the very rustic environment that surrounded us with old barns and roosters crowing of in the distance.
Kin are not forgotten in Shelton Laurel
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As we surveyed the graves and paid a little respect I got the feeling that I am standing on a historic landmark, which will forever be spoken of. Out here in the woods lies a landmark of tragedy of a time when our nation was divided and it is truly amazing. It also made me think of how tragic for this area it must have been to lose these people, some of which were innocent. As we left I really felt humbled to have seen and been a small part of it.
Story Gems from Rena Shelton
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