ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 14, 1997 TAG: 9703140008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
THE WEATHER IN Carroll County was cold and muddy on March 14, 1912. Spring was coming, as it often does, grudgingly to the mountains of Southwest Virginia.
And in the courthouse at Hillsville, violence would erupt that dark morning - violence of a kind that has no equal in Virginia history or perhaps in the history of the entire country.
For on that gloomy morning 85 years ago today, guns snapped in the small courtroom and rim fire made red flashes in gunsmoke. Five people died - including the judge - and a legend was born that has tantalized the people of Carroll County and others in these parts ever since.
A legend born in the smoke of guns.
It has been called the "Hillsville Tragedy," and it has all of the elements to qualify it for the Greek definition of tragedy - the fall of persons in high places, including most of the people responsible for law and order in the county.
At 7:30 tonight, the Carroll County Historical Society will hold a memorial service for the victims of that terrible day. The service will be in the same courtroom - although greatly changed - that saw the events of March 1912. Remodeling has covered the bullet holes.
This is a memorial service only, but the legend born 85 years ago won't let it go at that.
The tragedy "has a life of its own," said Gary Marshall, who is chairman of the memorial observance.
Although the society never discussed a re-enactment of March 14, 1912, word got out on the street that gunfire - from blank cartridges, ideally - would come again to the courthouse.
But Marshall insisted there would be no shootout.
It will be strictly a memorial service.
"That's all we ever called it," he said.
It began like this|
The reason for the sudden, incredible gunfire was Floyd Allen, a handsome man with a mustache, who didn't get along with the courthouse crowd in Hillsville. He looks back at us through the years in a photograph in which he eerily resembles a mustached Burt Lancaster, perhaps portraying a country lawyer.
In the spring of 1911, two of Floyd Allen's nephews - Wesley and Sidna Edwards - had been involved in a fight outside a church in the Fancy Gap section of Carroll County and charged with disturbing public worship. The minister was an Allen brother.
It is said that Floyd Allen told his nephews to slip over the border to North Carolina, to let things cool off. They did that. But two deputies from Carroll County crossed the state line - without, the Allens said, an extradition order.
The deputies tied the young men up and were bringing them back to Hillsville. The deputies, some said by design to taunt Floyd, took the road through Fancy Gap that would take them by Floyd's home and a store run by Sidna Allen, Floyd's brother.
Floyd - who was said by some to have had a reputation as a lawman himself and was called by one admirer "The Buffalo Bill of Carroll County" - didn't like what he saw when the wagon approached.
Floyd took offense at the way the boys were tied up and lying in the bed of the wagon. He asked the deputies to untie the boys. One of the deputies drew a gun. Floyd broke it against a rock.
The tale of the shootout at the courthouse is one often twisted by believers on both sides. An anti-Allen story at the time, according to Sidna Allen, was that Floyd struck Deputy Pink Samuels "and left him for dead by the side of the road."
But in his memoirs, Sidna said Pink Samuels was well enough to join the other deputy in abandoning the boys in front of Sidna's store once they were untied.
It is certain that Floyd Allen was not charged with attempted murder or with assault, but only with "illegal rescue of prisoners." The Allens said that Floyd didn't want to take the boys away from the deputies - objecting only to the way they were trussed up. It is said that Floyd later brought the boys to the county seat himself.
It is also certain that the reputations of both Floyd and Sidna Allen were not without blemish.
Floyd Allen had been involved in a number of shootings - including one in which he wounded his brother Jasper.
Sidna Allen had been charged with counterfeiting. In his memoirs, he said he had been with a business associate, who was charged with counterfeiting coins, during a visit to Winston-Salem.
Just because he was with the man, Sidna said, "I was charged with the same offense, although I knew nothing of the matter."
Death on a dreary morning|
Floyd went to trial on March 13, but the jury, unable to reach a verdict, was put up at the hotel. That night he stayed with Sidna Allen - his home being farther from Hillsville than Sidna's.
Judge Thornton Massie, perhaps sensing trouble when the jury came back the next morning, had decided to open court early. Or possibly he wanted to avoid a crowd. If that was his reason, the move was in vain. The courthouse was full early.
In the crowd were Allen relatives besides Sidna - including Claude, Floyd's son.
The jury said one year in prison for Floyd and the ancient dignity of the law seemed to be working in Carroll County. The judge agreed to study a defense motion for a new trial, but he said he couldn't grant bond in the meantime. He told Sheriff Lewis Webb to take Floyd to jail. The sheriff moved forward.
Although the Allens always denied it, there is much evidence that Floyd said, "Gentlemen, I ain't a-goin'" just before hell broke loose in Hillsville.
A witness later would say the gunfire "sounded like the snapping of mountain laurel." Sidna described an inferno-like scene in which flashes from the guns sliced through the smoke and the March gloom "as lightning illuminates cloud banks at night."
The Allens and their kin were firing. The prosecutor, the clerk and sheriff were firing.
When it was over, Judge Massie was dead, the lint flying from his coat padding as he was hit. The sheriff was dead. Commonwealth's Attorney William M. Foster was dead. Clerk Dexter Goad was wounded but survived.
The Allens always claimed that the courthouse crowd had decided to assassinate Floyd that day. Indeed, it was not usual for officers of the court - with the exception of the sheriff - to come armed into the courtroom.
Whether usual or not, the Allen clan came armed also.
Also hit in the gunplay was a juror, August Fowler. Nancy Ayers, 19, described variously in news accounts as a bystander or maybe a witness who was not called in the trial, was hit in the back. They were dead within 48 hours.
The aftermath|
Floyd Allen himself was wounded seriously and when his relatives tried to get him on a horse, they found he couldn't ride. They took him to a room in the hotel. Sidna Edwards also stayed in Hillsville, hid out for a while and then surrendered.
Sidna, Claude and Friel Allen and Wesley Edwards rode off down the dark mountain trails - soon to be pursued by detectives of Roanoke's Baldwin-Felts Agency brought to Hillsville.
A posse rode the spring trails of the Blue Ridge and only Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards escaped. After a trial on May 1 in Wytheville, Floyd and Claude Allen were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Friel Allen and Sidna Edwards were found guilty of second-degree murder late in the summer. Allen got 18 years and Edwards 15. His uncle Sidna claimed Edwards didn't fire a shot.
But it was the father and son whose legends were embellished. Petitions signed by thousands of Virginians were sent to Gov. William E. Mann, asking for commutation of the sentences.
Claude became a folk hero, a young man with a sweetheart named Nellie Wissler, who tried to get the governor to let her man live. A newspaper story said Nellie would tell Claude she would "meet him in eternity."
A group of Southwest Virginia women would sponsor a gold medal for Claude for defending his father - which is what he claimed he was doing. A ballad would be written about him.
Floyd, 56, and Claude, 23, were executed on March 28, 1913, and brought back to the Blue Ridge country for burial just as another spring was beginning. An inscription on their gravestone charged they had been "judiciously murdered by the governor of Virginia."
An epitaph|
And then, although the legend didn't need further adornment, it was decorated anew.
Although it would seem that Nellie's poignant promise to meet her sweetheart in heaven was just about as melodramatic as the thing could get, another mountain beauty entered the story.
Her name was Maude Iroler and she was the sweetheart of the yet-uncaptured Wesley Edwards.
Edwards and Sidna Allen had left the mountains far behind and were working in Des Moines, Iowa, under assumed names.
But Maude knew where they were and she went west to meet her sweetheart and marry him - the trouble for Edwards and Allen being that the detectives either came with her or followed her.
Maude arrived in Des Moines on Sept. 4, 1913, and her fiancee and uncle were arrested.
Although Sidna would say in his memoirs that Maude betrayed him and Wesley for the reward, she would say that she followed her heart to Des Moines and the detectives followed her.
Sidna was given 35 years and Wesley was given 27 years. They were pardoned in the mid-1920s by Gov. Harry F. Byrd Sr.
There are still dark memories about that day 85 years ago, but time has clothed the tragedy at Hillsville in the softer, more colorful tones that legend likes.
But there are reminders that are still sharp. Among them is the Victorian house on U.S. 52 south of Hillsville at Fancy Gap that Sidna Allen built for his new bride just after the turn of the century.
Sidna described the house proudly in his memoirs; including its oak and white maple floors and the slate roof. It cost $13,000 and was a mansion in its time.
Now, said Gary Marshall of the county historical society, it is dying by the side of the road.
It is "in a state of sad repair," Marshall said. And nobody lives in the house Floyd and Sidna Allen left on a solemn, wet morning in March 85 years ago on their way to a dubious immortality.
LENGTH: Long : 205 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Accidentally or otherwise, Maude Iroller was the oneby CNBwho led detectives to shootout fugitives in Iowa. 2. Floyd Allen
reaches for his pistol in Glendon Boyd's version of the "Hillsville
Tragedy" carved in wood. 3. Floyd Allen didn't get along very well
with the courthouse crowd in Hillsville. 4. Sidna Allen said the
courtroom gunfight exploded "as lightning illuminates cloud banks at
night." 5. Wesley Edwards was one of the brawlers whose trial led to
the Hillisville shootout. 6. The Des Moines, Iowa, house (above,
right) where Wesley Edwards and Sidna Allen were captured in 1913
after detectives followed Maude Iroller on her visit to Edwards, her
fiancee. 7. Carvings by Glendon Boyd depict the scene inside the
Carroll County Courthouse in 1912 when th shootout took place. 8.
Members of Carroll County's Allen clan (above, standing in rear of
vehicle) were captured and held by Baldwin-Felts detectives from
Roanoke.