Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Chester Scott, Part Three: In the Footsteps of the Gunters

             For much of the last few weeks I've been looking into my ancestry on my father’s side.  Learning about the criminal history of my great-great grandfather and it’s various reverberations has been absorbing.  Much too absorbing, really.   But I'm glad to have done it.  As Russell Baker wrote, "“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”  This research has brought that wisdom home to me, but it is time to move on. To try to tie off this strand of the braid and bring this episode to a conclusion that will allow me to reorient myself toward the present, I want to talk about how these inquiries have me thinking differently about one of the last experiences my father and I shared when he was in relatively good health.

            In the two years between getting my driver’s license and leaving for college, there were a few times when I served as my father’s chauffeur when he had professional business out of town.  He was in his mid 40s and experiencing health complications of type 1 diabetes, notably failing eyesight due to retinopathy.   One spring afternoon in 1981 he engaged me to drive him to a meeting in Atlanta at the state Department of Education (he was working on statewide writing assessments).  While he was in the meeting I was free to do as I pleased with the car (within reason).   I drove up and down Peachtree listening to radio stations we couldn’t get in Athens - what a rube!  When I returned at the appointed hour to pick Pop up, he seemed wistful.  He pointed to the building where his meeting had been – severely rectangular, industrial-looking.  “That used to be a hat factory,” he said.  “I worked there when I was a teenager.”   

 

            At the time my sense of my family origins was thin.  What I knew of my father was that he had come of age in a middle class neighborhood around Grant Park, just southeast of downtown.   He had gone to Roosevelt High School.  His father worked for the highway department.  I knew Pop had disappointed his parents by defying everyone's hopes and expectations and not becoming a Presbyterian minister.  His parents had divorced when he was in his twenties (having met them separately and experienced their dispositions, it was practically inconceivable to me that they had ever been married).  I knew that a member of the household when he was a growing up was his grandfather, James McDonald “Mac” Veal, a widower, lackluster businessman, and Pop’s compadre in sidestepping the severe religiosity that ruled the household.  On Sundays they liked to sneak away to the movies in Mac’s Model A.  For this reason Pop had decided to name me after him. I figured there had to be more to that story, but for now it would do. These few details (plus the Rome clock story and the Winfield Scott speculation) were the extent of my knowledge then, so I didn't have much to say in reaction to this remarkable workplace coincidence Pop had reported.  I did think it was cool.  I told Pop I thought it was cool.
 

            Of course what he had noticed that day about his location had resonances to it that I could not have understood then.  I understand them a little better now, thanks to what I've learned about his ancestors in Atlanta. I always knew that Pop and his parents in their little house on Kendrick Avenue were not the first Veals in Grant Park, but I didn't grasp until recently the full extent of my ancestors' presence in that neighborhood.  The extended families that combined in his little nuclear family were the Veals and the Gunters.  From the 1920s through the 1950s Grant Park was dotted with Veals and Gunters, two generations of them, scattered from Hill Street to Glenwood Avenue to Cherokee Place to Kelly Street.  The Veals, Pop's father's people, had come from Rome, starting fresh in the big city after some family shames and failures.  The Gunters, Pop's mother's people, went way back in rural northeast Georgia.  Among my male Gunter ancestors there are plenty of Confederate veterans (very few were slaveholders, but I strongly suspect that was because they couldn’t afford to be, not because of moral objections).  After the war most of the Gunters continued to be what they had always been -  small farmers, mostly in Jackson County, some of them small landowners, the rest sharecroppers.  It was a hard life.  In the early 20th century, my great grandfather, Albert R. Gunter, gave up tenant farming (his last place was in the Bay Creek area of Gwinnett County, near what is today the community of Grayson) and he and his wife Vada moved their five children into Atlanta.  My Grandmother Lucy was their youngest.  Albert Sr. sold fruit from a cart (the 1930 census calls him "a produce peddler") and Vada and the older children got work in various industries.  Albert Jr. was a mechanic. Two daughters worked as packagers at a candy factory: Lorraine, who died at 16 in 1926, and Beatrice,  my father's Aunt Bea, who lived long enough to hold our infant daughters in her lap at the age of 90 in 1999.  Vada, their mother, worked for over 20 years as a machine operator at American Hat Manufacturing at 160 Trinity Avenue.  I suppose that connection was how my father could get some employment there in the summers.

 

            In following the trajectory they had as lower class whites giving up the dead end of tenant farming to take a chance on opportunity in the city, the Gunters had a lot of company.  In her book The Temple Bombing, Melissa Fay Greene devotes a chapter to the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, a young factory worker whose backstory was not unlike that of my Gunter ancestors.  Of the Phagans and their kind, Greene writes that they had been "driven by rural poverty into Atlanta, where urban poverty and cotton mill slums had come as a terrible shock and disappointment.  They endured filthy conditions, enervating labor, subsistence wages for fourteen-hour workdays, and a social standing second to last.  Women and children were forced to work, too.”  The resentments arising from the “antebellum – even colonial – economic and social arrangements” that circumscribed the lives of these transplants transformed the murdered and sexually assaulted Mary Phagan into a full blown symbolic victim (in their eyes) of Yankee exploitation and created hunger for a scapegoat.  One was furnished in the person of the young Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, the manager of the pencil factory where Mary had worked.  He was a suspect in the murder and, for demagogues, the epitome of the “alien” oppressor from the North.  With the prosecution and the jury and the community willing to substitute anti-semitism for their usual racism, Frank was convicted on dubious evidence amid a hysterical atmosphere.  When the outgoing governor recognized the unfairness of the trial and commuted the death sentence, a lynch mob from Cobb County (Phagan’s original home) kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.  That was in 1915.  In the aftermath, quite a few Jewish families left the city.  Others withdrew from public life.  Along with the mass violence committed against the city's black citizens in 1906, the story of Leo Frank is a case from that era that furnishes reason to scoff at the "City to Busy to Hate" moniker that you can still hear some Atlantans flex every now and then.

 


         In the mid 1990s I interviewed Aunt Bea.  By then she was living alone in a little apartment near Lawrenceville, back in Gwinnett County again after 70 years.  Twice-widowed, childless, the last survivor of her generation of Gunters, she had been a heavy smoker (her brand was Bel Airs) who kept mean chihuahuas and sent improvident sums to shady TV preachers and shocked my mother (difficult to do) with her double-entendre laced conversations with her equally ancient boyfriend Gilbert when Mom took them out for fried catfish dinners at Rio Vista on Moreland Avenue
.  However difficult it may have been to keep up with Aunt Bea, Mom found a way - she had been dear to my parents, and Mom doesn’t forget.  When Pop’s mother and father cut him off after he quit seminary, Aunt Bea and her husband K.C. "Kim" Still (a maintenance man at Georgia State University) generously helped keep him afloat while he reoriented his career path  (Pop ultimately reconciled with his parents, who I'm sure were much happier and more pleasant to be around after they split up and stopped being angry that their son wasn't a reverend).  Beyond her long ago kindness to my father, Aunt Bea was a colorful character and I wanted to have some record of her before it was too late.  Her diction alone was worth preserving (Who else did I know who casually used "Sugarfoot" as a term of affection?) and I thought I might catch a detail or two about Georgia politics from the 30s and 40s, maybe a chance encounter with Eugene Talmadge.  But she surprised me by going way, way back.  The Leo Frank case came up, and Aunt Bea began to sing, from memory, “The Ballad of Mary Phagan”, the maudlin propaganda tune made popular by Fiddlin' John Carson around the time of the trial and sung at rallies dedicated to violent retribution for Frank:
 

                         Little Mary Phagan, she went to town one day
                         She went to the pencil fact'ry, to get her little pay
                         She left her home at eleven, when she kissed her mother good-bye
                         Not one time did the po' child think, she was goin' right to die

 

I was astonished that she knew it.  Had she learned it from a record?  But then I did the math.   She must have been six or seven during the trial.  For a moment I was afraid she had been part of those mobs, until she said "I always thought Frank was innocent" (whew!) because "Jews don't get mixed up in that sort of thing" (OK, more stereotyping, but still -  relieved).  She had picked up that song skipping rope as a child.  Everybody knew it.


            The unnerving experience of hearing her sing that song reinforced for me the ways that Aunt Bea and her sisters had been Mary Phagans in their own way - not murder victims, not martyrs to be used in the service of hate, but country girls of very limited means who had experienced the wrenching transition to urban life.  I’m speaking exclusively of the Gunters here.  The Veals struggled economically when they came to Atlanta from Rome, but their immediate forbears were people for whom career ambition was an expectation: the sons became road  engineers and military officers. The Gunters were sharecroppers, peddlers, factory workers. They had little or no schooling.  
They seemed far more susceptible to the gravitational pull of proletarian drudgery and a hand-to-mouth way of life.  
 
  
   And the Gunters were my father’s original connection to the American Hat Manufacturing Company.  In 1981 the old factory building was gone, but the blockish new structure that housed his writing assessment meeting was plenty industrial-looking, and at the same address.  What must he have been thinking in 1981, walking 
in the footsteps of his grandmother, the cotton-picker-turned-machine-operator, while carrying his professor’s briefcase, heavy with its esoteric content?  He probably thought a lot of things.  Maybe the new building's embodiment of his home city’s well-known allergy to historic preservation flittered across his mind, along with the many similarities between a factory and American public schooling.  Maybe he was just remembering what American Hat was like inside on a busy day - I bet it was hot and loud - and if he was thinking that then I expect he was also thinking at least a little about the Gunters and the improbabilities of a life like his emerging out of lives like theirs.  When he was a striving teenager, a top student at Roosevelt High School and winning speech contests at the Biltmore and looking destined for the ministry, his mother’s family must have been absolutely beaming.  This boy had risen up.  He didn't always handle it with poise.  I know that in his early twenties, with the arrogance that comes with a fresh new college education, he grew vocally frustrated at the provincialism of his parents (I've read some letters that make me wince).  But that wasn't his essence.  In time an interpersonal disposition that his future colleagues called "respectful, sincere, and understanding" became his natural manner with others.  In his adulthood I saw those qualities in his unaffected way of interacting with his unsophisticated mother and her sister.  So I don't think revisiting the site of American Hat would have kindled in him any vainglorious notion that his successes were somehow required to validate the lives of the poor side of his family.  But perhaps, with the ghost of his grandmother Vada hovering about, he took a moment to think of himself as part of the posterity of the Gunters (because he was) and maybe he indulged the thought that to go from tenant farming to professorship in two generations was quite a journey. And now he had circled back around. If entering 160 Trinity as an academic felt to him like a glowing strand in the braided cord of humanity that was the Gunters, I hope he went with that feeling, and I hope he was proud.  
           

            As I say, in 1981 I didn’t know nearly as much about his background as I do today, so the possible enhanced meanings of the meeting location were lost on me. And it takes many more years of living than I had then for compression of the distant past and right-now present to really touch the heart.   But the amazing coincidence was interesting enough in itself, so when memory lane continued to beckon and Pop requested a detour, I was happy to play along.  He told me not to get on I-20 east to head back home to Athens.  Instead, I was to take the evocatively named Memorial Drive, a four lane road that runs east from the Capitol to Stone Mountain.  He told me that he wanted to go to a cemetery, East View, to visit the grave of his grandfather, Mac.  The grandfather I am named after.  I was happy to oblige. It is not every day you get to see your own name on a tombstone.  Pop told me he not been there since the day of the funeral, 20 years before.  
 

            It is about five miles on Memorial Drive from the Gold Dome to East View Cemetery. Mac is not alone there.  His wife Belle and his mother-in-law Mina are there, too, as are my father’s maternal grandparents, Albert and Vada Gunter.  In the 40 years since I’ve been there quite a few times, but the spontaneous side trip with my father in 1981 was my first, and what we discovered when we finally found the gravesite we were looking for was unpleasant.  Mac’s wife, Belle, had a tombstone, so we could easily identify the gravel rectangle of Mac's grave, but no marker had ever been installed.  The amiably reflective mood I had observed in Pop at the site of the old hat factory was gone.  Now he was just furious, as angry as I had ever seen him.  He speculated that Mac’s three sons (his father among them) had remained so aggrieved with him over something from the past that they had done the passive-aggressive thing of never ordering a marker.  Whether it was that or mere neglect didn't matter.  This would not stand.  Once we were home in Athens, angry letter exchanges and phone conversations ensued.  I wasn't privy to what was said, but Pop got action.  There’s a tombstone for James M Veal there now, and has been for a long time.  Today I can visit East View and enjoy the macabre experience of kinda sorta looking at my own grave.
 

            That original visit to East View Cemetery with my father is another experience that I recall with new eyes now that I know some more family history. The hidden drama around Mac's absent marker has long eclipsed any interest I might have had in his wife’s story.  To me, up to now Belle hasn’t even ranked as a sideshow. Her marker, the one that has been there all along, features this saccharine inscription:  "A beautiful life filled with love and kindness to all."  Every time I've read that it has made me think, "She sounds like a nice old lady."  I suppose she was, but now I know more.  The next time I visit East View will be my first with knowledge of Belle’s astonishing childhood.  Whatever the nature of the animosity behind the empty gravel pit where Mac's marker should have been, it cannot have been as enthralling as a little girl having a family breakfast with her fugitive father just before they took him off to jail, or seeing him behind bars handing over to her mother the honest pay he earned while on the run from the law.  


But in 1981 Pop and I had no way of knowing all that stuff (Mom is sure that his relatives from Rome kept him in the dark about Chester Scott).  Belle's "nice old lady" epitaph kept it all hidden, as it does to this day.  Like her father’s unmarked grave a continent away, it would prefer that we know nothing at all about the headline-making dramas of her childhood.  


In a graveyard with the bones of so many ancestors around him, Pop might have been anticipating his own appointment with the hereafter.  It was coming soon: he would suffer a debilitating stroke in just a few months and die within three years.  We didn’t know it that day, but this was the right time to revisit these old places.  I just wish he had known more about Belle.  If he had, I feel sure the rage he felt at East View would have been replaced by something like the wonder he felt at the old hat factory. 


Thursday, August 18, 2022

Chester Scott, Part Two: Alive in Bakersfield


     In the first installment of this genealogical saga, I said that upon the release of my great-great-grandfather Chester Scott from prison in 1905, there were no more records of him.  Based on the dearth of documentation, I assumed that he had been rejected by both his family of origin and his wife Mina, and that the unspecified injuries that prompted the commutation of his sentence were severe enough that the rest of his story must have been brief, anonymous, and bleak: "My intuition tells me that he didn't live long after 1905, that he died obscurely and his remains are in a potter's field somewhere." 

 

     It turns out he lived another 45 years, and his remains are interred in a neatly manicured cemetery in Bakersfield, California.  The grave is not marked, but cemetery records say this is the place.


       The clue that unlocked the rest of the story (and discredited my theory) is the photograph above, a family portrait taken in a Bakersfield front yard in 1941.  I came across it in an attic-stored box of memorabilia that once belonged to my father's mother (she would have been the daughter-in-law of Belle Scott Veal, Chester's daughter).  Some kind relative who knew all the players had written long explanations on the back of who everyone in the photo is and their relationship to each other.  On the front row, far right, that's Chester Scott.  THE Chester Scott, “the notorious train robber whose exploits in criminal annals are known throughout the country" (The Lafayette Advertiser).  Age 73, a widower, living in the home of Arthur Phillips, his eldest stepson (far left, front row), who appears unfazed that he harbors an infamous reprobate under his roof.

 

      So my speculation about Chester's fate turned out to be way wrong.  I suppose I was under the spell of some politically-tinted preconceptions, envisioning Chester crushed in the gears of mass media and economic exploitation and cruel social judgment and a merciless penal system.  


     I guess I got carried away.  


     Here’s my best guess at what actually happened.  By the time the Morrow Brothers had been captured and convicted, it was evident to many that Chester's life sentence for murder had been a miscarriage of justice:  it was Ben Morrow who shot the sheriff. Chester did not shoot the sheriff. He also did not shoot the deputy. Unfortunately, that doesn't scan, so there would be no catchy protest song, nor would there be any FREE CHESTER bumperstickers.  What finally tipped the scales in his favor was having advocates of the right caste. I came across a couple of 1898 reports that his case had become a cause célèbre among society women in Rome.  An especially cringey item from the Chattanooga Times, with accompanying cartoon (see right) said the women of Rome had resolved "to exert themselves to secure Chester Scott's pardon . . . The ladies usually have most excellent intentions, but sometimes they display most miserable judgment."  (When the recaptured Chester was brought through Chattanooga five years earlier, the same newspaper had suggested that he was too good looking to be guilty - there's "judgment" for you).  But the women of Rome were not alone.  Participants in the posse that had pursued him, members of the jury that had convicted him, plus “prominent citizens" of Floyd and Gordon Counties pleaded convincingly on Chester's behalf.  The parole board reduced his sentence from life to 20 years (no pardon - there was still that robbery to answer for).  Of course in pushing for a lighter sentence he had his race going for him.  In Georgia of that era (and really well into our time), the capacity to conjure up advocates as potent as Chester's was limited to white people.  A black counterpart - similarly culpable, similarly subjected to an overly harsh sentence, but without "prominent citizens" to champion his cause - would not have seen the outside of prison again.  If he even made it that far.  Had a black suspect been in Chester’s shoes back in 1892, accused of killing a sheriff, the abortive lynching that the authorities feared for Chester and Ben Morrow had a decent chance of coming to pass after all. In that year, the worst year nationally for lynchings, of 24 reported lynchings in Georgia, 22 were of black men.  

     Chester Scott, of the favored demographic, got a jury trial, then a sentence reduction, and finally - in 1905 - clemency. The official reason he was released early - that he had been badly injured in "service to the state", presumably on some work detail - is quite believable:  the use of convict labor to mine coal in Dade County was so notoriously brutal that the practice was abolished there altogether not long after Chester’s release.  I still do not know the exact nature of his injuries, but apparently they were bad enough to get him sent home to Gordon County but not bad enough to prevent him from courting a widow, Martha Phillips, once he got there.  She was several years older than he was.  Just like Mina, the first Mrs. Scott.


       The status of that relationship when Chester came home is part of the mystery. The 1900 census identifies Mina as married.  Was that still true in 1905? And if it was, how was the supposedly still married Chester Scott able to make time with a widow just one county over from his lawful wife? Significant age difference, catastrophic injury, the ignominy of a two-timing husband - nothing was going to stop Chester and Martha from plighting their damn troth!  Actually, although I have not found anything to confirm that things were legally over between Chester and Mina, there's also nothing to suggest they were still together in any way, legal or otherwise. His total absence from the public record of his wife and children, other than their continued use of his last name, is telling.  The authorities, too, seemed to regard him as eligible.  When Chester and his new girl Martha got around to tying the knot in September of 1906, they did it in Gordon County, where his history and status had to be well known. Could a suspected bigamist have obtained a marriage license this authentic in his home county?



Mina Scott's take on these developments can be inferred from the way her marital status appears on documents for the next few years.  The 1910 census identifies her as a widow.  So does the Rome city directory.  That woman knew how to say, "You're dead to me."  


     When and how had Chester Scott and Martha Phillips met? I believe they had known each other for a long, long time.   She might have first encountered him as a snot-nosed kid in the household of her fiancee. In 1870, the census tells us, Chester was three years old, living in the Gordon County home of his father Thomas J. Scott (57) and his mother Letitia (41).  Chester was the last child of many for old Thomas.  Also living in the household was Samuel Phillips.  He was 21.  That's 18 years older than Chester.  And he wasn't a Scott.  My first surmise was that he was a hired man, or maybe a local kid who had been taken in because his folks had died in the war. But here the notes on the back of the 1941 photograph foil my speculation again:  Arthur Phillips (front left) is identified as the grandson of Thomas J. Scott's wife, "Letitia Lee Anne (Kinnan) Phillips." So Samuel and Chester were half brothers:  Letitia was mother to them both, the older one a son from her first marriage, welcomed into her new husband's household.   


     Some time in the 1870s this Samuel Phillips married Martha Elizabeth Carlile, 10 years his junior, a native of Arkansas.  When Samuel and Martha were courting did she happen to meet his young half-brother Chester?  (I'm imagining a Waltons episode where young Jim-Bob pesters John-Boy and his new girlfriend because he has a secret crush on her).  If they did meet in Georgia, it could only have been briefly: the 1880 census has Samuel and Martha as residents of Excelsior, Arkansas (it seems to have been a kind of Western outpost for the Scotts of Gordon County, Georgia).  Over the next few years they had a lot of kids - Arthur (1884) was the first.  But in 1899 they were back in Georgia. Samuel had TB and had probably come home to die.  His passing left Martha Phillips, then pushing 40, in a real fix: she was a widow with seven children. Fortunately, just a few years later, Chester Scott, her late husband's kid half-brother, became available (and willing) to jump into the breach.   


    The circumstances that gave rise to this 1906 marriage are mighty peculiar. 35 years before, Samuel and Chester had been half-brothers in the same household, one of them a grown man living under his step-father's roof, the other a little boy with train robbery in his future, and somehow each of them wound up married to Martha. That weird family history, that rural Southern setting - much 
too warped for the Waltons, more like a Faulkner novel. One can imagine a gothic coalescence of old debts and dark secrets and unhealthy desire impelling Chester and Martha to the altar like a pair of dissipated Northwest Georgia Compsons.  Were there covert deals?   Had Chester's people finagled his discharge from prison under the condition that he assume responsibility for the widow and her family? Was Martha forced, for the welfare of her children, to enter in to a relationship she found repellent?  Had the Scotts engineered a divorce from Mina? Of course there's also a less scandalous explanation: Chester really was injured, Mina really was through with him, and this union was just a practical arrangement between two desperate people  - Martha needed help and security, Chester needed to be taken in - and old time family loyalties were there to provide the final impetus.  History is full of such marriages. Chester became not just half-uncle but step-father to Martha's children, and before long they were in Arkansas.  Recall that it was here where Chester hid out for several weeks after escaping from the Rome jail 1893. I wonder if that adventure was somehow connected to Samuel and Martha (one newspaper article said that a family network had provided cover for Chester).  When he returned to Arkansas fifteen years later, Martha on his arm, there were no lawmen in hot pursuit.  Chester and his new family made their home at a wide place in the road called Bass Little. The 1910 census has him working as a railway brakeman (background checks must have been a little spotty back then).  In 1920 he was managing a hotel.  It cannot have been much of a hotel, Bass Little being so small.     

      The truly striking thing about Bass Little, the thing that adds to my sense that this whole ancestral muddle was orchestrated by the gods just to jerk me around, is that it is located in Sebastian County, whose county seat is Fort Smith, where much of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit is set.  I know True Grit is a work of fiction.  I know it isn’t real. I know that as an adult its narrator Mattie Ross lives in Yell County, not Sebastian County, and that Chester was a married man by the time he lived in Arkansas.  But consider the flights of fancy my mind went on when I got the news that Chester was in shouting distance of Mattie Ross during the period of her life of which she says


I never had time to get married but it is nobody's business if I am married or not married. I care nothing for what they say. I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him cashier. I never had time to fool with it. A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage, although I will say I could have had two or three untidy old men around here who had their eyes fastened on my bank. No thank you!
 
The idea of my great great grandfather ineptly courting Mattie Ross is just too wonderful not to entertain.  There’s old Chester, trying to summon what’s left of the good looks that charmed the Chattanooga Times and impress her with his train robber bona fides.  Unfortunately,  he only reminds her of Lucky Ned Pepper’s dimwit accomplices.  “Criminal trash!” she thinks, turning her attention to a ledger that doesn’t add up.    

 I need a second to breathe.  

     Back to reality.  In 1928 Martha died.  She had been able to live out her days in Arkansas, and by then she and Chester had completed the job of raising all those kids and sending them out into the world.  Within a few years of her death, Chester had made his last move, to Bakersfield.  Go west, untidy old man.  He spent the last 18 years of his life there, in Arthur's house, where the front yard photo was taken.  Just one year before the photo he had been declared "deceased" on his first wife Mina's death certificate, back in Georgia.  A classic American story - to be alive and well out West, having left your Eastern self for dead. 

      By the way, in my original research I had come across this Chester Scott of Arkansas, with his wife Martha and their many children, but I did not believe he could be the same Chester Scott of Rome, Georgia, husband of Mina, that I had been studying.  No way.  The kid situation didn't add up - he would have to have spent the 1880s and 1890s being in Georgia and Arkansas simultaneously, fathering children at the same time with two different wives.  What I hadn't accounted for was the possibility of the children listed on the Arkansas census actually being his step-children.  I noticed with astonishment that Arkansas Chester was only 13 years older than his "son" Arthur.  That should have tipped me off.  But it is easy enough for the obtuse to attribute such weirdness to a bungling census taker, or to the social peculiarities of the 19th century rural South, and that's what I did.
  
When Chester and Martha married, Arthur Phillips was 21, too old to need a step-father.  And as the eldest son of a dead father with a (half) uncle as his step father, he was kind of an Arkansas Hamlet, with Chester as an ex-con Claudius.  All this makes me wonder how Chester managed to secure 18 years in Arthur's household out there in Bakersfield at the end of his life.  How could Arthur have felt enough of a sense of obligation to Chester to permit that long of a stay?  Of course Martha could have extracted a promise from her son to take care of Chester.  Maybe Arthur was just finishing the job his father Samuel started in Arkansas back in 1893, giving shelter to the fugitive. I don’t even know if Chester was comfortable in Arthur's house, or that he wasn’t deeply resented.  But I hope it was a good set up born out of good motives, that Arthur, grateful to Chester for taking on burdensome roles of care and responsibility that would typically have gone to the eldest child of a widowed mother, didn’t need any convincing to set him up with a roof over his head.  I like a redemption story for Chester: he left prison under the cloud of his criminal past, saw a family he was connected to in need of help, and he helped.  

    In that photograph he doesn't look anything like the way I picture a train robber.  It surprises me.  But the more I have learned of him, the more I believe that in that episode of his life, he probably surprised himself, too.

Monday, August 08, 2022

“Papa’s Got a Heap of Money”: the Ballad of Chester Scott

    
A few nights back my son and I were watching episode one of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary (Now 30 years old! Still classic in some ways, out of step with reality in others).   
We hit pause along the way to chat about things we were noticing. One of those occasions was the factoid that at the war’s beginning, General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers”, was commander of the Union army. I told Ike something I remembered hearing when I was a kid: they used to tell me that on my father’s side we were descended from Winfield Scott

     Talking about this bit of family lore with my son reminded me that I had never investigated it, even though we’ve had access to the information superhighway all this time. I’ve used the internet to explore my ancestry on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side I confirmed the family point of pride that a Veal ancestor installed the clock in Rome, Georgia’s iconic clock tower (J.E. Veal  was the actual timekeeper for five years, too).  But I had never dug in to this Winfield Scott claim before. For one thing, his distinguished appearance aside, Scott may not be the sort of historical figure you want to be associated with - he’s got a lot of innocent blood on his very distinguished hands. Moreover, I was skeptical of the connection: along with a rumor that my father’s people used to own Kennesaw Mountain but sold it for Confederate money, it sounded like a classic case of white southerners fabulizing the war for entertainment and self-affirmation. But now my interest was piqued, and it's true my father’s paternal grandmother was born “Belle Scott” - maybe the link wasn’t completely implausible. So once the Ken Burns episode was over, even though it has been many a year since I would have sincerely flexed a Winfield Scott in my ancestry, I began snooping around to find out for sure whether we are residents of the same family tree.

     What happened next reminds me a little of the end of William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning.” We find young Sarty Snopes running away in the dark of night, fleeing a violent scene he helped to cause. In an irresistible fit of conscience he has just ratted out his arsonist father and perhaps gotten him killed. There’s no way he can go back to his family. Exhausted, confused, wrestling with guilt, he sits and tries to reconcile two images of his father: the heroic Civil War veteran father he’s been taught to revere and the pissant pyro father he’s seen with his own two eyes. But the narrator adds some complicating details: 

 My father, he thought, "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: “He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris' cav'ry! " not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did; for booty--it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own. 

It's like one of those Arrested Development narrator memes: 

     Sarty: My father was a war hero! 
    Narrator: Actually, his father was a no account horse thief. 

In my case: 

     Jim: Chances are I’m a descendant of a noteworthy military leader. 
     Narrator: Actually, he’s a descendant of a two bit train robber. 

     It went like this: I started with the hefty general, but his many offspring presented a tangle of too many paths forward and I was quickly overwhelmed. So I turned to the other end: my great grandmother, Lula Belle Scott Veal (1889-1943), wife of James McDonald Veal (r. - 1877-1960), the great grandfather my parents named me after. Lula Belle Scott was from Rome, Georgia, in Floyd County, one of the three children of Mina Boyd Scott (1860-1940) and Chester Scott (1866 - ?). Perhaps this fellow Chester would provide a link to a more heavyweight Scott, a Scott from the pages of history, a Scott decorated with a lot of medals.  Unfortunately, there are more Chester Scotts in the world than you might imagine (one of them was an amateur radio pioneer in Pennsylvania), making my particular Chester Scott hard to track down. In fact, I am not 100% certain that the Chester Scott I found is my great-great-grandfather. But if he is (you may evaluate the evidence for yourself - it's coming) the first trace of him I found beyond his name and place in the family line was from a report of the Georgia General Assembly, from 1893. A bill was passed for the reimbursement of Jake C. Moore, Sheriff of Floyd County, for expenses incurred in recapturing the fugitive Chester Scott, who had escaped from jail in Rome. 

     That didn’t shock me too much. My first thought was “bootlegger” (I imagine there was a lot of that in hilly Northwest Georgia), and I was still early in my search, not really buying that this Ernest T Bass of a Chester Scott was my ancestor. But I had a new search term to work with. Adding “escape” to Google provided some new surprises: a few short articles from small town newspapers, appearing to be drawn from wire service stories. The first from November 1892, the second from ten months later, and they both indicated that this person I'd been scouting out as a possible forbear of mine had led a life that would make him unlikely to have a stately Uncle Winfield gilding his pedigree:

 McGinnis Is Dead. Rome, Ga., Nov. 29. Sheriff N. H. McGinnis, who was shot last Friday by train robbers at Plainville, died this afternoon. It is feared that a mob of citizens will enter the jail at Calhoun tonight when they learn of the sheriff's death and take out Chester Scott and Ben Morrow and hang them. 

 A dispatch from Rome, Ga., says: Chester Scott, the noted train robber and desperado and convicted of murdering Sheriff McGinnis of Gordon county, along with five other prisoners in the Floyd County jail, escaped Saturday night shortly after 7 o’clock. The escape was most daring. Jailer Copeland was knocked down, his wife and mother were run over and with crowded streets within a few feet all made good their escape. 

    The coup de grace is this story published in the Rome newspaper upon Scott’s recapture:  “IN JAIL AGAIN: Chester Scott Once More in Durance”. The product of a jailhouse interview, it reads like material for a sentimental country ballad, perhaps to be sung by Johnny Cash, about the misadventures of a small time crook. Scott tells of busting out, of making it to Arkansas by a perilous route, of living there for weeks and working at a cotton gin under an assumed name (Charles Halks) before the law caught up with him (“I was weighing some seed and in walked three men and covered me with four Colts pistols”). At the end the reporter describes the wife coming in with the children, a tender kiss through the bars, the wayward husband handing her the wages he made while on the lam. One of the children is quoted as saying, “Papa’s got a heap of money!” What a line! It’s ironic, it’s poignant, it encapsulates the pathos of the situation.  That’s  got to be the title of the ballad.

      Please note:  as these maudlin details of the criminal career of the outlaw Chester Scott kept bubbling up, his hoped-for counterpart -  the Chester Scott of Floyd County who married Mina and fathered Lula Belle and DID NOT rob any trains or kill any sheriffs - was nowhere to be found.   Was he hiding?  Or just non-existent?  I kept looking.   

   As for the Chester Scott I HAD found, his history before and after those eventful months in the early 1890s was hard to uncover, and it is incomplete. Even the story of his short life of crime is fragmented. What I was able to piece together from further newspaper articles is that he had been a sometime participant in a two year crime spree executed by the “Morrow Gang” ("Robberies galore are laid to them", according to one article). Three of the crimes were train robberies – Scott’s previous employment as a railway conductor, the insider knowledge it gave him, apparently made him valuable to the gang for that purpose. After a failed attempt to rob a train at nearby Adairsville, Scott and his accomplices were hiding out at a home in Plainville, between Calhoun and Rome, when a posse led by Gordon County Sheriff A.N. McGinnis banged on the door. Gunfire ensued. A blast from Ben Morrow mortally wounded the sheriff, and Scott was again on the run. It was during this time that one newspaper reported, “Scott’s wife says that she found, a short time ago, her husband’s black mask and the oath, which was written on legal cap and imposed the penalty of death on any member of the gang who betrayed it” (material for the ballad!). Four days after the shootout a posse located Scott, and after a brief standoff he surrendered peaceably.  One article reports that the arresting officers let him have breakfast at home with his wife and kids before they took him in (that's also for the ballad).  There were official fears that Scott and fellow defendant Ben Morrow would be lynched, public outrage over the killing of Sheriff McGinnis being so high, but in the end the mob simmered down. Ultimately, Scott was brought to trial in Rome, convicted (with McGinnis’ widow present) and sentenced to life in prison (he showed "visible signs of emotion" wrote the reporter who covered the sentencing). It was during the time he awaited being sent to the state penitentiary that he and five other prisoners escaped from the local jail.  And for the second time in a year several hundred (it seems) poorly-supervised, heavily-armed men were trooping all over Northwest Georgia on the hunt for Chester Scott. It's kind of a miracle there wasn't more of a bloodbath.

      The newspaper stories I found leave many questions unanswered. What happened to Sheriff McGinnis' family? How did they go on?  How did Chester Scott get mixed up with the Morrow Gang in the first place? Was he in a desperate financial situation? Was he looking for adventure?  Had he been pressured?  All this is shrouded, and I suppose it always will be.  
    
     If the quantity of facts the newspaper coverage provides isn't completely satisfying, it does furnish a rewarding case study for media analysis, especially in how it illustrates the marketability of thrilling crime stories and the ready willingness of content providers to deliver the goods. Some of the articles lean sensationalistic, speculating wildly (and inaccurately, as it turned out) about Scott’s marauding during his time in the run, and using terminology  – “desperado”, “notorious outlaw”, etc.  – that savors of dime novels rather than dispassionate journalism. It doesn’t help that in that era of newspapering, serious news articles sometimes bled almost imperceptibly into pre-FDA patent medicine advertising. One sentence is about a criminal case, the next: 
“Scrofula, whether hereditary or acquired, is thoroughly expelled from the blood by Hood’s Sarsaparilla, the great blood purifier.” In any case, did Chester Scott really commit enough big time public felonies to earn the label “notorious?” It is worth considering that his brief history in that line of work coincides exactly with the heyday of Butch Cassidy and his famous train robbing gang, celebrity outlaws of the day, so perhaps circulation-minded reporters were just going with the flow when they tried to inject a little extra gunpowder into their accounts of the Morrow Gang.  This passage from an Atlanta Constitution story about the McGinnis murder is rather up front (and with a splash of tough guy prose) about the era’s creepy relationship between violent crime and fame-seeking and publicity: “The Morrows, it seems, were ambitious, anxious to surpass the deeds of the James and Dalton gangs, and, like them, their accounts will be closed suddenly. Will Morrow, the one still uncaught in the latest account, has declared that if he were ever brought into jail it would be feet first.” Feet first! Beautiful. “Come and get me, copper! We'll see whose account gets closed!”  Chester Scott, crook though he was, did not seem "ambitious" in that way. He surrendered his weapons and turned himself in, lacking the disposition to pursue life as a b-list Jesse James.  After his one daring escape he didn’t attempt another, disappearing from the headlines forever.  After 1893 he was done furnishing material for Ned Buntline wannabes.   

    He comes up only twice more in what I was able to find, but strictly in reports of legal proceedings. In 1899, with the support of many people, including members of the posse who had cornered the Morrow Gang at Plainville, Scott’s sentence was reduced from life to 20 years because he had never fired on Sheriff McGinnis. Later, in 1905, the state commuted his sentence to time served because he had been seriously injured in “service to the state.” They let him go. 

     And that’s it.  The trickle of information shuts off completely.  How was he hurt?  Was the state just unloading him rather than liberating him? Where did he go when they let him out? Did he try to reunite with his people?  Had his family back home in Gordon County rejected him?  No yellow ribbon around the old oak tree for poor Chester?  Or did they welcome their prodigal son home, but only to the back door and after dark, no fatted calf provided?  When did he die? Where?  How?  There’s no record of any of it.  My intuition tells me he didn't live long after 1905, that he died obscurely and his remains are in a potter’s field somewhere. 

     So what makes me so sure that the Chester Scott who made shocking headlines is the same Chester Scott who married Mina Boyd and fathered my great-grandmother Belle? The newspaper stories, perhaps with good reason, are silent about the name of his wife, protecting her identity even though she's often right  there in the background - finding his mask, visiting him in jail, supporting him in court. Nevertheless, even without that confirmation, the details match up in a convincing way. If the outlaw Chester Scott isn't Mina Scott's husband, where is the law-abiding Chester Scott?  I can’t find him.  All signs point to there being only one man of that name in that time and place.  The Chester Scott who married Mina was born in 1866.  That lines up with the 1893 newspaper stories about the trial, where outlaw Chester Scott is described as being 26.  In the genealogy Chester has three kids; so does the Chester of the newspapers.  We do not have a year of death for the Chester of the genealogy or the Chester listed as "husband" on Mina's death certificate - instead there’s just the opaque word "deceased" - when or how, God only knows;  the Chester who left prison in 1905 seemed to disappear without a trace, too.  

      The concurrence of all these details leads me to a certainty that when my father (b. 1936) was a baby, he was sometimes held by a Grandma Belle who had an ancient memory of kissing her father through the bars of a jail cell.  She might even have been the one who exclaimed, "Papa's got a heap of money!"   

    But in reality it was a heap of trouble, not just for Papa, but for all of them.  He and Mina never reunited. What had brought them together in the first place?  And how does the unusual fact of her being six years older than he was fit in to that unknown story?  Whatever the case, the scanty available material suggests that the years after 1893 were a world of struggle for Chester’s onetime family. The 1900 census identifies Mina as head of household in Rome, renting in a poor neighborhood and working as a dressmaker.  Belle, 11, was in school, but her twin brother Thomas was already working as a delivery boy.  It is difficult to tell what happened to Leila, the older sister, other than that she never married and died at 75 in 1962 as a resident of the state mental hospital in Milledgeville.  One can imagine many possible stories behind that fate, none of them cheerful.  

    Mostly I think of Belle. In that era, in that place, from that background, how limited the options for my great grandmother must have been.  And for someone who came of age as she had, life must have felt perpetually unsafe. But she made her way. Within a few years of that 1900 census, when she was just 16, Belle married James M. Veal and before long they moved to Atlanta. There they raised three boys.  There's a photograph from the early 1990s of me and  my paternal grandfather (Leland - just to my right) and his two older brothers, Joe and Don: the sons of Belle, all very old men by that time. They were not particularly colorful characters, but all solidly successful  - Joe was a career army officer, while Don and Leland were planners in the Georgia highway department. And they were paragons of safe conventionality, no more likely to get themselves arrested than they were to fly to the moon. Belle must have been proud, and relieved. They're all gone now, of course.  Last week, just after I uncovered Chester Scott, I thought of the three of them and I found it surprising that not one of them had ever thought it worth mentioning to me that THEIR GRANDFATHER WAS A TRAIN ROBBER.  Not even in an offhand "Oh, by the way . . . " fashion, the story and its attendant shames being too far in the past now to hurt anybody. But later I wondered if they'd been kept in the dark themselves - maybe they didn't even know. Or, if they did know, a learned habit of keeping the secret meant they would never tell me.  
A conspiracy of silence in Belle's family after Chester went off to the pen is not hard to imagine, or justify.  
To the Scotts and Veals who migrated from Rome to Atlanta, the "desperado Chester Scott" wasn't what he is to me, a source of amusement and fascination.  To them he was a burden. Perhaps the relocation to Atlanta was, in part, a way of escaping a bad family reputation and putting bitter memories of "a pathetic scene at the jail" and all the  rest as far away as possible - up in the hills, back in the past.  And maybe all that Winfield Scott stuff was part of the same collective family effort to change the subject.


MOTHERS!! To know that a single application of the Cuticura Remedies will afford instant relief, permit rest and sleep, and point to a speedy and economical cure of torturing, disfiguring, itching, burning and scaly humors, and not to use them without a moment’s delay is to fail in your duty.  


UPDATE 1:  One week after undertaking this investigation I have located what I believe is conclusive evidence that the Chester Scott who is my great great grandfather is also the Chester Scott who . . . did all those things.  This eureka moment did not result from a new discovery arising from my diligence but because of my noticing something rather obvious I had overlooked before.  An Atlanta Constitution story about the arrest of Chester Scott four days after the shoot-out at Plainville reports that he was apprehended at the home of his father-in-law, who had persuaded him to surrender.  That father-in-law was named John Boyd, and as we all know by now, my great great grandmother was born Mina Boyd.

UPDATE 2:  My mother (this afternoon):  "We almost named you Scott."  

UPDATE 3:  Guess who?