MORE FALLEN HEROES

A List Too Long

It was on a warm Sunday afternoon, some 14 plus years ago, on May 21, 2000  when the members of Laurens Leadership dedicated their project to honor those Laurens County law enforcement and public service officers who gave their lives in the performance of their duty to serve and protect our citizens.  The group raised a generous $50,000.00 in donations.  

The Dublin-Laurens community came together, as it always does, to ensure that no one would ever forget their lives they gave for us.

The memorial, designed by local architect David Woodburn, featured four half pyramid, black marble markers surrounding a star in the middle.    With the recent improvements to the area of the Bicentennial Plaza, the marker was removed with the plans to place it in a more suitable place, complete with a flag pole and appropriate appurtenances. After much study, the decision was made to permanently place the enhanced memorial between the Bicentennial Clock and the Railroad Park.

Now comes the part of this story that no one wants to talk about and that subject is new names.  Thankfully, no one has lost their lives since the first unveiling of the monument.

Through the efforts of the Laurens County Historical Society, more names can now be honored and added to the list of names of the fallen law enforcement and public safety officers of Laurens County.

As you may remember, the original marker contained the names of Laurens County Deputy Sheriffs, Kyle Dinkheller, Kip Brown and Wesley Stubbs, the latter of whom was killed in a car crash.  Stubbs, as he left the city limits, surrendered his title as Police Chief of Dublin and by agreement became a Laurens County Deputy Sheriff.    Three city policemen, John J. Webb of Dudley, Joseph E. Fennell and John Faircloth, both of Cadwell,  were all killed in the line of duty.  Danny Badgett, an EMT, lost his life while traveling to the scene of a deadly tornado which struck just across the county line.  Constable W.F. Pierce, at the time, thought to have been the first Laurens County law enforcement officer to have lost his life in the performance of his duty in 1904.  County Policeman W.E. Hathaway was killed in a liquor raid in East Dublin on Christmas Eve, 1919.  State Trooper, John D. Morris, a Dublin native, was killed while traveling to the scene of an accident. County Work Camp Warden John Coleman, who was killed in an accident,  rounded out the original eleven  honorees.

George Crawford was a law man.  He was a son of a lawman.  His daddy, a county sheriff, was slain while attempting to apprehend a prisoner.  Before this day, May 21, 1921,  was over, George too would take his last breath in the performance of his duty.

Laurens County's commissioners hired their own policeman to enforce the state law against moonshining.  Sometimes these officers conducted raids in conjunction with state and federal officers.  This time, county policeman George Crawford and his deputy, E.M. Osborn, set off to look for a still, which they believed was operated by one Math Holsey or his daddy, ol' man Green Holsey, way down in the lower extremities of Burch's District.

Ol' man Holsey burst into the breeze way brandishing a shotgun.  Crawford instinctively wrestled him to the ground and took his gun.  Osborn, out of the corner of his best eye, noticed the senior Holsey reaching behind  a crookedly hung picture frame and pull out an object. At first, he did know exactly what the old man had in his hand.  He was about to found out soon, frighteningly soon.

Crawford and Holsey fiercely fought for control of the weapon.  Deputy Osborn ran around to the other side of the scrum and beckoned to George, "What's he got George?"  Crawford screamed out, "He's got a gun!"

The officers and the occupants of the house continued to struggle.   A shot struck Crawford. "George was still breathing, but he never spoke and he died in two or three minutes," Deputy Osborn recalled.  

Crawford, described as a fearless officer,  had been a Laurens County policeman for two years.   This acclamation was attested to by the fact that during the entire clash with Green Holsey that he did not draw his gun, not once.  When the morticians were preparing his body for the funeral, they found Crawford's leather billy still secured in his pocket.

George Crawford was known to have been a policeman who fervently sought out makers of illegal moonshine.  It cost him his life and the eternal misery of his widow, his eight children and a host of friends.  But, no murder of a law enforcement officer would stop the fight to end crimes, whenever and wherever they occur.  The county commissioners recognized the magnitude of the moonshine problem.  So, they appointed not one, but two,  officers to carry on the battle.  Within two weeks of George Crawford's tragic death in the performance of his duty, Judson L. Jackson and J.K. Rowland stepped in and picked up the torch of justice to carry on the fight the rid the county of the evil demon rum.

The saddest day of the year 1888 came on a Monday, November 5.  On the Sabbath evening the night before, for some unknown reason, W.M. Scarborough, in a stuporous state took offense to his arrest by Dublin Town Marshal N.K. Watson.  As Marshal Watson pronounced that Scarborough was to submit to arrest for being drunk and disorderly, Scarborough plunged a dagger into Watson's neck, severing his jugular vein, spewing blood everywhere.  For five agonizing minutes, the city marshal lay dying.  It was the first time in the recorded history of our county that a public safety officer was killed in the line of duty.  Nearly two years later, Scarborough was exonerated by a jury of his peers.

George Martin, a convict guard at the Laurens County Prisoner of Work Farm, died an accidental death while in the performance of his duties on March 14, 1922.  Martin was attempting to clean an old pistol to be used in his duty as a guard.  After attempting several times to make the gun work, Martin handed the bothersome pistol over to Dewey Bedingfield, brother of County Warden, George W. Bedingfield.  Bedingfield, while tinkering with the pistol, accidentally caused the gun to fire.  A sole mortal bullet struck Martin in the abdomen, severely damaging his intestines and his kidney.  Despite all efforts to save the guard, Martin died in a local hospital a few hours later.

As we re-dedicate the Law Enforcement and Public Safety Officers' Memorial at the gateway to downtown Dublin, let us all hope and pray that never again shall any more names shall ever be added to the list, a list too long.

CLIPPINGS FROM OUR SCRAPBOOKS

Saving Our Past One Piece at a Time

Scrapbooks have been around for just a little more than two hundred years.  President Thomas Jefferson was one of the more notable early scrap bookers.  Jefferson clipped newspaper articles pertaining to his presidency for future compilation into a book.  Today, scrap booking is undergoing a revival.  It has become an art.  Entire stores are devoted to its most passionate participants.  The greatest compliment I receive from my readers is that they “cut my column out of the paper and saved it.”  No other blessing justifies the fruits of my passion for the past.  Let’s take a look at some pieces of scrap paper assembled by a foresighted ladies, who clipped previous pieces of our past so that we can remember them today.

Corporal punishment, brutally severe by today’s standards, was the order of the day in the early years of Laurens County.  In1812 a cattle thief was found guilty by a Laurens County judge.  The judge ordered  the convicted man be taken immediately to the public square and that his shirt be stripped off his back and his hands tied to a tree.  Thereupon the officer of the court administered thirty-nine lashes across his bare back.   The process was to be repeated the following day and the day after that.  After the third round of lashings, the court ordered that the thief be branded, much like the cattle he stole, with the letter “R” on his shoulder.  There was a way out.  The defendant could escape the lashings and the branding  if he paid the court costs, the sheriff’s fee and the charges of those who popped the whip and pressed the branding iron against his naked, bruised and slashed back.  Though “cruel and unusual” punishment was banned by both the Federal and Georgia constitutions, the practice of lashing wasn’t terminated until years later.

In order to protect escapes between lashings and other punishments, the Inferior Court of Laurens County ordered improvements to the jail in 1832.  The justices ordered that a ditch, five feet deep, be constructed around the perimeter of the jail.  The ditch would be of sufficient width to hold a vertical line of one-foot-thick timbers, which were to protrude from the ground to a height of three feet along the exterior walls.  The interior walls, also to be made of the finest heart pine timbers, were constructed of timbers laid in  horizontal positions to a height of one foot above the surface, to prevent tunneling by those who feared the whip.

In one of the most unusual cases of grand theft ever reported in Laurens County was the actual theft of a church. No, I did not say a theft of something in the church. I said the entire church building.  On September 12, 1952, the Deacons of Ebenezer Baptist Church appeared before Justice of the Peace Hill G. Thomas to swear out a warrant for the thief, or should I say the alleged thief, whom they accused of stealing their church building.  Deacon Ivey Stanley testified that when he was ill during the month of August when he abandoned his work on repairing the church.  Upon his return to the job, he found, much to his dismay, that the church building was gone.  Stanley formed his own one member posse and scoured the countryside for the missed church.  He found the transformed structure in the southern part of the county.   After an intense interrogation, the deacon found that Belle Coley sold the building to a Jab Haynes.  Haynes then dismantled the structure, moved the materials to a remote location and assembled them into his personal residence.  The duo was convicted of the theft and receiving stolen goods respectively.

In the days before our country became cognizant of our homeland security, airplane hijacks were fairly common events, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  A Delta Airlines Super DC-9, carrying a crew of five and seventy-seven paying passengers, was headed to Savannah.  The flight, which originated out of Chicago, was about halfway from the Atlanta airport and its destination when an armed male passenger in the rear seat informed a stewardess that he was armed and wanted to go to Havana, Cuba.  At the time the plane was flying in a southeasterly direction directly above Laurens County.  The pilot of Flight 435 radioed F.A.A. officials and reported that the plane was being hijacked.  He yielded to the hijacker, who was carrying a bomb, and turned the plane in a southerly direction toward Havana, where the aircraft  landed at 10:34 p.m., some seven hours after it took off from Chicago.  The hijacking, which occurred on August 20, 1970, was the first of four hijacking of American planes in a five-day period.

It was a hot Sunday in 1950 when a Cuban army plane was forced to land at the Laurens County Airport.  For three days and over the July 4th holiday, the Cubans endured the hot heat of Georgia in July and enjoyed the warm hospitality of Dubliners while their plane was being repaired.  In his haste to leave Dublin and return to Cuba, Dr. Sanchez Arranga, the country’s Minister of Education, left a thousand dollars in cash in American money and considerably more in Cuban currency, along with his passport in his room at the Fred Robert’s Hotel.    Alberta Quilchey was cleaning Dr. Sanchez’s recently vacated room when she found the minister’s valuables.  She sprightly ran downstairs and reported her find to the hotel manager.  The astounded manager, recognizing the urgency of the situation, jumped in his car and dashed to the airport, just in time to present the grateful leader of a group of Cubans who were returning from a vacation in the North Carolina mountains.

Some hotel guests in Dublin didn’t receive such royal treatment.  Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey was the antithesis of ostentatiousness.  He was a plainly dressed man and looked like any other gentleman traveler of his day.  Governor Dorsey was due in Dublin on the day after Christmas in 1919.  The governor was in town at the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to address the county’s businessmen on his plan for the Georgia Cotton Bank.  When the governor arrived at the depot on South Jefferson Street, he noticed the large crowd gathering on the piazza of the New Dublin Hotel anxiously awaiting his arrival.  He stepped from the rear of the train and decided to walk the short distance up the street to the hotel at the end of the block.  Hotel manager Stubbs Hooks noticed the visitor coming up the street.  The thought that he might be the eagerly awaited dignitary never crossed his mind. He expected only an exalted entourage would be accompanying the governor of Georgia.    In a matter of respect to the guest he told the man that he better go ahead and eat because a large banquet was about to take place.  The governor, not wanting to embarrass Hooks, told the anxious manager that he would wait and eat with everyone else.  As the governor began to mill around in the crowd, someone approached Hooks and informed him that the man he had just talked to was the man the reception committee had been waiting on.  Stunned and stymied, Hooks recovered from his blunder and greeted the governor in the appropriate manner, all the time thinking to himself, “how could I be so stupid.”