The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Every foundling town should have a founding father with a name like Springer. Twelve years before Bill Craddock stormed into town with his load of horses, Allen Springer had sprung upon the town to open Lake City’s mercantile store and buy up the land that was to constitute the new Lake City when Oldtown, as the first river port was called, faded away. This road past the Lake City Cemetery, now officially called Lake Street, fronting the Sunk Lands, had been the Main Street of Oldtown, where two Hungarian Jews, Moskovich Morris and Leopold Rich, had opened separate businesses in the pre-Springer era. This was almost a prehistoric era, in the sense that nothing is known about the two Jews, their business, and their later departure; when the remains of Oldtown burned in a fire in 1904, they were already gone. Allen Springer was coterminous with Mark Twain, whom he resembled, at least insofar as his mustache: his manner was quiet and reserved. He lived in his native Indiana until the Civil War, when, as a Union foot soldier, he fought at Shiloh and Vicksburg, marched to the sea with Sherman, and came to know and love and remember the South. However, he did not return to it until ten years after the war, when he bought 240 acres to farm near Lake City, still called Sunk Lands or Oldtown. This area was populated by Confederate veterans who were suspicious of him until he sprang upon them the fraternal spirit of Freemasonry and organized them into a Masonic brotherhood and lodge of which he served as Worshipful Master for twenty years, throughout the springing of the town into cityhood.

  When Lake City acquired a post office in our key year of 1886, Springer sprang an appointment as its first postmaster. When the railroad came and a site was needed for a terminal and a new town, Springer sprang his 240-acre farm upon both the railroad company and the subdividers platting out the blocks of the new city (which shows on its various parts “Springer Addition,” “Springer’s Grove,” “Springer Estate,” and “Springer Block”). When the town was incorporated in 1898 as Lake City, he sprang upon it his candidacy for mayor and was elected its first mayor while getting himself reappointed perennially as postmaster. What wars of competition between Springer and Judge Craddock were settled in the wooden courthouse can only be imagined. One can assume that the town was big enough for both of them, or was in the process of becoming so as a result of their competitive efforts. When Craddock started his sawmill, Springer started one, too. But Springer was almost twenty years older than Craddock, and all that was left for Springer to spring upon the town, now that it had reached its optimum life, was an establishment to take care of its dying: he opened an undertaker’s parlor.

  Although Lake City Cemetery would be eschewed by Springer himself (as well as two of his wives, and his children), the customers of his funeral home are buried here. Plug points out the grave of B. J. Harrison, who, with Judge Craddock and Allen Springer, makes up the triumvirate of the Lake City power establishment.

  Befitting a tycoon, Benjamin J. Harrison (not named for his contemporary, the United States president from 1889 to 1893) was known simply as “B.J.” to his associates, friends, and family. A year younger than Allen Springer, he fought on the opposite side in the Civil War, a sergeant with the Rebels; unlike Springer, whose three wives came from Indiana and Illinois, B.J. married a local girl in Craighead County and set up their postwar farmstead south of Lake City. In the Reconstruction years, beset by carpetbaggers, ex-Rebel B.J. organized a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and when that organization was declared illegal and forced to disband, organized a kind of antijayhawker band of vigilantes who made life rough for the lawless bandits roaming the countryside. B.J. personally killed the ringleader of the gang and drove the rest of them into retirement, bringing a decade of peace to Lake City.

  During the bustling 1880s, Harrison began a daily commute from his farm to his general store in Lake City, Harrison Mercantile Company, competition for Allen Springer’s store at a time when Lake City’s population was only seventy-five. One day a fur trapper visiting his store became drunk and disorderly; B.J. evicted him with force and humiliation; the trapper returned in the night and set fire to the store, ending the Harrison Mercantile Company. B.J. sold his southern spread and bought a new farm right on the eastern edge of the village, adjoining the cemetery (“That white house you see right up there,” Plug points out, from the cruiser parked beside the cemetery, “that was B. J. Harrison’s farm when he moved to town”). On this farm he started an orchard of twelve hundred trees, and, walking distance from downtown Lake City, began to operate a cotton gin in competition with Judge Craddock’s, a gristmill without competition, and the Lake City Hotel.

  Carefully he rebuilt his burned-out mercantile store and reopened for business, only to lose it again in the fire of 1904 that wiped out Oldtown and destroyed half of the new Lake City.

  His son, George, married a beautiful but high-strung woman named Pearl. Plug points out her grave. “You want to hear about a murder?” Plug says to Kim. “Here’s one.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “It’s the other way around, maybe,” Plug says, and tells her the best of his many stories about crime in Lake City.

  The summer of 1921, Pearl Harrison was the cook for the road gang of a construction company that had a contract to hard-surface the main road westward to Jonesboro (Plug makes quotation marks with his fingers around “hard-surface,” explaining it meant simply covering the dust with crushed rock, creating what the locals called a “rock road” to distinguish it from a dirt road). As the work progressed farther out of town, a new camp was established at the crossroads for Webbs Mill, a sawmill station, and Pearl, who did not want to leave Lake City to move into the Webbs Mill camp (or whose husband, George Harrison, would not let her go), offered the job to a friend of hers, Alma Curry. One imagines both Pearl and Alma as camp cook counterparts of Stella Beavers of Buffalo City, the pretty cook for the railroad gang. Pearl’s father-in-law, B.J., was quite wealthy, but his son, George, wasn’t, not enough to keep his wife from working as a cook. Or perhaps she enjoyed the opportunities the job offered her to get out of the house and meet people, and to have a lot of men appreciate her cooking.

  Alma Curry readily accepted Pearl’s offer, but Alma was shackled with a twelve-year-old daughter, Verne, and decided the only way she could take the job at Webbs Mill would be to bring Verne with her; Verne could help peel potatoes and wash dishes. Meanwhile, the road gang at Webbs Mill was getting hungry, waiting for their new cook to show up and replace Pearl. They speculated whether the new cook would be as pretty as Pearl and as much fun to tease.

  But the new cook never showed up. She was supposed to come by rail, and the road gang eagerly met each incoming passenger train, but Alma Curry wasn’t on any of them. A week went by during which they cooked for themselves and complained.

  One hot evening in July, two boys who had been squirrel hunting in the dense woods near Webbs Mill, south of the railroad tracks, came upon the rapidly decomposing bodies of a woman and a girl. The sheriff and the coroner found that both bodies had been severely beaten, the woman’s head almost severed from her body, and the child’s head completely cut off and thrown some fifteen feet away. A search collected only fragments of evidence: the bloody wooden club, broken in three, which had been the murder weapon, and a letter torn to shreds and scattered. The July heat had caused the bodies to rot so thoroughly that they were shoveled into makeshift coffins and buried on the spot.

  The letter, pieced together, was from a man named Lovejoy, in Pine Bluff, who had written to ask Alma the whereabouts of her husband, Jim, and to offer him a job. Alma and Jim had been separated for a year. Jim Curry was arrested at Caraway, southwest of Lake City, by his landlord, Deputy Sheriff J. H. “Boogerman” Jenkins (who makes another story later), but Jenkins convinced detectives that Jim Curry had been in Caraway at the time of the murders.

  The investigation turned to Pat Ryan, foreman of the road gang that Alma Curry was to cook for, and to Pearl Harrison, who had relinquished the job to her. Ryan had suddenly quit his job and was preparing to lea
ve the country, which placed him under suspicion, and under arrest. Pearl Harrison…Well, it was a tangled web, leading to one Asberry Webb. Testimony at various meetings of a grand jury revealed that Webb had been “on intimate terms” with Alma Curry before the crime, and had been seen by a witness running out of the woods at Webbs Mill and boarding a train three days before the bodies were found. Subsequent evidence revealed that Asberry Webb had also been “on intimate terms” with Pearl Harrison, and that George Harrison had caught Asberry and Pearl together on the wagon bridge at Lake City and given Webb a terrible whipping.

  The best explanation for a motive was that Webb and Pearl had believed that Alma was so jealous she had tipped off George Harrison as to their whereabouts.

  But a grand jury meeting in August would not indict any of the suspects, and Pearl was released, along with Jim Curry, Asberry Webb, and Pat Ryan. When the governor of Arkansas offered a hundred-dollar reward for the solving of the case, a Memphis “psychic detective” went into a trance and diverted everyone’s attention to a “yellow skinned negro” who was the lone black man within miles of the scene of the crime; the sheriff questioned, but could not find any evidence against, a black man who was found to fit the description. Later in August the county’s habitual crook, a little man named Whitey Davis who had been arrested several times for pandering, operating a bawdy house, and petty larcenies, was taken into custody, inflated into the role of prime suspect, grilled at length, but managed to produce an airtight alibi.

  Finally, and suddenly, Pearl Harrison was arrested again in September and formally charged as an “accessory before and after the fact of murder.” New evidence had suggested that Pearl had met the train on which Alma and her daughter had arrived at Webbs Mill, had escorted them to the cookhouse at the camp, and was seen leading the two of them off into the woods.

  Before she could be taken to Jonesboro to stand trial, Pearl Harrison swallowed an ounce of carbolic acid and died, leaving a note To Whom It May Concern: “God knows I am innocent of what they got me charged with and God is above all. I’ll tell you again that I am innocent and had rather die than go out to Jonesboro.”

  The investigation appeared to end with her suicide and was never seriously reopened, although amateur sleuths, as well as Corporal Plug Eaton, are continuing it to this day. Popular sentiment refused to accept the possibility that Pearl Harrison herself could have bludgeoned and decapitated the two victims, and if she was in collusion with the man who did, she took the secret of his identity to her grave.

  Plug has pointed out to Kim where she died, B. J. Harrison’s large white two-story house at the end of Main Street near the river and the cemetery. A roomer in that house at the time was Will Nash, who had once been sheriff of all Craighead County and who was later to become sheriff again…and again. To newspaper reporters, he mentioned that as he was leaving his room shortly before the suicide, Pearl waved to him and said good-bye. “That was the first time in my life she had ever said good-bye to me and when I learned of her suicide I really understood the meaning of her parting farewell,” said ex-Sheriff Nash. Just why Sheriff Nash was rooming with the Harrisons instead of with his own mother, who took in boarders, is a mystery. One of Mrs. Nash’s boarders at the time was Dr. Fred Roberts, age forty-six, a lifelong bachelor like his friend Judge Craddock, with whom he had bought and subdivided Springer’s Grove. Doc Roberts, remember, had his office upstairs on Main Street, and he was an old friend of Pearl’s; indeed, he had posted her thousand-dollar bond himself both times she was arrested. He was the first on the scene after she took the poison, and worked frantically to counteract the poison and revive her. Doc Roberts lived another decade before a stroke took him. His tombstone at Pine Log Cemetery bears the inscription “Office Upstairs.”

  Will Nash had a passionate distaste for spirituous beverages, which made him the man of the hour whenever Lake City’s problems with liquor got out of hand. He was the son and brother of lawmen. His father, Samuel Nash, had been a pioneer native-born sheriff of Craighead County who later served as postmaster of Lake City when it was still called Sunk Lands by the Post Office Department; he died before the name was changed, in 1886, to Lake City, and his grave is one of the earliest of those that are sometimes flooded in the Lake City Cemetery. Samuel’s wife, Virginia, was forced to take in boarders after his death, including Doc Roberts. The older son, Alanson (Lance) Nash, was to become town marshal of Lake City in the Gay Nineties, but not before the younger son, Will, became town marshal at the age of seventeen, when Lake City was only a small “sawmill town” with a saloon on every corner and a reputation for miles through the virgin timber as a “wild and woolly” town (shades of Cherokee City, but for a different reason: these hard-drinking Lake City men spent their weekdays in the woods felling timber and were thus lumberjack drinkers, not cowboy drinkers, who were a gentler breed of tippler).

  Young Marshal Nash was so successful in handling the drinkers that he ran for, and was elected, chief deputy sheriff of the Eastern District in 1902, and then, in 1908, on a promise to “clean up the county” of its illegal liquor traffic (commonplace “moonshining” and bootlegging), was elected high sheriff of the whole county. The prosecuting attorney with whom he worked was Judge Craddock’s crusading protégé, Thaddeus Caraway, later to become U.S. senator (and to be followed after death by his wife, Hattie Caraway, who became during the Depression the first woman elected in her own right to the United States Senate), and with his help Sheriff Nash kept good his promise for four years. Nash then went into retirement and watched during the Prohibition years as the liquor problem grew to enormous dimensions, stills were brewing in every back yard, and gambling interests were joining organized crime to manipulate the liquor industry. “Lake City was the capital of the moonshine trade,” says Plug Eaton. Citizens called on Will Nash to come out of retirement; re-elected sheriff, he once again set about his county-wide clean-up.

  During the early years of the Depression, after his four-year term as sheriff ended, Will Nash was allowed to return to his farm for a while, but he was again called out of retirement to become a United States marshal throughout the years of World War II, when most younger men were in the service. His next “retirement” was equally short-lived: the wild postwar years saw a return of illegal liquor manufacturing and gambling, and once again, at the age of seventy-three, forty years after his first election to the office, Will Nash was elected sheriff of Craighead County, to serve notice upon all the county’s malefactors and illegal operators that “Nash has returned.” The mere mention of his name seemed sufficient to clean up the county this time, and he was permitted to serve out a quiet four-year term. The principal street on the south edge of town was named Nash Road.

  Sheriff Nash died peacefully in bed. Two other sheriffs died with their boots on. Boogerman Jenkins, who had operated the hotel in Caraway where Jim Curry was arrested and provided the alibi that sprang Curry, later sought promotion and election from deputy to chief deputy. When Will Nash came out of retirement in 1928 to handle the Prohibition-inspired liquor problem, the Boogerman ran for the office of chief deputy of the Eastern District, where throughout Prohibition he had fought the moonshiners who had nicknamed him. He had accepted, even welcomed his nickname, and used it in his campaign literature: “If you want the law enforced in this fair land, cast your vote for the Boogerman.” This was bad rhyme but clever politics: he defeated nine other candidates for the job.

  But shortly before he was to be sworn in as chief, the Boogerman went out one morning on a routine errand to collect some taxes; a mail carrier found his body beside his car on a county road. He had been shot twice, once in the back and once in the chest. Other deputies arrested two youths and a boy who had been operating a moonshine still. The younger, Rayford Ransome, age fifteen, was charged with actually firing the shots that killed the Boogerman, but while free on bail was hit by a train. He spent six months in a hospital, and his trial was delayed for two years. The boy did not deny the
shooting, but claimed that he did not know the Boogerman was a deputy sheriff, and that he had fired in self-defense. Because the jury was deadlocked six to six, the judge declared a mistrial. Ransome had to be brought to trial a second time before a jury would convict him of murder in the second degree. He was given twenty-one years.

  Plug explains to Kim that murder in the second degree is without premeditation, not planned, a spur-of-the moment thing. The boy Rayford Ransome was carrying a weapon because most moonshiners were armed.

  Liquor was also involved in the shooting of Chief Deputy George Spencer, though this was after the Prohibition years had ended. There are other points of comparison between the killings of Chiefs Jenkins and Spencer: both were shot twice, Spencer in the arm and in the chest; both were shot in the country outside of Lake City, Spencer in the “suburb” of Lunsford, south of town; both assailants claimed in court that they had shot in self-defense; both were convicted not of murder in the first but in the second degree; and both were sentenced to twenty-one years in the Arkansas State Penitentiary. But the young Rayford Ransome, unless he had been sampling his own moonshine, was sober when he shot the Boogerman; Alf Wood was drunk when he shot George Spencer.