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Mary the
Elephant. The town considered guns, electrocution and
dismemberment before setting on hanging. |
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There's A
Skeleton In A Trainyard In East Tennessee
BY JOAN VANNORSDALL SCHROEDER
It
was 1916, and things were changing fast. World War I raged
in Europe. Dadaism, ripe with comic derision and
irrationality, took hold in artistic circles. Freeform
jazz took hold of the American music scene. Margaret
Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic. It was a
good year for scapegoats. It was a good year to hang an
elephant. |
The Place
Erwin, Tennessee seems to be a polite and patriotic town,
where campaign signs ask voters to "Please
Elect...," then thank them in advance. It's a place
where many of the Main Street businesses mark the Fourth
of July by closing down for four days, and nobody seems to
mind the inconvenience.
In 1916, Erwin was a railroad boom town, home to the
Cincinnati, Clinchfield, and Ohio Railroad's repair
facilities, "sprouting like a boy growing too fast
for his own britches," according to longtime resident
Hank S. Johnson. The population of Erwin (which was
supposed to be called Ervin, in honor of the man who
donated 15 acres of land for the town, but was misspelled
by a postal worker) nearly tripled in the first 16 years
of the century. Makeshift boardwalks stretched above the
ankle-deep yellow mud in the streets.
The Clinchfield line used to carry coal out of the
Tennessee mountains; Clinchfield and Blue Ridge Pottery
were the major employers in Erwin. For decades, the
railroad yards were the busiest place in town.
Now, the yards are quiet: pigeons roost in the old
passenger station, and most of the tracks are dull from
disuse.
This is where Murderous Mary, a five-ton cow elephant
with the Sparks Brothers Circus, was hung by the neck from
Derrick Car 1400 on September 13, 1916. The story of why
and how Mary died is, of course, obscured by time and
countless retelling: an example of the best and worst of
oral history. It is tragic, absurd, excessive:
quintessential turn-of-the-century America.
The Players
Charlie Sparks, the owner of Sparks World Famous Shows,
was a frustrated man. His circus was two-bit, compared to
his southern rival, John Robinson's Four Ring Circus and
Menagerie. A circus's net worth was measured in rolling
stock and elephants: Sparks' dog-and-pony show traveled in
a mere 10 railroad cars, compared to Robinson's 42; Sparks
could boast of only five elephants compared to Robinson's
dozen. Never mind Barnum and Bailey -- 84 railroad cars
was beyond Charlie Sparks' reach.
So Charlie did the best he could, traveling around the
South, putting up advance posters and enticing folks with
a noon circus parade prior to the day's two performances.
Sparks posters claimed a certain degree of moral
superiority:
"Twenty-five years of honest dealing with the
public!"
"Moral, entertaining, and instructive!"
"The show that never broke a promise!"
What else did Sparks offer? Educated sea lions.
Greasepainted and powdered dogs and humans, posing like
Greek statues. Clowns. The Man Who Walks Upon His Head.
And elephants.
Mary was billed as "the largest living land animal
on earth"; her owner claimed she was three inches
bigger than Jumbo, P.T. Barnum's famous pachyderm. At 30
years old, Mary was five tons of pure talent: she could
"play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a
note"; the pitcher on the circus baseball-game
routine, her .400 batting average "astonished
millions in New York."
Rumor and exaggeration swarmed about Mary like flies.
She was worth a small fortune: $20,000, Charlie Sparks
claimed. She was dangerous, having killed two men, or was
it eight, or 18?
She was Charlie Sparks' favorite, his cash cow, his
claim to circus fame. She was the leader of his small band
of elephants, an exotic crowd-pleaser, an unpredictable
giant.
On Monday, September 11, 1916, Sparks World Famous
Shows played St. Paul, Va., a tiny mining town in the
Clinch River Valley.
Which is where drifter Red Eldridge made a fatal
decision. Slight and flame-haired, Red had nothing to lose
by signing up with Sparks World Famous Shows: he'd dropped
into St. Paul from a Norfolk and Western boxcar and
decided to stay for a while. Taking a job as janitor at
the Riverside Hotel, Eldridge found himself pushing a
broom and, then, dreaming of moving on.
Eldridge was hired as an elephant handler and marched
in the circus parade that afternoon. It's easy to imagine
that what he lacked in skill and knowledge, he made up for
with go-for-broke bravado. A small man carrying a big
stick can be a dangerous thing.
The Proceedings
No one denies that Mary killed Eldridge in Kingsport,
Tenn. on September 12, 1916. The details of why and how it
happened, gathered from oral-history tapes from the
Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University,
vary so wildly that they should be read with skepticism,
and no small dose of chagrin.
Version I. After the Kingsport performance, Red
Eldridge was assigned to ride Mary to a pond, where she
could drink and splash with the other elephants. According
to W.H. Coleman, who at the tender age of 19 witnessed the
"murder":
There was a big ditch at that time, run up through
Center Street, ...And they'd sent these boys to ride the
elephants... There was, oh, I don't know now, seven or
eight elephants... and they went down to water them and on
the way back each boy had a little stick-like, that was a
spear or a hook in the end of it... And this big old
elephant reach over to get her a watermelon rind, about
half a watermelon somebody eat and just laid it down
there; 'n he did, the boy give him a jerk. He pulled him
away from 'em, and he just blowed real big, and when he
did, he took him right around the waist... and throwed him
against the side of the drink stand and he just knocked
the whole side out of it. I guess it killed him, but when
he hit the ground the elephant just walked over and set
his foot on his head... and blood and brains and stuff
just squirted all over the street.
Version II. As reported in the September 13, 1916 issue
of the Johnson City Staff, Mary "collided its trunk
vice-like [sic] about [Eldridge's] body, lifted him 10
feet in the air, then dashed him with fury to the
ground... and with the full force of her biestly [sic]
fury is said to have sunk her giant tusks entirely through
his body. The animal then trampled the dying form of
Eldridge as if seeking a murderous triumph, then with a
sudden... swing of her massive foot hurled his body into
the crowd."
Version III. Maybe Mary was simply bored, as a staff
writer for the Johnson City Press-Chronicle suggested in
1936. "The elephant's keeper, while in the act of
feeding her, walked unsuspectingly between her and the
tent wall. For no reason that could be ascertained, Mary
became angry and, with a vicious swish of her trunk,
landed a fatal blow on his head."
Version IV. Or did Mary kill Red Eldridge because she
was in pain? Erwin legend has it that Mary had two
abscessed teeth, which caused her such agony that she went
berserk when Eldridge tapped her with his elephant stick.
The infections were, of course, discovered only after Mary
was killed.
Regardless of the details, the end was the same -- a
man dead. Justice to be served. And besides, Charlie
Sparks was no fool: no town in Tennessee would invite his
circus to perform with a certifiably rogue elephant.
Johnson City, where performances were scheduled for
September 26, had already passed a privilege-tax ordinance
restricting carnivals' oper- ations within city limits, in
order to protect its citizens from wholesale fleecing; it
was common knowledge that Johnson City officials were
looking for an excuse to ban all traveling shows. As
valuable as Mary was, she had to go.
The problem was, how?
Guns, of course, were the first course of action. Just
after Eldridge's death, blacksmith Hench Cox fired his
32-20 five times at Mary; the story goes that the bullets
hardly phased her. "Kill the elephant. Let's kill
him," the crowd began chanting. Later, Sheriff
Gallahan "knocked chips out of her hide a
little" with his .45, according to witness Bud Jones.
But the circus manager stated, "There ain't gun
enough in this country that he could be killed";
another approach would have to be attempted.
Someone suggested electrocution: "They tried to
electrocute her in Kingsport -- they put 44,000 volts to
her and she just danced a little bit," railroader
Mont Lilly claimed. Others report that electrocution was
never an option, because there wasn't enough power running
in the railroad yards to affect Mary. (Since most American
railroads continued to use steam locomotives until the
1930s, it's curious that railroad electrocution was even a
possibility.)
Other reports suggest a third execution method: hooking
Mary to two opposing engines and dismembering her, or
crushing her between two facing engines. Both were
dismissed as too cruel.
And so it was decided, instead, that Murderous Mary
would be hung by the neck from a derrick car the next day.
The Execution
Mary didn't perform for the matinee performance the day
she died. She was chained outside the circus tent, and
folks say she spent the entire performance time swaying
nervously. The crowd's dissatisfaction with her absence
was mollified by the announcement that Mary would be hung
in the Clinchfield Railyards later in the afternoon --
with no additional charge for admission.
More than 2,500 people gathered to watch Mary swing
near the turn-table and powerhouse on that drizzly
afternoon; perhaps the number of eyewitnesses, as well as
the unforgettable, sad spectacle of the event, explains
the consensus on this part of the story.
One of those witnesses, Myrtle Taylor, remembered that
every child in Erwin was at the Clinchfield Yards.
"And they took the other elephants and Mary down Love
Street from the performance to the railyards, trunk to
tail. We kids hung back because we were scared to death,
but still we wanted to see it."
Wade Ambrose, who was 20 at the time Mary was hung,
recalls that the roustabouts chained Mary's leg to the
rail, then drove her companions back around the
roundhouse.
"They had a time getting the chain around her
neck. Then they hooked the boom to the neck chain, and
when they began to lift her up, I heard the bones and
ligaments cracking in her foot. They finally discovered
that she'd not been released from the rail, so they did
that."
It doesn't seem surprising that the chain from which
Mary hung snapped shortly after she was raised off the
ground. It was, after all, just a 7/8" chain, and
Mary weighed 10,000 pounds. She hit the ground and sat
upright, immobilized from the pain of a broken hip.
"It made a right smart little racket when the
elephant hit the ground," says eyewitness George
Ingram, with admirable understatement.
Seeing Mary loose, not knowing that she had broken her
hip and couldn't move, the crowd panicked and ran for
cover. Then one of the roustabouts "ran up her back
like he was climbing a small hill and attached a heavier
chain"; the winch was put in motion a second time,
and Mary died.
They left her hanging for a half-hour, witnesses say,
and then they dumped her in the grave they'd dug with a
steam shovel 400 feet up the tracks. (The reports of the
grave size vary from a too-small 10 by 12 feet to
"big as a barn.")
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Antique
shop.
Ruth Piper's store commemorates Mary the Elephant.
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 Clinchfield
railyards.
The elephant's leg was chained to the rail before she was lifted
by a chain around her neck.
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When Mary's massive and valuable tusks were sawed off
is a matter of debate. Some, such as eyewitness M.D.
Clark, claim that "they dug down that night and cut
her tushes off." Mont Lilly, who helped hang Mary,
claims someone made a pair of dice from the tusks.
A careful observer of the one photograph allegedly
taken at Mary's hanging will notice that the elephant
suspended there has no tusks. So either Mary's tusks were
removed before she was hung -- or they were removed after
the hanging and Mary was "rehung" for a
photo-op. A third possibility -- that the photograph was a
hoax -- ought not to be discounted; when it was submitted
to Argosy magazine for publication, the photo was rejected
as a phony.
Tusks or no tusks, Mary or a superimposed substitute:
The photograph revealing the hung elephant is a mirror of
the times, in which Old Testament, frontier justice was
served (Mary had, after all, killed two or three or 18
men), and people's insatiable hunger for grotesquery was,
at least temporarily, satisfied.
Eighty Years Later...
There is an antique shop in Erwin memorializing -- or
capitalizing -- on Mary's death. The owners of the Hanging
Elephant Antique Shop sell T-shirts emblazoned with Mary's
likeness, which also graces the side of their building.
There is also in Erwin a woman named Ruth Piper, who
has made it her mission to memorialize Mary, to wash the
town clean of elephant blood. Piper believes that Erwin
has for too long taken the rap for Mary's death.
"Kingsport, the railroad, and Mr. Sparks are to
blame for what happened to Mary -- not Erwin. People feel
so guilty about it -- we've got to release it. It is a
sad, sad thing that happened, but we have to let it
go."
Somewhat paradoxically, Piper wants an elephant statue
and fountain built in town, a movie at the visitor center,
a memorial wreath laid in the railroad yards. In October
1995, she presented her proposal to the Erwin Bicentennial
Committee. Nothing came of it.
There is a final irony clinging to the story of
Murderous Mary, one that firmly places Mary's murder in a
time and place. In an article published in the March 1971
issue of the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, author
Thomas Burton reports that some local residents recall
"two Negro keepers" being hung alongside Mary,
and that others remember Mary's corpse being burned on a
pile of crossties. "This belief," Burton writes,
"may stem from a fusion of the hanging with another
incident that occurred in Erwin, the burning on a pile of
crossties of a Negro who allegedly abducted a white
girl."
The murder of an elephant: a spectacle. The murder of
"a Negro": another spectacle.
It was 1916 -- a good year for scapegoats in America.
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