It has been exactly 100 years since the infamous shootout on March 14, 1912, involving the Allen family at the Carroll County Courthouse in Hillsville, Va., in which five persons were killed. It happened in the packed courtroom immediately after the jury returned a guilty verdict against Floyd Allen, head of a well-known local family, who was accused of beating the sheriff’s deputies and thereby impeding the arrest of two of his nephews.
The people in the neck of the woods around Hillsville and across the state line in Mount Airy, N.C., still talk about the incident and its aftermath. It has become a part of the region’s lore. There have been accounts written on the massacre; and at the regional history museum in downtown Mount Airy, there is an exhibit about the case.
Fred Anderson
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In a nutshell, Allen’s nephews had been involved in a brawl outside a church service. They were indicted for disturbing a public worship service. They fled to Mount Airy. The Carroll County sheriff dispatched his deputies and they were arrested and brought back to Virginia handcuffed to the posts in the back of a wagon for all to see. Among the on-lookers was their Uncle Floyd and he was mad to see his kin “trussed up like hogs.”
Allen was known for his temper. He had had other run-ins and it seemed that he was a law unto himself. Some folks later theorized that the local authorities came down hard on Allen to establish themselves as the only rightful law. Some blamed it all on politics, declaring that the Allens were Democrats and the authorities were Republicans. And then there was the streak of independence in “them thar hills” as well as moonshining. It all made for an interesting spectacle on the fateful day in the courtroom.
The day was one of those gray rainy miserable days in the country. The people came out of interest and curiosity. When the verdict was announced, shots were fired; and forever after—even with a hundred eyewitnesses—there was confusion over who fired the first shot. When the firing stopped, the dead included the presiding judge, the Commonwealth’s attorney, the sheriff, a juror and an innocent bystander who was a witness for another case. Allen was wounded.
The governor sent a private detective agency to catch the culprits. Claude, Allen’s son, was captured. Others escaped but eventually were apprehended and faced trial.
Allen was placed on trial for the death of the Commonwealth’s attorney. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Claude went through three trials and was given the death sentence. The others were convicted and given prison terms.
The courthouse massacre made headlines all over the country. Even the region’s Baptist newspaper weighed in on the story. J.W. Cammack was the business manager for the Religious Herald and he frequently wrote editorial columns. He opined that the folks of Carroll County, with a population of 20,000, were no better or worse than folks anywhere else in Virginia and noted that some awful crimes had been committed elsewhere. However, he was quick to state that Carroll County had only one Baptist pastor and presumed “that the other denominations are not much better equipped in the county.”
Cammack saw two lessons out of the case. “The first lesson is that Carroll County needs to be more thoroughly evangelized. The New Testament teaches submission to law and order. One of the best contributions the Baptists of Virginia could make to Carroll County and to Virginia would be three or four more strong evangelistic pastors with the funds necessary to keep them there until the churches are self-supporting.
“The other lesson is that at the bottom of this, as most other crimes which blacken the fair name of Virginia, is a whiskey barrel. Virginia and the ‘Allen gang’ are both in the whiskey business, one ‘legally’ the other ‘illegally.’ It will take a long time to teach the liberty-loving mountaineers that it is wrong for them to take their corn and their apples and their peaches and make of these a drink for sale, so long as we as a state are in the same business for revenue. Southwest Virginia, like Eastern Virginia, needs more religion and less whiskey in their business.”
There was a movement circulating a petition to save Claude from the electric chair. Among the sympathetic was George White McDaniel, pastor of the influential First Baptist Church of Virginia’s capital city. He often championed “wronged men” and helped prisoners secure pardons. His wife remembered that her husband “made a careful investigation into the facts and was impressed that Claude did not deserve to suffer equally with his father, that he did only what any loyal son would have done, rush to the defense of his father.”
A newspaper in South Carolina told more of the pastor’s role in the story. “The humanity and sympathy of George W. McDaniel never shone brighter than when he sought to save Claude Allen from the electric chair. When Claude Allen was delivered to the penitentiary, he had no friends until Dr. McDaniel went to see him. Then he had a friend at last. The more the good doctor talked with the young man, the more the doctor was persuaded that his life ought to be spared, so Dr. McDaniel set about saving him and he came near doing it. He presented an appeal for mercy for young Allen on every occasion and sought in every possible way to secure clemency.
“Soon it became a statewide movement, so that thousands of influential citizens joined in the appeal. [Some accounts say 40,000 signed petitions.] Often meeting with discouragement, Dr. McDaniel fought on for the young mountaineer’s life. The press and the people in large measure joined him in the plea for mercy, but in Virginia the verdict of a jury in a capital case is reversed only upon the most extraordinary occasions by the governor. So Claude Allen went to the death house, but McDaniel walked beside him and talked and prayed with him until the hour of doom struck.”
Claude Allen’s mother expressed her deep appreciation in a letter to the Richmond Baptist pastor, thanking him for trying to save her “darling boy” from “an unjust death.”
In recent years Americans have become almost jaded from numerous massacres in all kinds of places—post offices, schools and even a military fort and a federal courthouse—but what happened in a mountain town in Southwest Virginia in 1912 was fresh and shocking and it caught the attention of everyone—even the Baptist newspaper and a big-hearted Baptist pastor in Richmond.
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies.