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11-12-2006, 11:32 AM
http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200661111018
100 years since Will Harris’ killing spree
by Bob Terrell, Citizen-Times Correspondent
published November 12, 2006 12:15 am
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8320/7446gu7.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5341/5263cl0.jpg)
credit: James Bailey descendants
In 1906, Asheville Police officer James W. Bailey was among five people shot and killed by Charlotte outlaw Will Harris. Bill Bailey Sr. and Bill Bailey Jr., James’ grandson and great-grandson, posed in the mid-1990s for this photo, with the elder holding James Bailey’s police dress sword and the younger holding Will Harris’ murder weapon, a .303 Savage rifle.
__________________________________________________ ____________________________________
To keep law and order in Asheville in 1906, the police department had one chief, two captains and 15 patrolmen. In the first decade of the 20th century,
17 men died violently on South Main Street, near Pack Square, in an area known as Hell’s Half Acre and Saloon Row. This is the story of five of those deaths.
The name of Will Harris has lived in infamy in Asheville for 100 years and in the minds of those who know his story. It will continue to live as long as the sounds of his gunshots reverberate around Pack Square and Eagle Street.
One hundred years ago Monday — Nov. 13, 1906 — Will Harris, dazed on drugs and booze, shot and killed five men in 20 minutes — three citizens and two city policemen — all on or within a stone’s throw of Pack Square, the center of the city.
Outlawed by Mecklenburg County and the state of North Carolina, Harris, of Charlotte, had been convicted of various crimes, including murder. He had escaped often and boasted that the prison had not been built that could hold him.
A posse ran him out of Charlotte and he came to Asheville, hoping to see a girl, Mollie Maxwell, whom he had met in Virginia. She lived in an apartment with her sister, Pearl, near the corner of Eagle and Valley streets, but, fearing Harris might show up at her doorstep, Mollie had recently moved to Hendersonville to live with friends.
Rampage begins
On the cold, windy morning of Nov. 13, Will Harris bought warm clothing, a .303 Savage rifle, steel-nosed ammunition and a quart of whiskey in downtown Asheville.
He found a place in the woods sheltered from the wind and settled down to lower the level in his whiskey bottle. Later in the afternoon, he emerged and began asking where Mollie and Pearl Maxwell lived, and someone pointed out their apartment on Eagle Street. When Pearl answered his knock, he shoved her aside and walked in, ordering her to cook supper. Then he resumed drinking.
He asked about Mollie, and Pearl told him she didn’t know where she was, that she had moved away. After he had eaten, he taunted Pearl for four hours, until Toney Johnson, Pearl’s boyfriend, came in. Harris told him his name, and Toney paled. He knew of Will Harris.
An hour later, Harris reached to grab Pearl, and Johnson said, “Leave her alone!” Harris grabbed for his rifle, and Johnson bolted out the door and fled.
Johnson ran to police headquarters in City Hall behind the Vance Monument on the east side of Pack Square and reported to Capt. John R. Page and Patrolmen Charles R. Blackstock and James W. Bailey that the Charlotte outlaw Will Harris was in Pearl Maxwell’s apartment.
Page told Blackstock to come with him and ordered Bailey to stand by in headquarters.
Silas G. Bernard, chief of police who also doubled as fire chief, was out of contact, on his way home from work to Chestnut Street, half a mile away.
As Page and Blackstock approached the apartment, Page told Blackstock he would go around back to keep Harris from escaping that way. “Knock on the door,” Page said, “and I’ll slip in through the kitchen.”
4 dead in 10 minutes
Before Page was out of sight, Blackstock stepped on the stoop. Harris heard him, grabbed his rifle, fired through the door and killed Blackstock. Page ran back to the front of the house just as Harris came out. He shot Page in the right arm near his wrist, disabling his gun hand.
Harris went up Eagle Street shouting, “My name is Will Harris, and I’m a mean son of a b——!”
When Page reached police headquarters, he ordered Bailey, “Go find some help. A crazy man’s shooting up Eagle Street. He’s already killed Blackstock.”
Bailey ran across the square to Sheriff’s Café at the head of Patton Avenue and recruited four volunteers. Asheville men were always ready to help the law in an emergency.
In the space of the 10 minutes required to walk up Eagle to South Main, the drunk, enraged Harris shot and killed three other men, all reportedly without provocation.
The first was an elderly storekeeper, Benjamin F. Addison, who opened his door to see who was screaming and shooting. Framing himself against the light inside, he took a shot from Harris in the chest and dropped dead.
Harris was halfway up Eagle Street when a young man, Walter (Jakko) Corpening, on his way home from work, unwittingly stepped out of Market Street onto Eagle, and Harris shot him in the stomach. Corpening stumbled into a dark alley, fell and bled to death.
Harris’ fourth victim was a young man named Tom Neal, who stood near Eagle’s junction with South Main, talking with three friends. Hearing the shots and seeing the approaching Harris, Neal’s companions fled.
Neal thought Harris was playing a game, but when Harris reached him, he shot Neal without warning. The ball struck a silver quarter in Neal’s pocket and smashed upward through his body, driving shards of bone into his bladder. Neal staggered back and fell on the steps of a doctor’s office. When found, he was rushed to the hospital but died on the operating table.
Reaching the square with his volunteers, Bailey told one to ring the fire bell, which stood nearby and was used to serve as a warning to residents that trouble was abroad. Bailey sent the other three inside to look for arms, but they found no guns. In 1906, each police officer furnished his own weapons.
Bailey heard the firing on South Main, ran across the square, and took position behind a 12-inch telephone pole in front of the Asheville Hardware on the corner of the square and South Main.
He saw a figure with a rifle advancing toward him, shooting indiscriminately, and drawing his own underpowered .32 revolver, Bailey shot at the figure twice, the bullets bouncing off the street near Harris.
Harris dropped to one knee, aimed at the pole and fired, missing by a hair. His second shot, however, went through the pole, entered Bailey’s mouth and exploded out the back of his head.
Bailey was falling to the street dead when the shot that killed him ricocheted off the Vance Monument, went under a plate glass window into Allison and Jarrett’s grocery on the north side of the square, pierced a box of cigars, broke the handle off a jug and spent its force on the brick back wall of the store.
The peal of the fire bell broke Harris’s whiskey-dulled mind and stirred him to action. He raced down South Main, shooting into buildings and fired at three or four men on the street, missing each time.
Posses search
Searching for a place to hide, Harris reached Hilliard Avenue and angled off South Main into the woods to the left toward Kenilworth.
Behind him lay five bloody men, four dead and the fifth dying.
Silas Bernard heard the fire bell begin to ring as he reached home. Inside, his telephone was ringing. Allison, the jailer, gave him the news.
“Are you sure about Blackstock and Bailey?” Bernard asked.
“They’re dead, all right.”
Bernard hung up, went outside and began to run through short cuts back to the square.
Bernard was an intelligent man who held a law degree. He also was tough as nails. As an Army sergeant eight years before, he had gone up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When he saw the body of James W. Bailey lying beside the telephone pole, he was determined to bring Harris to justice. He wanted the job of doing so, and to him it didn’t matter whether Harris was brought in dead or alive.
Men arrived on the square through the night and were assigned to posses. By 10 the next morning, a thousand armed men were scattered through the country, searching for — a black man. That was the only description they had.
Harris spent the night in a boxcar on the sidetracks in Biltmore Village. Early that morning he emerged and looked for a way to escape.
‘Shoot to kill’
Near Biltmore, a bloodhound picked up Harris’ trail, but snow began to fall, big fluffy flakes that quickly covered the ground, and the bloodhound lost the trail.
That day, James H. Caine, editor of The Citizen, wrote a no-nonsense editorial: “If Harris is caught and brought to Asheville, he will be tried immediately in Superior Court and sentenced to be hung in short order.” Then Caine put his .38 in his pocket, left the building and joined the manhunt.
The first sign of a break in the case occurred that morning, when a trainman working in the Biltmore yards called to say that he’d just seen a man with a rifle jump out of an empty freight car and run across the tracks.
Later in the afternoon, Bernard assigned Fred Jones, an expert tracker, and Bailes Gasperson to go to Biltmore and try to pick up Harris’ trail.
Jones picked up Harris’ tracks where he had left a barn after spending the night sleeping in hay.
Jones said, “Come on, Bailes. We’ve got him now. I’ll stay on his trail and you go find a telephone. Call Si (Bernard) and tell him what’s up.”
Gasperson went back to the railway station, phoned Bernard and told him they were hot on the trail. When Gasperson stepped out of the station, a posse rode in on horseback. Gasperson suggested they catch up with Jones and drive Harris into a corner.
Bernard had notified all posses in the area of the murderer’s whereabouts, and they congregated at the Westfeldt Estate, spreading widely so Harris couldn’t slip through.
Harris heard the posse behind him and continued to run west, directly into the jaws of the trap. The waiting posses put themselves under the command of Frank M. Jordan, a veteran manhunter who had been chief of Asheville police until the previous year. Jordan ordered the men to shoot Harris on sight.
“Don’t give him a chance to shoot at us,” Jordan said. “Shoot fast and shoot to kill!”
Jordan looked around and saw several levelheaded men — Lloyd P. Russell, N.B. Baldwin, Harry M. Roberts, C.W. Gasperson and Caine. He put them directly in Harris’ path. Harris appeared, coming on the run, head down, rifle swinging in his right hand. Bundled in heavy clothing, Harris’ attention was riveted behind him on the posse now led by Jones and Bailes Gasperson.
Caine pulled his pistol and fired three times at Harris, narrowly missing, but turning him toward a laurel thicket along which posse men waited on the far side. Harris plunged into the laurel.
“Here,” Caine yelled to the approaching posse. “In that thicket.”
‘He’s dead’
Slowly, methodically, the posses tightened the circle around Harris, trying not to expose themselves to his deadly aim.
Moving around, Harris ran directly into the guns of Russell, Baldwin, Roberts and C.W. Gasperson. They all fired and missed, and then Russell fired the second barrel of his shotgun and saw the charge hit Harris in the side of the head and knock him down.
Screaming profanities, the outlaw rose to his feet and began firing front and back.
With all three posses in position, Jordan commanded, “Fire!” and a hundred men slammed volley after volley into the thicket. Jordan later estimated the posse men had fired 500 rounds at Harris, hitting him more than 100 times. The outlaw had been shot out of one of his brogan shoes.
His clothing smoked from the heat of so many slugs.
“No cheering, men,” Jordan said, looking at Harris’s crumpled body. “He’s dead.”
Harris was lifted into a waiting wagon and the posses followed the wagon back to Asheville. A thousand people lined South Main Street to see the procession go by.
Sheriff Henry Reed began letting 20 men enter at a time to see Harris lying on a gurney, but when 20 went in, 40 more arrived. So Reed had the funeral directors place Harris’s gurney at a front window where all could see it from the outside.
Several hot heads threatened to shoot Harris again through the window, and Reed had to station a deputy outside to prevent it.
Thus ended one of Asheville’s most terrible times in which, incidentally, twice as many men were killed as in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral of Tombstone, Ariz., 25 years earlier.
Postscript: Newspaper archives give no insight, other than crime reports, of Will Harris. The coverage was typical of the day: full of racism and stereotypes about “Negroes.” Little is known of Harris’ life before the shooting spree here, and no one came to claim his body after he was killed.
But even after his death, the fear of Harris held so much sway in Asheville that in 1907 it became the first city in the state to vote in prohibition.
Superstition in the APD also led to a change. Because one officer who died — James W. Bailey — wore the badge No. 13, and some of the shooting spree happened at 13 Biltmore Ave. on Nov. 13, the police retired that badge number, never to be used again.
100 years since Will Harris’ killing spree
by Bob Terrell, Citizen-Times Correspondent
published November 12, 2006 12:15 am
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8320/7446gu7.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5341/5263cl0.jpg)
credit: James Bailey descendants
In 1906, Asheville Police officer James W. Bailey was among five people shot and killed by Charlotte outlaw Will Harris. Bill Bailey Sr. and Bill Bailey Jr., James’ grandson and great-grandson, posed in the mid-1990s for this photo, with the elder holding James Bailey’s police dress sword and the younger holding Will Harris’ murder weapon, a .303 Savage rifle.
__________________________________________________ ____________________________________
To keep law and order in Asheville in 1906, the police department had one chief, two captains and 15 patrolmen. In the first decade of the 20th century,
17 men died violently on South Main Street, near Pack Square, in an area known as Hell’s Half Acre and Saloon Row. This is the story of five of those deaths.
The name of Will Harris has lived in infamy in Asheville for 100 years and in the minds of those who know his story. It will continue to live as long as the sounds of his gunshots reverberate around Pack Square and Eagle Street.
One hundred years ago Monday — Nov. 13, 1906 — Will Harris, dazed on drugs and booze, shot and killed five men in 20 minutes — three citizens and two city policemen — all on or within a stone’s throw of Pack Square, the center of the city.
Outlawed by Mecklenburg County and the state of North Carolina, Harris, of Charlotte, had been convicted of various crimes, including murder. He had escaped often and boasted that the prison had not been built that could hold him.
A posse ran him out of Charlotte and he came to Asheville, hoping to see a girl, Mollie Maxwell, whom he had met in Virginia. She lived in an apartment with her sister, Pearl, near the corner of Eagle and Valley streets, but, fearing Harris might show up at her doorstep, Mollie had recently moved to Hendersonville to live with friends.
Rampage begins
On the cold, windy morning of Nov. 13, Will Harris bought warm clothing, a .303 Savage rifle, steel-nosed ammunition and a quart of whiskey in downtown Asheville.
He found a place in the woods sheltered from the wind and settled down to lower the level in his whiskey bottle. Later in the afternoon, he emerged and began asking where Mollie and Pearl Maxwell lived, and someone pointed out their apartment on Eagle Street. When Pearl answered his knock, he shoved her aside and walked in, ordering her to cook supper. Then he resumed drinking.
He asked about Mollie, and Pearl told him she didn’t know where she was, that she had moved away. After he had eaten, he taunted Pearl for four hours, until Toney Johnson, Pearl’s boyfriend, came in. Harris told him his name, and Toney paled. He knew of Will Harris.
An hour later, Harris reached to grab Pearl, and Johnson said, “Leave her alone!” Harris grabbed for his rifle, and Johnson bolted out the door and fled.
Johnson ran to police headquarters in City Hall behind the Vance Monument on the east side of Pack Square and reported to Capt. John R. Page and Patrolmen Charles R. Blackstock and James W. Bailey that the Charlotte outlaw Will Harris was in Pearl Maxwell’s apartment.
Page told Blackstock to come with him and ordered Bailey to stand by in headquarters.
Silas G. Bernard, chief of police who also doubled as fire chief, was out of contact, on his way home from work to Chestnut Street, half a mile away.
As Page and Blackstock approached the apartment, Page told Blackstock he would go around back to keep Harris from escaping that way. “Knock on the door,” Page said, “and I’ll slip in through the kitchen.”
4 dead in 10 minutes
Before Page was out of sight, Blackstock stepped on the stoop. Harris heard him, grabbed his rifle, fired through the door and killed Blackstock. Page ran back to the front of the house just as Harris came out. He shot Page in the right arm near his wrist, disabling his gun hand.
Harris went up Eagle Street shouting, “My name is Will Harris, and I’m a mean son of a b——!”
When Page reached police headquarters, he ordered Bailey, “Go find some help. A crazy man’s shooting up Eagle Street. He’s already killed Blackstock.”
Bailey ran across the square to Sheriff’s Café at the head of Patton Avenue and recruited four volunteers. Asheville men were always ready to help the law in an emergency.
In the space of the 10 minutes required to walk up Eagle to South Main, the drunk, enraged Harris shot and killed three other men, all reportedly without provocation.
The first was an elderly storekeeper, Benjamin F. Addison, who opened his door to see who was screaming and shooting. Framing himself against the light inside, he took a shot from Harris in the chest and dropped dead.
Harris was halfway up Eagle Street when a young man, Walter (Jakko) Corpening, on his way home from work, unwittingly stepped out of Market Street onto Eagle, and Harris shot him in the stomach. Corpening stumbled into a dark alley, fell and bled to death.
Harris’ fourth victim was a young man named Tom Neal, who stood near Eagle’s junction with South Main, talking with three friends. Hearing the shots and seeing the approaching Harris, Neal’s companions fled.
Neal thought Harris was playing a game, but when Harris reached him, he shot Neal without warning. The ball struck a silver quarter in Neal’s pocket and smashed upward through his body, driving shards of bone into his bladder. Neal staggered back and fell on the steps of a doctor’s office. When found, he was rushed to the hospital but died on the operating table.
Reaching the square with his volunteers, Bailey told one to ring the fire bell, which stood nearby and was used to serve as a warning to residents that trouble was abroad. Bailey sent the other three inside to look for arms, but they found no guns. In 1906, each police officer furnished his own weapons.
Bailey heard the firing on South Main, ran across the square, and took position behind a 12-inch telephone pole in front of the Asheville Hardware on the corner of the square and South Main.
He saw a figure with a rifle advancing toward him, shooting indiscriminately, and drawing his own underpowered .32 revolver, Bailey shot at the figure twice, the bullets bouncing off the street near Harris.
Harris dropped to one knee, aimed at the pole and fired, missing by a hair. His second shot, however, went through the pole, entered Bailey’s mouth and exploded out the back of his head.
Bailey was falling to the street dead when the shot that killed him ricocheted off the Vance Monument, went under a plate glass window into Allison and Jarrett’s grocery on the north side of the square, pierced a box of cigars, broke the handle off a jug and spent its force on the brick back wall of the store.
The peal of the fire bell broke Harris’s whiskey-dulled mind and stirred him to action. He raced down South Main, shooting into buildings and fired at three or four men on the street, missing each time.
Posses search
Searching for a place to hide, Harris reached Hilliard Avenue and angled off South Main into the woods to the left toward Kenilworth.
Behind him lay five bloody men, four dead and the fifth dying.
Silas Bernard heard the fire bell begin to ring as he reached home. Inside, his telephone was ringing. Allison, the jailer, gave him the news.
“Are you sure about Blackstock and Bailey?” Bernard asked.
“They’re dead, all right.”
Bernard hung up, went outside and began to run through short cuts back to the square.
Bernard was an intelligent man who held a law degree. He also was tough as nails. As an Army sergeant eight years before, he had gone up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When he saw the body of James W. Bailey lying beside the telephone pole, he was determined to bring Harris to justice. He wanted the job of doing so, and to him it didn’t matter whether Harris was brought in dead or alive.
Men arrived on the square through the night and were assigned to posses. By 10 the next morning, a thousand armed men were scattered through the country, searching for — a black man. That was the only description they had.
Harris spent the night in a boxcar on the sidetracks in Biltmore Village. Early that morning he emerged and looked for a way to escape.
‘Shoot to kill’
Near Biltmore, a bloodhound picked up Harris’ trail, but snow began to fall, big fluffy flakes that quickly covered the ground, and the bloodhound lost the trail.
That day, James H. Caine, editor of The Citizen, wrote a no-nonsense editorial: “If Harris is caught and brought to Asheville, he will be tried immediately in Superior Court and sentenced to be hung in short order.” Then Caine put his .38 in his pocket, left the building and joined the manhunt.
The first sign of a break in the case occurred that morning, when a trainman working in the Biltmore yards called to say that he’d just seen a man with a rifle jump out of an empty freight car and run across the tracks.
Later in the afternoon, Bernard assigned Fred Jones, an expert tracker, and Bailes Gasperson to go to Biltmore and try to pick up Harris’ trail.
Jones picked up Harris’ tracks where he had left a barn after spending the night sleeping in hay.
Jones said, “Come on, Bailes. We’ve got him now. I’ll stay on his trail and you go find a telephone. Call Si (Bernard) and tell him what’s up.”
Gasperson went back to the railway station, phoned Bernard and told him they were hot on the trail. When Gasperson stepped out of the station, a posse rode in on horseback. Gasperson suggested they catch up with Jones and drive Harris into a corner.
Bernard had notified all posses in the area of the murderer’s whereabouts, and they congregated at the Westfeldt Estate, spreading widely so Harris couldn’t slip through.
Harris heard the posse behind him and continued to run west, directly into the jaws of the trap. The waiting posses put themselves under the command of Frank M. Jordan, a veteran manhunter who had been chief of Asheville police until the previous year. Jordan ordered the men to shoot Harris on sight.
“Don’t give him a chance to shoot at us,” Jordan said. “Shoot fast and shoot to kill!”
Jordan looked around and saw several levelheaded men — Lloyd P. Russell, N.B. Baldwin, Harry M. Roberts, C.W. Gasperson and Caine. He put them directly in Harris’ path. Harris appeared, coming on the run, head down, rifle swinging in his right hand. Bundled in heavy clothing, Harris’ attention was riveted behind him on the posse now led by Jones and Bailes Gasperson.
Caine pulled his pistol and fired three times at Harris, narrowly missing, but turning him toward a laurel thicket along which posse men waited on the far side. Harris plunged into the laurel.
“Here,” Caine yelled to the approaching posse. “In that thicket.”
‘He’s dead’
Slowly, methodically, the posses tightened the circle around Harris, trying not to expose themselves to his deadly aim.
Moving around, Harris ran directly into the guns of Russell, Baldwin, Roberts and C.W. Gasperson. They all fired and missed, and then Russell fired the second barrel of his shotgun and saw the charge hit Harris in the side of the head and knock him down.
Screaming profanities, the outlaw rose to his feet and began firing front and back.
With all three posses in position, Jordan commanded, “Fire!” and a hundred men slammed volley after volley into the thicket. Jordan later estimated the posse men had fired 500 rounds at Harris, hitting him more than 100 times. The outlaw had been shot out of one of his brogan shoes.
His clothing smoked from the heat of so many slugs.
“No cheering, men,” Jordan said, looking at Harris’s crumpled body. “He’s dead.”
Harris was lifted into a waiting wagon and the posses followed the wagon back to Asheville. A thousand people lined South Main Street to see the procession go by.
Sheriff Henry Reed began letting 20 men enter at a time to see Harris lying on a gurney, but when 20 went in, 40 more arrived. So Reed had the funeral directors place Harris’s gurney at a front window where all could see it from the outside.
Several hot heads threatened to shoot Harris again through the window, and Reed had to station a deputy outside to prevent it.
Thus ended one of Asheville’s most terrible times in which, incidentally, twice as many men were killed as in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral of Tombstone, Ariz., 25 years earlier.
Postscript: Newspaper archives give no insight, other than crime reports, of Will Harris. The coverage was typical of the day: full of racism and stereotypes about “Negroes.” Little is known of Harris’ life before the shooting spree here, and no one came to claim his body after he was killed.
But even after his death, the fear of Harris held so much sway in Asheville that in 1907 it became the first city in the state to vote in prohibition.
Superstition in the APD also led to a change. Because one officer who died — James W. Bailey — wore the badge No. 13, and some of the shooting spree happened at 13 Biltmore Ave. on Nov. 13, the police retired that badge number, never to be used again.