Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
How Do You Memorialize a Mob?--The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas
Gainesville, Texas, is a patriotic small town. It's also the site of one of the nation's worst acts of mob violence—a history some citizens would like to forget.
Two years after the incident, news of the Great Hanging made its way east. This depiction, from the Feb. 20, 1864, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, is apocryphal—the victims were actually hanged one or two at a time.
On the gray, rainy morning of Oct. 1, 1862, about 70 men were roused from their homes in Gainesville and corralled inside a vacant store, under arrest on suspicion of treason. Within 13 days, approximately 80 more men had been captured. The town’s citizen’s court, made up of prominent community leaders, immediately found seven men guilty by majority vote and promptly hanged them from an old tree. As tensions mounted, a mob grew angrier outside the store, worried that the remaining men were not just seditious but bandits, John Brown supporters, or friendly to the Indian tribes that frequently attacked the area.
Within a little over a week, 40 men had been hanged and another two shot trying to escape the rope. The Great Hanging of Gainesville entered history as the largest act of mob violence in American history.
Memories of the event almost immediately began to fade. Families of the men who’d been hanged moved away or stopped talking about it. Newcomers flooded the town, which grew from 250 residents during the Civil War to more than 12,000 by the turn of the century. While two men—one a member of the jury and the other with full access to court records—wrote accounts of the hanging in the 1870s and 1880s, neither account was publicly available until the 1960s. Court records of the trial were lost by the 1920s. Around the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, in 1964, the Texas Historical Commission erected a pink granite marker conveying an account sympathetic to the mob, based on what is now known to be incomplete information. Over time the marker has become largely illegible.
Gainesville, meanwhile, has chugged along as a charming small Texas town. In 2012 Rand McNally named Gainesville the “Most Patriotic Small Town in America.” Each year the town invites some 30 Medal of Honor recipients on an expense-paid trip to Gainesville, allowing the town to call itself the nation’s only Medal of Honor Host City. There’s a historical marker to honor the pioneers who first brought cattle to the area and established the town, and the old State Theater movie house still stands on East California Street, though it no longer shows movies. Leonard Park features baseball diamonds, a pool with water slides and a small zoo that grew out of a volunteer community circus. A Confederate memorial greets visitors at the entrance. Downtown, the Cooke County Courthouse boasts memorials to Confederate soldiers and to veterans of World War II.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/great-hanging-gainesville/
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm willing to wager that you didn't expect to see Gainesville in a thread title on DU. I'm glad that the Texas Tribune covered this story since I was unaware of the history related to this event. If you get to visit the memorial soon please post some pictures for our readers.
