You may read a reference in the latest version of the minutes from the Collins family reunion regarding the "historic, family-led massacre at Hinton Methodist Church." So as not to obfuscate the family history, I offer some historic context about the event that I trust the reader will find helpful. Some family members may be mortified by my actions herewith, however I think it fairly appropriate to pay tribute to those from our past who have given us something to continue to gossip about today. Probably quite unintentionally, ancestors achieve their own, imperfect level of immortality, and hopefully we are the better for it. At any rate, the results can be colorful. Thus, following is a bit of Collins family history sent to me by Ann (Collins) Merritt of Asheville, NC. All credit, of course, to Mr. Davis, the author who, for whatever reason, developed an interest in the first place:
THE LAST OF A CIVIL WAR: THE SCARECORN MASSACRE
by Robert S. Davis, Jr.
In the popular mind, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Grant in April 1865 and the Civil War ended. In fact other Confederate armies surrendered over the month that followed and some of the Confederate forces, such as General Nathan Forrest's cavalry corps, didn't surrender at all but eventually informally disbanded.
During the several months that followed Lee's surrender, fighting continued throughout the nation. Two books have covered some of the turbulence of this period, Burke Davis' The Long Surrender (1985) and Noah Andre Trudeau's Out of the Storm (1994) but much remains to be told. Hordes of starving and desperate Confederate soldiers trying to return to their homes rioted and broke into former Confederate depots. Some of these men turned to outright banditry of private property. Even before the war ended, gangs of armed deserters from both armies roamed the South committing pillage just outside of the reach of any organized military force. The advancing federal forces also had to deal with suspicious fires and explosions that destroyed federal facilities, North and South, as well as steamer and locomotive explosions killing Yankee soldiers returning home.
For the soldiers of blue, the war had hardly ended at all. When no other way of ending the war seemed possible, President Abraham Lincoln had considered peace terms that allowed local officials in the South to retain their public offices. Such a plan would have kept operating the machinery of civil law and order in many areas of the crumbling Confederacy. Lee's sudden surrender, however, persuaded Lincoln to abandon this idea and the president's assassination shortly afterwards hardened federal authorities to allowing any continuation of any semblance of the former southern governments.
Historian Henry C. Hyde, Jr. argues that this end of civil authority and the local influence of the wealthy planters began an era of escalating acts of personal violence that continued in much of the South, including Pickens County, through the 1890s in lieu of rule of law. A class of southern "plain folk" armed, used to violence, and with a greatly diminished regard for political authority now acted as vigilantes.
One particularly bloody example of this new age took place at the Scarecorn Methodist Campground and Tabernacle in Pickens County's community of Hinton. It is a tale of how several people came to die because of a cow. The people of Hinton lived in the hill country rather than the mountains of North Georgia but they lacked the transportation system in 1860 to make cotton a viable crop. Few of them owned slaves and they greeted secession with mixed feelings. Strongly Methodist, the people of this area ultimately likely named their community for James Wootten Hinton, the well known author and North Georgia Methodist leader. When the war came, the local people divided with those opposed to secession forming a Methodist church separate from the original Methodist church at Hinton.
Hinton's problems reflected those of surrounding Pickens County, where supporters of the Union raised and protected a United States flag over the Pickens County court house in protest of secession. During the war, Pickens raised both Confederate and Union companies, while suffering cavalry invasions from both armies.
The war officially ended in the Spring of 1865 but the hatreds and the violence continued. Henry Ledford had traveled north of the Ohio River to avoid the war. However, he eventually enlisted in the 144th Indiana Infantry. Returning home to Pickens County, he was gunned down and killed in the streets of the county seat of Jasper by former Confederates. When the Pickens County grand jury convened after the war, under the protection of federal troops, the jury men lamented on the necessity of the people having to carry guns to walk the streets of Jasper safely. Hinton specifically obtained a reputation for violence through the 1920s.
Many of the Civil War veterans had long standing grudges. In 1862, a John H. Paxton recruited several men in eastern Gordon County and western Pickens County, including the Hinton area. He offered to take the men through the Confederate lines to the Union army. After the men formed and followed Paxton, he led them into a Confederate camp and enlisted them as Company F of the 1st Georgia Confederate "Volunteer" Cavalry Regiment. Paxton received the rank of lieutenant and a large bounty fee before going home to Pickens County on sick leave and then obtaining a medical discharge from the army. His victims, after hard fighting and riding in Tennessee and Kentucky, deserted or, as they claimed, escaped from the Confederate army in 1863. With Tom Hailey as a guide, fifty-six of these men and their relations reached the federal lines and joined Union units, especially the 10th Tennessee Cavalry Regiment. Some of these men, including the Nallys, were captured by Confederate Home Guard in Tennessee en route to the federal lines but managed to escape.
According to Nally family tradition, the final cause of the Scarecorn shootings began with a cow. With the war over and discharged from service, Jesse Aaron, Bailey ("Dick"), and Elijah Nally of the 10th Tennessee returned home to Pickens County to learn of their farm being looted, the family cow having been taken, and their mother abused by the local Confederate Home Guard. Even worse, the Nallys learned that the Home Guard had not taken the cow to the Confederate Commissary but had sold it. Some accounts claim that the cow actually belonged to Edy Gravely, the mother of their neighbor Franklin A.Gravely, formerly of the 1st Tennessee Artillery (Union) and the son of prominent local blacksmith Booker Gravely. The Nally brothers and Frank set out for the Scarecorn Campground to confront some of the men who took the cow.
The history behind the violence that followed had other dimensions far beyond Hinton community. Before the war, many young men from northwest Georgia, some from prominent families, traveled to the then western states to seek their fortunes. How many of them became involved in the violence between "free soil" northerners and pro-slavery southerners remains unknown. When the war came, these men returned to Georgia and enlisted in the Confederate army. They found the discipline and the sacrifices of the formal military not to their liking and deserted.
Georgia Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown had no military forces left in 1864 to arrest these men. Historian Keith Bohannon believes that Brown dealt with the problem by allowing these deserters to form county home guard units to arrest other deserters and draft evaders, as well as to act as commissaries and as a force to suppress anti-Confederate activities. Although largely deserters themselves, these home guards herded hundreds of unwilling recruits to the Confederate army.
Most of the records of the official sanction for these units long ago disappeared. Family tales and the Confederate press describe these men as riding about the countryside in their distinctive broad brimmed hats, long hair, and spurs, stealing, torturing, and killing, with little distinction between them and the growing numbers of bandits and deserters led by such men as John Gatewood. Booker Gravely of Pickens County made a deposition in the post war claim of John Johnson of how he and hundreds of his neighbors had to hide out in the woods from such men during the war. The home guards serves as the nemesis in the new novel Cold Mountain.
Home guard units led by such men as Captain Benjamin F. Jordon of Pickens County and Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin F. McCollum of Cherokee County acted as effective guerrillas against the federal supply lines as General Sherman's army moved south against Atlanta in the summer of 1864. As the federals fought desperately against their rebel counterparts, the home guard preyed upon the more than 100 railroad cars of supplies per day that Sherman's army needed to stay supplied. Eventually half of Sheman's command defended the railroad and chased the guerrillas. Sherman and his chief subordinate, Major General George H. Thomas, took harsh measures against anyone suspected of aiding the guerrillas. Hundreds of Georgia civilians were moved to the federal prison camp at Louisville, Kentucky and entire families were moved to the North behind federal lines.
The Scarecorn shootings took place in this atmosphere, heightened hostility and despair after the official end of the war. A newspaper account appeared in the Rome Weekly Courier of September 7, 1865. The paper quoted a "source deemed entirely reliable" that a man named Nally and a man named Gravely on Sunday August 27, 1865 entered a church in Pickens County during preaching and called out two men against whom they had a long standing grudge. When the men refused to comply, Nally and Gravely went in and killed one while mortally wounding the other. A woman was accidentally shot but recovered. The following Wednesday, Lieutenant Harper of the 29th Indiana Infantry arrived with three soldiers and three Cartersville civilians, Thomas Hancock, Bell Collins, and Ben Smith, at the "Gravely" House. In the fray that followed, Collins, Smith, old man Gravely, Gravely's three sons, and Nally were killed or mortally wounded with no injury to the federal troops or to the two women present in the cabin.
A different version by a Collins relative appeared in the Cartersville Courant, July 2, 1885. The Collins family had moved to North Georgia in the 1840s from Cleveland County, North Carolina. Many of them had served in the Confederate army including Captain Miles Collins of the 23rd Georgia Infantry. In August 1865, several of the family attended a funeral at the Scarecorn Campground. Men entered the tabernacle and called for Boswell Collins to step outside. His brother (Should be, his cousin) Miller told him not to do it. The Collins pulled knives and the Nallys and Gravely pulled guns. Berry Collins fell dead. His brother, Boswell Collins, mortally wounded, left a bloody hand print on the pulpit. A Collins relative, married that morning, suffered a shot through the elbow, and a bullet passed through the hip of a small boy. Pickens County historian Luke Tate learned many years later that Bailey and Elijah Nally suffered knife wounds, the former serious cuts, from the affray.
Bell Collins of Cartersville learned of what had happened to his brothers-in-law (Should be his brother and his brother-in-law) of the same surname and went to the federal troops at Cartersville for help. With a posse of federal troops and civilians, he reached the Nally cabin between today's Ludville and Fairmount by the following Tuesday night. Bell Collins and Smith stormed into the cabin, reportedly yelling that if the Nallys wanted the home guard they would have them now. However, the Nallys killed Collins and Smith. The federal soldiers fired through the cracks between the logs. Wounded, Frank Gravely fled the cabin and offered to surrender but, according to the Collins's account, then tried to fire and a federal soldier bayoneted him. According to his mother's later pension claim, he died the next day at her cabin. The federal soldiers loaded their dead in their wagons and withdrew.
Benson Nally, the head of the family and the South Carolina born son of an Irish immigrant, was wounded but lived and later moved to Illinois, where he died in 1888.
The brothers Jesse and Bailey Nally told their version of the "troubles" in their federal pension claims many years later. They omitted mentioning the Scarecorn campground shooting but claimed that Confederate bushwhackers stormed their home at supper time in August 1865, leaving their brother Elijah and their sister Gracy Ann dead. Jesse Aaron Nally changed his name to Jesse P. McAnally and lived in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas before his death in Pemiscot County, Missouri on September 15, 1924. His brother Bailey moved to Illinois, where he died in Pulaski County on January 1, 1927. An agent for the federal pension office later wrote sarcastically of Bailey Nally, "Judge Lynch, from all accounts, would have presided at claimant's trial if he had not made his escape with lightning-like rapidity" from the "regular massacre" he helped to create.
Jerry Nally believes that, aside from family prejudices, the differences in the original account in the Rome Courier and the various family stories can be understood through Lieutenant Harper's motives. Although born in Madina, Ohio in 1839, the five foot ten inch George W. Harper of Plymouth, Indiana enlisted in the 29th Indiana Infantry at La Porte in 1861. He served at the Battle of Shiloh and was captured by the Confederates in Kentucky in 1862 but he spent much of the war as a private and either absent as sick or on detached duty. He was promoted to sergeant in the summer of 1864 and to 1st lieutenant in the Spring of 1865. Although, his regiment was alternatively stationed at Marietta and Dalton, in May 1865, he and some of his men served on detached provost marshal duty at Cartersville.
Bell Collins had likely persuaded Harper to intervene in what Collins likely described as a public outrage. The lieutenant and his soldiers instead found themselves in the middle of bloody family feud. With most of the principals dead but none of his own men harmed, Harper withdrew before a bad situation became worse. He likely was the anonymous source for the garbled story for the Rome press that misidentified the Nallys as the Gravelys and which was later carried by other Georgia newspapers. Harper likely used the story as a means of persuading his superiors not to investigate further. His plan succeeded for no paperwork exists today in the National Archives about the Scarecorn shootings beyond the pension depositions that the Nallys made decades later.
With the many different troubles that the dwindling federal army had to deal with in the Summer of 1865, Harper's superiors likely saw no reason to look into a matter that Harper persuaded them had taken care of itself.
The Army's Department of Georgia had jails filled not only with their own unruly soldiers but growing numbers of civilians guilty of civil crimes. At almost that same moment, federal troops in nearby Cherokee County, Alabama, while recovering federal horses stolen by the gang of the bandit Gatewood, were fired upon and pursued by a posse of 100 men led by the local sheriff, attempting to arrest the federal soldiers! At the same time, the army had to deal with guerrillas in Chattanooga; men in federal uniforms committing robberies in Twiggs County; arsonists trying to destroy the Springfield (Massachusetts) Arsenal; roving gangs in Columbia, South Carolina and in Mississippi; lynchings in East Tennessee; and Iowa City going up in flames.
Harper and his regiment were formally mustered out of service on December 2, 1865. He moved to Douglas County, Minnesota where he married Mary Ingersoll on June 24, 1868 and began what became a large family. George W. Harper died at Cheppewa Lake, Medina County, Ohio on January 24, 1891.
For Harper, the Civil War finally ended on that date for after that no one could question him from then on about what happened in Pickens County in August 1865. The Nallys and the Collinses probably found their closure no sooner. Although these incidents took place after the surrender of the major Confederate armies, the Scarecorn shootings also occurred before the restoration of any civil law and order under the reunited United States. As the attorney for Edy Gravely, Frank Gravely's widowed mother argued, whenever he died and by whomever's hand, he died because he had been a soldier of the United States army and at a time when that army owed him protection. In the region wide confusion of the times, however, he fell at the hands of his comrades as they defended their former enemies. The parsimonious federal government, however, as much as possible avoided paying any benefits for any losses, under any circumstances, after the official end of the war.
The Civil War ended for each survivor in their own way, place, and time.
Acknowledgement: The author would like to thank the Nally family for their help in this research, especially Tamara McAnally, Paul Nally, and Jerry Nally.
Western soldiers of the federal army, unwillingly had to try to take on the responsibility for law order in Georgia for several months after the Civil War officially ended.
The Scarecorn Campground still stands next to the Hinton Methodist Church. Some members still remember a bloody hand print on the pulpit still visible decades after the shooting. (The author)
Many North Georgia families lived in rural isolation. Despite mixed feelings about the Confederacy, frequently such families lost most of their property and many family members to the war. (The author)
