This is a story about the life of a man who was born before the Civil War.  To the best of my knowledge it is a true story given that it has been assembled over the last six years from facts, hearsay, circumstantial evidence and stories told many years after the fact.  Anyone who knew him or spoke about him has long since died; therefore there is no further method of proving the tale of his life.  So let us begin.

 

On December 8, 1856 there were twins born to a family of farmers in Harris County Georgia.  They were the last of five surviving children born to John Euphrates Truitt and Mary Elizabeth Hart.  Their farm was on three land allotments, the 605 acres of land allotted to them in the “Trail of Tears” Fifth land lottery in 1827.  John Euphrates Truitt was a good farmer and a talented horseman.  He owned two or three thoroughbred horses and enslaved as many as nine people but his whole family lived in a hand hewn log cabin.

 

When the fraternal twins were born the first was a normal healthy baby and they named him James Euphrates Truitt.  The second was a small underdeveloped baby at about two pounds who was not expected to live.  He was named John Green Truitt and his parents wrapped him in carded cotton, placed him in a box by the kitchen stove and fed him with a “sugar tit”.  (A sugar tit is a small piece of cloth with cane sugar inside and soaked in liquor on the outside.)  Surprisingly he survived and grew up as a normal child.

 

J.G. was only 10 when the Civil War ended so he never served in that horrific conflict.  However his father enlisted and served as a farrier (horse caretaker) for the officers in his Company.  John Euphrates Truitt returned from the War Between the States with an amputated right leg.  A large wagon had run over him in a battle and crushed his leg.  Due to this injury and to the freeing of the enslaved people in the South, the whole dynamic of this family changed.  They no longer owned the farm workers that had fueled the economy of the South for generations and because of this their net worth declined drastically.  They had to adapt to an enterprise based on share cropping and although slavery was a horrible life style, share cropping did not provide enough resources and support for the Truitts or the people they had formerly enslaved.

 

The next part of this story occurs when J G was 19 in 1875 and he married his girlfriend Mary Frances LeCroy.  As the hearsay tells us, John Green had a habit of loading up the milk, eggs and produce (moonshine) from the farm and driving the buggy to town to sell these items at four in the morning on Saturday.  One Saturday morning six months after the marriage John Green got about five miles down the road and realized he had forgotten something.  Now J G had a best friend named Joseph Virgil Alexander [remember the Alexander name, it will show up again] and they did many things together.  When John arrived back at his house, which was an old slave cabin, he found Joseph Alexander in bed with his new wife.  To show you John’s temperament, he did not fight his friend, and he did not abuse his new wife.  He simply loaded her belongings on to the wagon and left her at her parent’s front door.  He also refused to associate with Joseph Alexander for the rest of their lives.  John was not an outwardly aggressive or forceful man.  He generally arranged things in the background to get what he wanted.  He was more of a follower, not a leader, likely not the brightest or most industrious of my ancestors.  This story came from Jessie Nix East, my mother’s half sister, who heard it from my grandmother when Jessie was a child.

 

After this fiasco, J.G. had no recorded relationships with a woman for 36 years of his life.  Because there is no recorded history, the next section of this story is based on hearsay, circumstantial evidence and statements given to Karen Branan during her research for her book “The Family Tree”.  Although this information is fairly nebulous in its separate pieces, taken together it all points to the reality I am about to describe.

 

From 1875 until 1914 when John married Mary Belle Alexander, John lived in the family home, a log cabin, with his mother, father and sister, Mary Olive Caroline Truitt.  Living also on their land until 1912 in some old slave cabins as share croppers were Lula and Genie Moore, (mother and daughter), Johnie Moore (Lula’s adult son), Loduska “Dusky” Crutchfield and her husband Jim, Minnie Palmer with two sisters and a daughter and Burrell Hardaway and family (Preacher at St James AME just south of this land).  Also in the same area on State Road off of Mountain Hill Road lived Eugene Harrington and family with their teenaged daughter Bertha Lee. The Harringtons lived next door to my wife’s Great Grandparents who also had large land grants in the area.

 

Directly across the road from the Truitt land, Mary Belle Alexander lived with her husband James Samuel “JS” Nix and her brother Raymond Alexander on Nix land.  James Samuel Nix was the son of Isaac M. Nix and his wife Elcy Ann E. Truitt who was J.G.Truitt’s other sister. Mary Belle Alexander was the daughter of Thomas Jefferson Alexander the brother to Joseph Virgil Alexander.  Thomas had become a close friend of J.G. Truitt over the years. [Now you have met the majority of the characters in this story who will reappear again in the future.]

 

Lula Moore was a black woman, the daughter of John B Moore who was Sheriff Hadley’s uncle.  Lula was a resident in a house owned by J.G. Truitt and she was referenced as a sharecropper.  She was unmarried and had two children Johnie Moore and Genie Moore.

 

In the years after the Civil War miscegeny was a crime in the South, punishable by two years in prison.  The reality was that there were many white men who kept black mistresses or attacked and raped black women.  The preacher Burrell Hardaway had a well earned reputation for his sermons against this practice by white men.  This appears to be the case with J.G. Truitt since Lula Moore, born in 1875, lived next door to him and she had her first child, Johnie, when she was 12.  Did I mention that by 1887 when Johnie was born, J.G. had developed a strong taste for very young women?  All of the circumstantial evidence and all of the hearsay I have gathered point to both Johnie and Genie being the children of J.G. Truitt and Lula Moore.

 

These relationships placed J.G. in an awkward position since the community knew what was happening but did not mention it in polite company.  This made him unacceptable as a serious mate to any white woman of any age much less the daughter of his close friend Thomas Alexander.  Resolving this problem became one of his major undertakings in life.

 

Somewhere around 1911 there was a short article in the Harris County Journal describing an altercation between Lula Moore and John Truitt where she pulled out a shotgun and fired it at her “landlord” Mr. Truitt in a fit of rage.  In those times a black female sharecropper did not fire a weapon at a white man.  The white man would have pulled out his pistol and killed her on the spot.  Instead Mr. Truitt left the scene and reported the incident to the sheriff as an assault.  A few days later all charges were dropped against Lula and she was free.  In my opinion that was a domestic disturbance not an assault. [It is very likely that the double barreled shotgun hanging on my wall is the one she used.]  This would have been about the time that James Samuel Nix died and Mary Belle Alexander was widowed.

 

In the early 1900’s there were no reliable cures for diseases that plagued the population.  In 1911 James Samuel Nix (who was called JS) contracted Typhoid Fever and died in October.  He left behind his pregnant wife Mary Belle Alexander and their first born child Orena.

 

Jessie was born in March and they called her Little JS because she acted like her father.  Thomas Alexander was Mary Belle’s father and a brother to Joseph mentioned above.  Although JG Truitt was not friends with Joseph Alexander, he was close with Thomas.  Thomas Alexander and Isaac M Nix (the father of J.S. Nix) came to help their pregnant daughter/daughter-in-law with the work on her farm.  JG from across the road came over often to help also.

 

In 1912 JG Truitt was 56 and Mary Belle Alexander was 23.  At this point JG Truitt was still in a relationship with his black mistress, who was 37, and their two children living on Truitt land. Johnie Moore, the 25 year old alleged son of Lula and JG, was widowed, childless and living separately as a sharecropper/farmer on Truitt land. At this time he had begun seeing Eugene Harrington’s teenaged daughter Bertha Lee and they were engaged to be married.  It was known that Norman Hadley, nephew of the sheriff, had decided to approach Bertha Lee for the purpose of sex, either willingly or eventually by rape.  This placed the whole group in a condition of upset, anger and aggressive attitudes.

 

Where did it all begin? Back in 1878 when two Truitt brothers (James and Samuel) packed up their families and left Mountain Hill for Texas after they drew the short straws and refused to kill the black man the KKK/Masons had targeted. This was against the caste code and after that, these two white men would be suspected race traitors so it was not safe to stay.  They would be pushed one way and the other to prove their race loyalty and if they kept refusing they’d likely be killed themselves.

 

In January of 1912 someone paid a visit to Norman’s house and shot and killed him.  The name of the perpetrator has never been proven, but several statements by people before they died point directly to one man.  We will cover that at the end of the story. The day after Norman’s murder, Sheriff Marion Hadley (Norman’s uncle, who was nicknamed Buddie) arrested Johnie Moore, Eugene Harrington and Dusky Crutchfield to interrogate them about the murder.  The sheriff later returned and arrested Burrell Hardaway.

 

Given the culture of the day it was not hard for the white moonshiners in Mountain Hill to convince a mob that the group of black individuals were guilty and should be punished.  The mob stopped Sheriff Buddie Hadley on his way to Hamilton and wanted to take the four individuals out and lynch them right there.  Sheriff Hadley convinced the mob to let him take the accused to jail and question them.  If they would do that he guaranteed a swift trial and conviction.  The next day Sheriff Hadley went to Columbus to arrange for a judge to come to Hamilton immediately rather than wait on the next circuit schedule for the trial.  He left the four prisoners in the jail in Hamilton with a jailer.  The mob had agreed to stand back at that point. Angered at the judge’s and/the law’s requirement that the special trial would wait 3 weeks, they moved in because the sheriff had no witnesses and they feared that Crutchfield would testify to the truth in court.  No charges were ever filed against any of them, but Dusky was told that if she would say the other three committed the crime then she could go free.  She refused to testify against her friends since it was not true.

 

On January 22, 1912 a large group of people converged on the jail, took the four accused people out to a tree next to Friendship Baptist Church, and hung them and then shot them multiple times with shotguns and pistols.  This was the 1912 lynching in Harris County, the largest and most violent and public lynching ever in Hamilton Georgia.  The notable participants in this mob were listed in Karen Branan’s book “The Family Tree” as Lum Teel, JG Truitt, Bud Cannon, John Land, Walter Gordon, Gordon Murrah, John Whit Hargett, John Henry Mobley, John Storey, Mans, Osborn, Farley and many others whose names were not remembered.  They were all just a bunch of moonshiners from the Mountain Hill area.  It was said that guilty or not, this group of blacks had gotten so difficult that something needed to be done.

 

Given this situation, J.G. Truitt was able to dispose of the father of Bertha Lee, the black preacher who was making trouble about white men assaulting young black women, a black troublesome woman sharecropper on his land and his own illegitimate son.  In April of 1912 Sheriff Buddie Hadley arrested Lula Moore again and charged her with the murder of a black woman neighbor, Minnie Palmer.  No description is given as to why she would kil a neighbor.  This time she was facing the fact that her white neighbors wanted her gone so she could plead guilty and go to jail or suffer the fate of her son and be eliminated by the people in the mob.  The jury containing some of the mob members found her guilty and sentenced her to 10 years hard labor in the state prison.  She died there. Later that year Dusky Crutchfield’s husband Jim was arrested and convicted of burglary and sentenced to 10 years in prison.  It is amazing how the white residents could legally eliminate any of the inconvenient black kin.

 

After removing all of the difficult relationships who lived on or near his land, J.G. Truitt became a little less objectionable to his future wife.  Although there was 33 years difference in age, John began courting Mary Belle as another of his much younger women.  They were married in 1914 in the woods behind Mary Belle’s house and at the time she was 2 or 3 months pregnant with their first child.  This means that he married the widowed wife of his sister’s son.  Years later his step-children stated that they despised him and described him as a slow witted dirty old man that never bathed or changed clothes and always smelled of “barnyard dirt and piss”.  He was a member of Antioch Baptist Church but because of his many digressions they would not allow him in the building.  However he is buried in the church yard and his pall bearers were the same men listed in the mob.  Stories are told of how he still delivered moonshine to Columbus in a buckboard early on Saturday mornings.  He would then go to the bar and drink until he was very drunk, climb on the wagon and the horse would bring him home.  His family would find him in the front yard on Sunday morning asleep on the wagon seat.  Despite all of his efforts to make himself acceptable, Thomas Alexander essentially disowned Mary Belle, J.G. and all of their children.

 

Oh, by the way, who actually killed Norman Hadley?  There is no definitive proof of who committed the murder but from interviews in Karen Branan’s book I have assembled the following.  Clyde Slayton who she interviewed said that in a death bed statement from another of the mob members divulged who did it.  Clyde said it was a name something like Sizemore, [Sy-sam-more] but that wasn’t right, he could not remember for sure.  Ivy Hodge told Karen twice “It was a Nix that did it.”  Isaac M Nix had a nickname; which was IsaM [I-sam], something like Sizemore [Sy-sam - more].