Hangings

Hangings in Lumpkin County

Timeline: 1844

Lumpkin County was established in 1832, Dahlonega was incorporated in 1834 and the courthouse built in 1836.

The county has had two legal hangings. Sneed and Jones, on scaffolds built at the foot of Crown Mountain in the hollow not far from the cemetery, where all desiring it could stand on either of three sides of the hills or rises and plainly see these men launched into eternity - all hangings being public back them.

Sneed was the first to be executed - in 1844. Jones was hanged later. Criminals of this nature not being allowed to be buried in cemeteries then, both were interred on a lonely nob to the right, a short distance from where Crooked Creek is crossed. For many years a couple of rocks marked their last resting place. But when the highway was first started to be built that way and by Auraria, it is quite likely these stones are now gone.

Although quite a number of murders have been committed in this county since then, none of them were sent away on the hemp route. Bell, who killed Blackstock, of Dawson County, in the door of the Hand Commissary then, now where you enter Dr. Cantrell's office, a number of years ago, was sentenced to be hanged. And Judge Lawson, the Ordinary, selected a place north of town , now John Moore's pasture, for the defendant to see the light of the sun for the last time at a fixed day and hour, but Colonel M.G. Boyd, Bell's attorney, succeeded in getting the Governor to relieve his client of the dreaded death and put him in the penitentiary, who after serving a few years was pardoned, and returned to his native home, Tennessee, where he soon got into trouble at a church on Sunday and left out.

While the point of execution here was later turned into a place of amusement, where the musicians for miles around met annually for a number of years with their fiddles and banjos and furnished music for hundreds of people. Now, it is a pasture again.

Contributed by Chris Worick. Source: Dahlonega Nugget 21 Aug. 1925