Spies, Outlaws & Scoundrels

 

Virginia “Ginny” Moon (1844 - 1925)

    Virginia “Ginny” Moon was a Confederate spy during the Civil War who later on became a movie star in Hollywood. When the Civil War began, she was in school at the Oxford Female College in Oxford, Ohio. She asked the school to let her go home to her mother in Memphis, and when they refused, she shot all the stars out of the Union flag in the courtyard of the school. They let her go home. She helped the Confederacy by smuggling medical supplies and information to the rebels and even tried once to hide a rifle down her back. After the war ended, Ginny came back to Memphis and opened up a boarding house. In the 20’s, she moved to Hollywood and appeared in two movies, Robin Hood and The Spanish Dancer. She lived in Greenwich Village in New York until her death in 1925.

 Kit Dalton (1843 - 1920)

    Daniel Webster Dalton, known as Kit, was born in 1843 Logan County, Kentucky. He joined the Confederate army at age 17, but got separated from his section and sought refuge at his uncle’s house. The uncle was shot by a Union soldier, and Kit Dalton swore to avenge him, and thus began his life as an outlaw. He joined up with William Quantrell’s Raiders, eventually becoming a Captain. After the war, Kit rode throughout Kentucky and Tennessee with Cole Younger and Jesse and Frank James, holding up trains and robbing banks in true outlaw fashion. Dalton seemed to think this was the “life I had been forced by the Federal government to lead.” He had a price on his head of 50,000, dead or alive, but was never captured.

    In 1888, Dalton decided to live inside the law again and moved back to Memphis with his wife to be a respectable citizen. His taste for excitement wasn’t completely gone though. Dalton signed up for the Spanish-American War when he was fifty-four, where he caught dengue fever and didn’t correspond with his wife for a year. Interestingly enough, Kit died a respected citizen and a good Baptist man. He was buried in the Confederate Rest section of Elmwood in 1920.

Alice Jessie Mitchell (1872 - 1898)

    Alice Jessie Mitchell is the central figure in what has been called the most sensational crime of the 19th century. In 1892, in front of several witnesses, she slit the throat of her lover, Frederica Ward with her father’s razor. Frederica and Alice had planned to elope, Alice dressed as a man, and move to St. Louis. When Freda’s sister found out about the plan she forbade the two from seeing each other. Alice was distraught that Freda was backing out, and was quoting as saying “I loved her so I couldn’t help it.” The story was so sensational that in made national news, including papers in Atlanta and New York. The homosexual aspect of the murder in an era where that kind of thing was barely acknowledged made it a popular topic for sociologists and psychologists, and is still written about in that capacity.

    At the trial, Alice was determined insane and she was committed to a state mental institution in Bolivar. She died at age 25 on March 31, 1898. The official cause for death was consumption, but in actuality, she committed suicide by jumping into the asylum’s water tank.

Works Cited

"Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records." Find A Grave. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.findagrave.com/index.html>.

Magness, Perre, and Murray Riss. Elmwood 2002: In the Shadows of the Elms. Memphis, TN: Elmwood 
            Cemetery, 2001. Print.

The Tennessee Children's Home Society

One of the newspaper ads run by Tann

    In plot T-504 at Elmwood lies one of the most heartbreaking stories to be found in the cemetery. The lot book at Elmwood says that this plot is “Reserved for the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.   For those of you not familiar with the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, this was the agency run by Memphis’s infamous Georgia Tann, also known as the “Baby Thief”. Tann practiced illegal adoptions and kidnapped children by several nefarious means. She was in contact with several local doctors who would let her know when unwed mothers were having children. Tann would go to the mothers and take the children, saying that they were sick and she was going to provide them with medical care. Instead, she adopted the babies out and told the mothers that they had died, and she had kindly taken care of the burial. She also had an arrangement with state mental hospitals and would take the children of patients there without their consent, then falsify their documents to reflect whatever background potential adoptive parents would like. Children were often adopted out to parents out of state (Joan Crawford’s twin daughters were adopted through this society), making it easier for her to take as much as she could from the adoption fees. Adoptive parents were not screened or examined, and no house visits or anything of the sort were made. If the interested parties had the money, the child was theirs. Not only was Tann stealing children and lying about their backgrounds, the children also often died under her care from neglect and poor medical treatment.

    In 1941, the society lost its place as a member of the Child Welfare League of America due to the fact that Tann destroyed most of the records in association with the adoptions. Finally, in 1950, a state investigation into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society began. Tann’s illegal dealings, falsifying of documents, and poor treatment of children came out, and the society was shut down. Tann was never prosecuted though, as she died in 1950 of cancer.   

    In this unmarked plot are buried 19 children who were victims of Georgia Tann. The first burial of this plot was on September 17th, 1923 and the last was on October 10, 1949, shortly before the organization was shut down. Some of the children in the lot book have full names listed, but Tann was known to change the names of the children to make them harder to track, so there’s no way of knowing if those are their real names. Ten of the names listed are only first names, such as Baby Billie or Baby Estelle, etc. These poor unknown children are just a few of the many casualties of this horrible organization. It’s estimated that over 500 children died in Georgia Tann’s care, many of whose graves were never found.

Works Cited

"Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records." Find A Grave. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.findagrave.com/index.html>.

"Homepage." Elmwood Cemetery. Elmwood Cemetery, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.elmwoodcemetery.org/>. 

 "Tennessee Children's Home Society." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2013.     
            Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org      
            /wiki/Tennessee_Children's_Home_Society>.

War Veterans of Elmwood

    There are veterans from every American war buried at Elmwood, including the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, The War of 1812, the Mexican War, and of course, the Civil War.

 Colonel John Smith (1765 - 1851) 

        Colonel John Smith is the only soldier who served in the Revolutionary War that is buried in Elmwood. He was born in Virginia in 1765 and served in the 6th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line from 1781 to 1783. He died in 1851 and was buried first in Virginia, then in Winchester Cemetery, and finally came to rest at Elmwood. His wife and children are buried in Elmwood as well.

 

 Nathaniel Anderson (1796 - 1867)

Anderson-Coward House

       Nathaniel Anderson was born in 1796 in Virginia and moved to Memphis with his wife in 1823. He fought in the War of 1812 and was a major in The Mexican War under General Winfield Scott. In 1827 or 1828, Anderson built what was called the first attractive hotel in Memphis, the City Hotel. In 1846, he was appointed quartermaster of the volunteer army that was involved in a war with Mexico and was stationed at Point Isabel. He retired after that war ended. At one time, Anderson and his family lived in the building that used to be Justine’s, a French restaurant that was opened in 1958 and stayed open for 37 years. The 1874 Elmwood book had this to say of him: “Happily for the city, which he did so much to serve, if successive generations of its people could be moulded by his example.”

 

                                            Admiral George R. Phelan III (1902 - 1975)

    George R. Phelan was rear Admiral and served 30 years in the Navy. He was born in what is now known as the the Hunt-Phelan home, a house that was commandeered by General Ulysses S. Grant as his Memphis headquarters. Phelan graduated from Annapolis in 1925 and went on to participate in the Sino-Japanese War from 1931 to 1938. He also served during World War II commanding destroyers in the Coral Sea, Solomon Islands, Midway, and Marianas campaigns. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7th, 1941. After his long war career, Phelan organized and lead the Navy’s technical intelligence program and became chief of Navy Intelligence in 1946. After retiring in 1955, he came back to Memphis and lived in the Hunt-Phelan home until his death in 1975.

 The Confederate Rest section is Elmwood's resting place for soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Union dead were originally buried there as well, but were moved to National Cemetery. Elmwood is home to over a thousand Confederate soldiers, including nineteen Confederate generals and two Union generals.

General Alfred Jefferson Vaughan (1830 - 1899)

    Alfred Jefferson Vaughan was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. He became a Civil War Confederate Brigadier General in the Civil War, fighting in the battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, Belmont, Richmond, and Murfreesboro. When the Civil War began, Vaughan recruited volunteers for the Confederacy and became Lieutenant Colonel of the 13th Tennessee. He had eight horses shot out from under him in battle was never injured in any of his campaigns until 1864. While in Atlanta with the army, Vaughan was conversing with fellow soldiers under a tree when a shell fell under his foot and exploded, causing him to lose his leg and effectively ending his military career. He came back to Memphis in 1873 and served as Criminal Court Judge. He died in 1899 and was buried in the Confederate Rest section of Elmwood with a large monument.

Works Cited

"Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records." Find A Grave. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.findagrave.com/index.html>.

Jordan, Mark. "For Sale?" The Memphis Flyer: Cover Story. Memphis Flyer, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.memphisflyer.com/backissues/issue577/cvr577.htm>. 

 Magness, Perre, and Murray Riss. Elmwood 2002: In the Shadows of the Elms. Memphis, TN: Elmwood Cemetery, 2001. Print.

The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Memphis

      Yellow fever is a devastating disease spread by the bite of a mosquito in which the victim experiences flu-like symptoms such as chills, aches, headaches, nausea, and fever. After a short remission, the symptoms would then worsen and could also include coughing up blood and liver damage with jaundice, which inspired the name of the disease. There were six outbursts in yellow fever in Memphis from 1828 - 1879, but none so devastating as the epidemic of 1878. In the span of just over two months, 5,150 people died of yellow fever in Memphis. The first Memphis resident to catch the fever was Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner who caught the sickness from a steamboat worker who had escaped from a quarantined ship and visited her restaurant. She died on August 13th, 1878. Panic spread, and 25,000 people fled the city within a week. By mid-September, there were an average of 200 deaths a day, and Elmwood Cemetery was managing about 50 burials a day. Half of the city’s doctors perished. It was an awful period in Memphis history, and the number of gravestones in Elmwood’s yellow fever section illustrates this stark reality. 

No Man’s Land in particular drives home the devastation Memphis went through. No Man’s Land is a grassy unmarked section of the cemetery that holds four public lots with about 1500 yellow fever victims buried there.

 Heroes of the Fever

  Mattie Stephenson (1855 - 1873)

      Mattie Stephenson was a young lady who came to Memphis in 1878 from Illinois after her fiance left her for another woman. Not long after she arrived, she volunteered to nurse the sick and dying and died herself from the fever within a week. She became a beloved figure in Memphis even in the short amount of time she was there, and when she died, the trustees at Elmwood set aside a lot for her. The public came up with the funds to erect a monument in her honor, and it stands in Elmwood today. The Elmwood book of 1879 said of Mattie, "The name of this poor unknown girl who today sleeps in Elmwood belongs not to Memphis; not to the little village which so recently knew her; it belongs to the world, to the records of heroism to which that of the conqueror of empires seems the merest devotion to duty."

 Dr. William J. Armstrong (1839 - 1878)

     Dr. William J. Armstrong was born in Maury County, Tennessee on the 24th of July, 1839. He attended Stephenson Academy studying medicine until the Civil War, where he served as Sergeant under Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, CSA. While Armstrong was in Memphis with the army in 1863, he met and fell in love with his wife, Louisa Caledonia "Lula" Hanna who he then married that year on her sixteenth birthday. After the Civil War ended, Armstrong moved back to Maury County with his family and worked as a doctor there until 1873 when he moved back to Memphis just in time for a yellow fever outbreak. Dr. Armstrong immediately sent his family back to safety in Maury County and managed to survive the first wave of the fever at which point his family returned to Memphis. However, when the disease came back with a vengeance in 1878 and he sent his family off again, including his newborn child. Armstrong’s letters to his family include moving descriptions of the ravages of the sickness and near the end, hope that the cool nights would bring an end to the epidemic. Armstrong did not live to see the end, however. He died on September 20th, 1878.

 

Annie Cook (1840 - 1878) 

     Annie Cook was one of those unexpected heroes that emerged during the yellow fever epidemic. She was listed in the city directory as a “madam” and her house as a “palatial resort” for “commercial affection”. I’ll let you guess what her profession was. However, when yellow fever hit Memphis, Annie turned her bordello into a hospital, sent away all her girls (though one stayed on to nurse), and turned her attentions to helping the sick. She died from the fever at age thirty-eight. Her obituary in the Daily Appeal read: “Out of sin, the woman in all tenderness and true fullness of her womanhood, merged, transfigured and purified, to become the healer, and at last to come to the Healer of souls with Him to rest forever… the woman who, after a long life of shame, ventured all she had of life and property for the sick.”

Works Cited

"Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records." Find A Grave. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.findagrave.com/index.html>.

"First Victim of Memphis Yellow-fever Epidemic Dies." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-victim-of-memphis-yellow-fever-epidemic-dies>.

Magness, Perre, and Murray Riss. Elmwood 2002: In the Shadows of the Elms. Memphis, TN: Elmwood Cemetery, 2001. Print.

"Yellow Fever - the Plague of Memphis." Yellow Fever - the Plague of Memphis. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://historic-memphis.com/memphis/yellow-fever/yellow-fever.html>.

"Yellow Fever." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Sept. 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.