The Judge Got Three Words Out. | Hillsville Courthouse, 1912

This is Carroll County, Virginia. March fourteenth, nineteen twelve. What follows is the Hillsville courthouse shooting as the newspapers of that week and the year after it actually reported it — including the one thing they never managed to agree on.

Hillsville is the county seat of Carroll County, in the far southwest corner of Virginia, up against the Blue Ridge and about twenty miles from the North Carolina line.

The Birmingham Age-Herald described the building for its readers the next morning. A quaint old red brick courthouse, standing on a green square in the center of the village.

The Allen family had lived in that county for generations. A year later the Evening Star of Washington summed them up in one paragraph. Men of means. Known to be relentless haters and desperate fighters. The men always went armed. It was an open secret, the paper said, that they were moonshiners.

And the Star named a cause that had nothing to do with liquor. A political feud between Republicans and Democrats. The Allens had sworn vengeance against the officeholders. The officeholders, it said, were equally bitter against the Allens.

It started with two boys. Floyd Allen's nephews were arrested on a minor charge. The deputy taking them in put handcuffs on them for the walk to jail.

Floyd Allen heard about it. He went out to the road the officer was travelling, gave him a beating, and turned the boys loose. His explanation, as the Star recorded it, was narrow and specific. He did not mind having the boys arrested. He minded that the officer had handcuffed them as though they were outlaws.

Sheriff Louis Webb went up into the mountains and arrested Floyd Allen anyway. He had been warned what that might mean. He went anyway. The Commonwealth's Attorney, William Foster, took the prosecution.

Then they had to find a jury. They could not find one in Carroll County. The men who sat on that panel were drawn from the inland section, because, in the Age-Herald's words, no man from Carroll County cared to sit on the jury if Allen was convicted.

On the morning of March fourteenth, the jury convicted him. The charge was interfering with an officer. The penalty was one year.

Sentencing drew an unusually large crowd. The room was small. People who could not get inside stood at the windows, which had been opened to the first warm days of spring, and watched through them.

Floyd Allen was fifty years old. The Age-Herald described him as tall and gaunt. He stood in the prisoner's dock.

His two brothers arrived while the court was still working. Sidna and Jack, at the head of a troop of about twenty men, rode up to the courthouse. Some of them carried rifles. Others had revolvers. They came inside and stood behind the rail and around the door.

Judge Thornton Massie took the bench. Foster moved for sentence. There was a shuffling of feet at the back of the room, and a general movement among the men standing there, but nothing, the paper said, to foretell what came next.

One year at hard labor.

Here is where the record comes apart. Two accounts of the next four seconds, printed by the same newspaper, six months apart. Neither one is a rumor. Both ran as fact.

In September of nineteen twelve, the Evening Star told it in a single clause. Allen drew a revolver and began shooting at the judge.

In March of nineteen thirteen, the same paper told it in nine lines, and the order of events is completely different.

Allen declared he would not go to the penitentiary. He was alleged to have begun to unfasten a sweater. Sheriff Webb was ordered to take charge of the prisoner and started toward him. Then the clerk of the court, Dexter Goad, described by the Star as a bitter enemy of the Allens, drew a pistol. So did Sheriff Webb. So did Foster.

Then, the paper says, the firing commenced. It does not say who fired. Six of the Allen family and their kin were in that room when it started.

About one hundred shots, in a courtroom small enough that the overflow crowd had to watch through the windows.

Judge Massie was killed. Sheriff Webb was killed. Foster was killed. So was a juror named Fowler. The Star's own headline over that account put the toll at five.

The fifth was not an official. The Washington Times reported her the following afternoon. Miss Betty Ayres, thirteen years old, a witness for Floyd Allen, dead at her home from a stray bullet.

Every Allen and every Edwards in the room got out except two. Floyd, whose leg was broken by a pistol shot. And his son Victor.

The Age-Herald's correspondent wrote that the shooting terrorized Hillsville to the point of paralysis. There was not a man to give an order or organize a pursuit. Citizens fled to places of safety, and mothers gathered up their children, while the men who had done it rode out of town.

By nightfall the state was moving. Governor Mann offered three thousand dollars for the capture of the men, and held state troops under arms for orders at Lynchburg and at Roanoke.

A special train out of Roanoke carried twenty detectives to Gaylax, which was the nearest railway station, nine miles away. The mountain roads that night were hub deep in spring mud. The paper estimated it would be daylight before the men could even be assembled.

The next day a company of militia stood guard at the courthouse with rifles in hand, and the wires carried a report the Washington Times printed but would not vouch for. One of the Baldwin detectives, it said, had been shot dead in a mountain pass while pursuing the men. The paper labeled it unconfirmed. It stayed unconfirmed.

The family came in over the following two weeks. Sidna Edwards was captured on the twenty-second of March. Claude Allen surrendered on the twenty-eighth. Friel Allen was caught on the twenty-ninth.

Two of them did not come in. Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards were gone for six months.

What ended the manhunt was not a posse and not a reward. It was letters. Wesley Edwards was writing to a young woman named Maude Iroler, of Mount Airy, North Carolina. Detectives got hold of the letters and read them.

Then they watched her. When she boarded a train for Des Moines, Iowa, two detectives from Roanoke boarded the same train.

On the fourteenth of September, W. G. Baldwin and G. O. Monday followed her to a house at Eleventh and Locust and arrested Sidna Allen inside it. Wesley Edwards was picked up separately. He was working with a paving gang.

There is one more line in the Star's record of the case, and it sits there without comment. On the twentieth of December, Maude Iroler married another man.

The trials were moved to Withville, one county over. Floyd Allen's trial began on the thirtieth of April. He was convicted, and he was sentenced to death.

His son Claude was tried three times. The second trial began on the second of July. On the twelfth, that jury reported it could not agree and was discharged. The third began a week later. On the twenty-seventh of July, Claude Allen was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death.

Sidna Allen was given fifteen years for murder in the second degree in November. In December they tried him again and gave him five more, and then fifteen years on another murder charge. Wesley Edwards accepted a compromise. He received twenty-seven years.

On the twenty-eighth of March, nineteen thirteen, Floyd Allen and Claude Allen were electrocuted at the state penitentiary in Richmond, shortly after one in the afternoon.

They came very close to not being. An appeal to the lieutenant governor ran all night and into the morning. It failed for a reason that is almost administrative. Governor Mann cancelled a trip to Trenton, New Jersey, and came back into the state. Virginia's attorney general then gave the opinion that with the governor home, the lieutenant governor had no power to act at all.

And then there is the medal.

Someone had bought a gold medal for Claude Allen. On the governor's orders it was never presented to him. It was locked in the prison superintendent's desk. It was engraved: For Bravery in Defending His Father. The defense had argued all along that Claude did not start shooting in that courtroom until he was forced to, in his father's defense.

Fourteen years later, Governor Byrd pardoned Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards. The Washington Times ran their photographs on the front page under two words. Gangsters free.

And in the caption under those photographs, the paper got the executed son's name wrong. It called him Charles. His name was Claude. Fourteen years was all it took.

So here is what the record establishes. Five people died in the Carroll County courthouse on the fourteenth of March, nineteen twelve. Two men were executed for it. Two more served years and were pardoned.

And here is what it does not. It never settles who drew first. The same newspaper printed two different answers, and the second one names three officers of the court reaching for pistols before anyone fired.

It does not settle the count, either. The headline said five slain. The paragraph underneath it names five, and then adds that another juror died a few days later. Nobody went back and fixed it.

Every document in this video is listed in the description, with the date and the page it came from. All of it is free to read at the Library of Congress. If you want to go argue with the record yourself, that is where it is.