James Horace Carter, a 45-year-old African American husband and father, was lynched on 12 Oct. 1923 a mile southeast of here. Two weeks before the lynching, a white woman had admitted that Carter was the father of one of her children. He was charged with rape and arrested. While being…
On the night of August 15, 1926, a mob of rowdy Wythe County citizens forced their way into the Wythe County jail that stood on this site until 1928. Overpowering the county jailer, the mob breached the cell in which a black man, Raymond Arthur Byrd, was incarcerated. The mob…
Leonard Woods, a black coal miner from Jenkins, KY, was lynched near here on the night of 29-30 Nov. 1927. Officers had arrested Woods for allegedly killing Herschel Deaton, a white man from Coeburn, VA, and had taken him to the Whitesburg, KY jail. On the day of Deaton’s funeral,…
About a dozen disguised people took Charlotte Harris from the custody of jailers in eastern Rockingham County on the night of 6 March 1878 and hanged her from a tree approximately 13 miles southeast of here. This is the only documented lynching of an African American woman in Virginia, and…
On November 8, 1889, between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., a 14-year-old African-American boy named Orion Anderson (1875-1889) was lynched at this site where the Leesburg freight depot was located along the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) Railroad. A week earlier, Orion had been arrested and taken to jail in…
A mob of about 75 masked men dragged Brandon from a cell in the old Charles City County jail and hanged him from a tree on this hillside on the night of 6 April 1892. Brandon, a 43-year-old black man, had been held in jail on a charge of assaulting…