In the winter of 1894, two desperate men crept through the dense fog of East Tennessee with murder on their minds. John Stanley, thirty-two, was a rough character marked by a long scar running from his forehead across his face to his right ear. His partner, Clarence Cox, was only twenty-two but just as hardened. Together, they had traveled on foot from the small community of Karns, begging for food along the way, too poor to own horses or money.
The mountain people they met were kind, feeding the hungry strangers and even drawing them a map to the mill they asked about. None of those good people realized what they were helping set in motion. The target of their journey was Henry Snoderly, a ninety-year-old miller who had built his life on Haines Creek, just north of Knoxville. Born during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Henry had lived through the War of 1812, the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War.
As a young man of twenty-one, he had crossed the Appalachian Mountains from Big Sandy in western North Carolina and settled on the banks of a clear stream where he built a mill that served the entire valley for decades. The steady water meant families could bring their corn and have it ground into meal, and the miller was one of the most important men in the settlement. Over the years, Henry prospered, building a large house within sight of the mill, raising a family, and becoming a leader in the Methodist church that eventually carried his family’s name. By that winter, Henry was married to his third wife, Serena, who was seventy-six.
Their daughter Lucinda had come for dinner that evening, and two grandchildren were also in the house: a young woman named Serena and a twenty-two-year-old man named Sam Guinn. The old miller had handed the daily work of the mill to a family man known affectionately as Uncle John, but Henry remained sharp and kept a close watch over his affairs. Every evening, when work was done and the mill was closed, he would sit before the fire and read the Bible aloud to his family. On the evening of the attack, a light rain had fallen since morning, and by dusk the fog covered the entire valley.
Stanley and Cox hid at the edge of the woods near the Snoderly home, waiting for darkness. The cold was bitter, and to fight it, they drank heavily, so by nightfall the two men were drunk on white whiskey. Inside the house, the world was peaceful. The fire crackled in the open hearth as Henry read from the Gospel of Matthew, and the small family joined hands in prayer.
At about half past seven, Sam rose from the fire and said he would check whether Uncle John had finished grinding the flour for the day. That simple act was the moment the family’s world came apart. As Sam reached the door and opened the latch, two masked men burst in with pistols drawn. Raise your hands, shouted the leader with the scarred face.
Old Henry rose from his chair and lifted his frail arms above his gray head, crying out, Lord, protect us all. Those were his last words. John Stanley fired, putting a bullet through the old man’s chest. Chaos erupted.
Henry’s wife ran toward the kitchen, but the outlaws fired again, striking her twice in the back. She was dead before she hit the floor. As the room filled with smoke and the smell of gunpowder, Lucinda grabbed young Serena and the two escaped out the back of the house, running into the cold night toward the swollen waters of Haines Creek. Inside the cabin, only Sam remained alive with the two masked men.
Cox shouted at him to open the cabinet drawer and empty everything onto the floor. Sam obeyed, begging not to be shot, but there was no money. The desperate outlaw demanded he open the rest. Sam struggled, but the top drawer was locked and he could only open the bottom one halfway because his grandfather’s body lay across it.
Spotting some shining coins on the floor, the outlaw with the gun moved to pick them up. Sam realized they would kill him, and this might be his only chance. He bolted for the front door. The gunmen turned and opened fire, punching holes in the wooden walls, but Sam somehow escaped and ran to his brother’s house for help.
Meanwhile, Lucinda and young Serena were trying to cross the fast, turbulent creek. The water was too high, and Serena cried that she could not do it. Lucinda insisted they would be killed if they stayed and took her hand to help her across. They entered the nearly freezing water in bare feet, over mud and slippery rocks.
Serena was not strong enough to stand against the current and was swept away. Lucinda held on with all her strength, but she slipped, lost the girl’s hand, and the two were separated in the darkness, each fighting to survive. Lucinda was carried downstream, gasping whenever her head rose above the water and clinging to whatever branches she could reach while her body battered against rocks in the heavy rain. Finally she grabbed a chestnut branch hanging over the creek and slowly pulled herself to the bank.
She survived, but Serena was gone. Back at the cabin, the killers took everything of value, stole two horses from the stable, and fled into the night. By the time Sam reached his brother’s home and raised the alarm, many men hurried back to the house of horror, but the murderers were already long gone. By morning, word of the killings spread quickly.
Henry Snoderly, the old miller and Methodist leader, was dead in his home along with his wife. But the story soon took a strange turn. When the sheriff arrived and examined the dreadful scene, Sam told him he had recognized one of the killers by his scar: John Stanley. Yet the sheriff was not convinced by Sam’s story and, remarkably, arrested Sam himself for murder.
Later that day, Lucinda found Serena hiding in a neighbor’s home. Both women had survived, and they told the sheriff the truth, confirming that Sam had arrested the wrong man. The confusion gave the real killers time to flee. A manhunt began for Stanley and Cox, with a reward of four hundred dollars for each, dead or alive.
The outlaws moved north, hiding for several days in Boyd County, Kentucky, but the posse tracked them into the deep hills of Virginia. Then came another strange turn. Word of the reward reached the fugitives, and Clarence Cox’s father told the authorities he would surrender the two men on one condition: that he receive the reward money to pay the legal expenses for both killers. Under that arrangement, Cox and Stanley surrendered.
Justice moved quickly. A grand jury issued indictments for murder, and on June 25 the trial began. Sam Guinn took the stand as the prosecution’s main witness, telling the jury about his grandfather rising from his chair and every detail of both killings. When Lucinda and Serena testified, no one in the courtroom had any doubt that Stanley and Cox had committed the crimes.
The jury convicted both men of murder and sentenced them to death by hanging. The judge fixed the date for December 24, 1894, and told the two killers, I intend to make you boys an early Christmas gift to the devil. News spread that this would be the first legal hanging in Union County, Tennessee, and crowds came from everywhere on horseback, in wagons, and on foot to witness it. Tennessee law forbade public viewing of executions, so the sheriff built a small fence around the gallows.
It did no good. The crowd was so large that people tore boards from the fence, stacked them, and stood on them for a better view. Shortly before four o’clock that afternoon, Stanley and Cox were brought from the county jail and loaded onto an old wagon, each man sitting atop his own coffin while armed officers rode alongside. Men and women ran beside the wagon, trying to look into the faces of the condemned, while fathers lifted their children onto their shoulders.
As the two men climbed the gallows and the ropes were placed, John Stanley stood to say a few words. He told the men and boys to listen and take warning, saying that whiskey, women, and carrying a gun had brought him to this place, and he hoped none of them would ever walk the road he was walking. Then he took a large piece of chewing tobacco from his mouth, held it up, and said he no longer needed it. An old mountain man rushed from the crowd, took the tobacco, put it in his cheek, and thanked the condemned man.
Stanley then made a final request, asking the crowd to join him in singing his favorite gospel hymn. The gathered spectators sang the first two verses with him. As the sheriff surveyed the scene, he calmly took a fresh piece of tobacco, put it in his mouth, and gave a quick wink. Then someone shouted that they were gone, swinging now.
That was the first and last legal execution by hanging in Union County, Tennessee. In the aftermath, the crowd collected souvenirs from the bodies of the killers. One man whose grandfather had attended the execution as a small boy later told of how people lined up and took relics from the hanged men. He showed a photograph of the condemned man’s boot, stolen from his feet while he hung from the rope.
He still kept a small piece of the actual rope used in the hanging, passed down proudly through his family for generations. The murders of Henry Snoderly and his wife remained a story the old folks still told, a grisly piece of Appalachian history that no one in Union County ever forgot.