The Appalachian Mountains have always bred their share of outlaws, men who defied the law and lived by the rules of the ridges. But among all those who left a mark of violence on those hills, none was hated more than Moses Harashaw, a man so despised that when he finally died, they planted a thorn bush over his grave and set a headstone that read: “Died and gone to hell. ” This is his true story. The story begins in 1794 in Burke County, North Carolina, on a bitterly cold winter night.
Snow lay deep on the highlands, and temperatures had not risen above freezing for nearly two weeks. That night, a blood-red moon rose over Pine Mountain. As midnight approached, wind from the heights rattled the shutters of a remote cabin. Inside, a young mother labored in childbirth, and around midnight she gave birth to a boy she named Moses.
It was said that when the midwife saw the child’s eyes, she refused payment for her services. The old folks claimed the fire in the hearth turned blue the moment Moses took his first breath. Others said the fire went out entirely, as if sucked into a void. Whatever the truth, one thing was agreed upon by all: when that boy opened his eyes that night, he grew to become a man so cruel that the very earth seemed to hate him.
Little is known about Moses’ childhood, as the family moved constantly through the Carolina hills. Wherever they went, strange events began to occur. The mountain people, deeply superstitious, told the family they were not welcome, and the Harashaws would load their wagons and move on. One thing is certain: someone in that household made sure Moses received an education unusual for a backcountry child.
By the time he reached his twenties, he was practicing law. The law became a weapon in Moses Harashaw’s hands. By 1814, Moses married a young wife named Nancy England, a girl of about seventeen. Whatever gentleness she hoped to find in her husband soon evaporated.
In 1822, sixty-one families left the highlands of North Carolina and made their way toward Georgia. Moses and Nancy were among the early arrivals. They left Burke County, crossed the mountains, and reached the Nacoochee Valley, once the heart of the Cherokee Nation. The United States government had seized this land from the Cherokee in 1818, and Moses Harashaw was among the first white men to settle there before the ink on the treaty had even dried.
There, Moses and Nancy raised seven children. He built a grand country home overlooking his domain of mountains, valleys, and streams that ran thick with gold. But Moses never worked that land himself. Instead, he used twenty enslaved people to do it.
Moses spent his days practicing law in Clarksville. He was a ruthless businessman, owning property near the town square, with interests in all kinds of ventures. He was a planter, a prospector, a lawyer, and above all, a man who settled disputes with a knife, a pistol, or his bare fists. Despite all his shady dealings, Moses was an even worse neighbor.
Between 1829 and 1844, Moses Harashaw appeared in court seven times on charges of assault and battery, and even manslaughter. Although he defended himself in court, he was convicted on six of the seven charges. On one occasion, he beat a neighbor so severely that the court ordered Moses to settle the matter by handing over a fine six-year-old horse. But a month later, Moses beat the man again and took the horse back.
The neighbor, wiser now, did not return to court. Instead, he accepted the beating and stayed silent. In a lawless land, Moses Harashaw was one of the few who knew how to bend the law to serve only himself. Then came the land lottery decisions.
In 1832, the gold-rich mountains of North Georgia were still under Cherokee control. In one of the most brazen thefts in American history, the government simply seized the land. They decided to hold a lottery on the steps of the state capitol and distribute the land as if it were a game. Two great iron wheels shaped like cages were set up.
In one wheel were placed thousands of paper slips describing 160-acre parcels and 40-acre gold lots of stolen soil, as if it had no owner. The other wheel held the names of white men eager to amass a fortune. For a fee of eighteen dollars and a turn of the wheel, a man could walk away with title to a piece of this ancient land. Day after day, for months, the wheel turned, and the Cherokee Nation shrank.
By the time it was over, more than eighteen thousand land parcels and about thirty-five hundred gold lots had been distributed. Moses Harashaw emerged from that drawing with title to more land, expanding his holdings into a vast plantation of fifteen hundred acres. When he received the land and found Indigenous families still living on it, he burned their cabins and crops and slaughtered their livestock. Then he warned them that his next visit would not be so gentle.
He was the kind of man who grew rich by manipulating the law and manipulating others. He had no friends, but he had plenty of enemies. Even his wife came to despise him. In those days, however, a wife had no escape from a cruel marriage, for divorce was illegal.
Whenever Moses needed to make the thirteen-mile trip to town for supplies, he took one of his enslaved workers to do the loading and unloading. But Moses never allowed a Black man to ride in that wagon. Instead, he strapped a leather belt around the poor man’s neck, tied the other end to the back of the wagon, and forced him to run behind it all the way to town. He was an evil man, and some said he had no soul at all.
When those workers grew too old to work his farm, it is said Moses would take them to the top of a nearby mountain and force them at gunpoint to leap to their deaths. To this day, that mountain bears the name Lynch Mountain. The most infamous act came in 1849, when a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl who had been ill for weeks died on his farm. Moses’ wife took pity on the girl and went to town to buy a simple white dress so she could be buried with dignity.
When Moses discovered this, he immediately ordered the grave dug up, the dress removed, and returned to the store for a full refund. There was no man more vile than Moses Harashaw. In 1850, when divorce finally became legal, Nancy was the first woman in the state to apply for and receive one. Eight years later, when Moses finally died, his former wife and children inherited much of his estate.
Nancy ordered the undertaker to dig a hole and bury the villain in the cheapest wooden coffin. Then she used Moses’ own money to engrave his headstone, which read: “Moses Harashaw, 1794 to 1858. Died and gone to hell. ”
Today, Moses’ final resting place lies in the old Clarksville cemetery, where a thorn tree grows from the soil of his grave.
His house still stands, now operating as a bed and breakfast. For a hundred and sixty-nine dollars a night, you can sleep in Moses’ bedroom. The thorn bush and the epitaph remain his legacy, the final judgment of a man whose own family wished him damned.