On the night of April 12, 1899, Mattie Cranford, the young wife of a Coweta County, Georgia, farmer, stumbled through the dark to the nearby home of her father-in-law, her four children in tow. At the gate to the yard, she cried for help and then collapsed. When she was revived, she told Grippia Cranford a horrifying tale: his son was dead, brained from behind by an ax-wielding black laborer known locally as Sam Holt or Hose.¹ Hose had also hurt two of the children, one so grievously that the infant boy was disfigured and his condition critical. At some...

Within a twenty-four-hour period covering April 12 and 13, 1899, two unrelated killings took place within twenty-five miles of each other in the state of Georgia. On the evening of Wednesday, April 12, just outside the small community of Palmetto, Sam Hose slew his white employer Alfred Cranford by striking him on the head with an ax. He then fled, setting in motion a massive manhunt that would eventually culminate in one of the first spectacle lynchings in the nation.

The following night, near the town of Woolsey, in neighboring Fayette County, George W. Kerlin, a well-known and highly respected...

In the May 5 edition of the Newnan Herald and Advertiser, which appeared almost two weeks after Sam Hose’s death, “Ripples,” the pseudonym of Coweta County squire J. P. Reese, who regularly commented on local events, proclaimed,

The 23rd day of April, 1899, will be remembered as “Lynch Sunday” in Coweta. Already the wail of the hobgoblin and the rattle of chains are being heard at dead of night in the vicinity of the spot where Sam Holt was cremated, and but few darkies will go near the place after nightfall. There still remains about twelve inches of the stump...

The town of Palmetto, Georgia, located twenty-five miles southwest of Atlanta, got its start in the land lottery of 1827. As described in Palmetto: A Town and Its People, the first building in the settlement was John H. Johnson’s general store, built in 1833. In the 1840s, Maj. Willis P. Menefee moved to the area and established a plantation. As local history tells us, “the ‘Major’ saw to it that the settlement would grow into a cohesive and lasting community by donating land for churches, schools, and parks.”¹ In January 1847, a volunteer regiment of South Carolina soldiers led by...

Although the Palmetto killings held the front pages for a short period, the story was rather quickly lost to other events, both local and national. One of these was the visit of U.S. president William McKinley to Georgia for a restful vacation in Thomasville, located in the extreme southern part of the state near the Florida border. On March 10, it had been announced that McKinley, accompanied by his wife and a small party including the vice president, Garret (Gus) Hobart, Hobart’s wife, Ohio Senator and Mrs. Mark Hanna, and a few other dignitaries would be making the trip to...

According to later reports, Sam Hose had quickly fled from Cranford’s Mill after killing Alfred Cranford and by Friday, the fourteenth, had arrived at the home of his mother near the Jones plantation outside Marshallville, Georgia, located some one hundred miles away between Macon and Columbus. While posses threatened, arrested, and sometimes tortured innocent men, Sam Hose apparently hid in plain sight at his former home. The Jones brothers, J. B. and J. L., who finally seized him and received most of the reward for his capture, related their story to the papers on the day of Hose’s execution. J....

While the quasi-legalistic proceedings were taking place inside the jail, the crowd surrounding the building, now composed of people from Newnan, Griffin, and the surrounding countryside, continued to grow, both in size and impatience. “There were all kinds of inciting cries, people mad almost with excitement and frenzy, begging for men to lead them in storming the jail,” the Journal reported. At nearby homes and city buildings, people climbed on roofs for a better view, and women stood at windows waving handkerchiefs in support before they “gradually were overcome by horror and simply stood in silence and awe, not knowing...

Sam Hose’s death on that Sabbath afternoon in April set loose a frenzy in this part of west Georgia, and it is unclear how many others became collateral victims. There were immediate rumors of other killings in Coweta and Campbell counties, men supposedly implicated by Hose as connected to the black gang that had terrorized the region through arson and threats of death. The Macon Telegraph noted that as many as five suspects were being pursued by mobs determined to put an end, once and for all, to the “negro outlawry” that plagued their communities. The white posses were “determined...

Shortly after Sam Hose’s death, a curious story circulated that his wife and nineteen-year-old son were spotted at the Atlanta depot, preparing to board a train for Washington, D.C., for their own safety. This was the first mention that Hose or Holt had a family, under any name. According to reports, as they waited on the platform, a white man approached them and handed the boy an envelope containing a finger taken from his father and warned that he should “make himself scarce” and never return to Georgia.¹ By May 4, it was reported that the young man, now identified...

In its May 12 edition, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser proudly published a poem titled “Sam Holt.” Holt was, the poem declared, “The monster fiend of all the fiends / That ever cursed the earth.” It further proclaimed,

’Twas but right that he should die

With lurid fire to light the same.

’Twill teach these brute beasts to know

That vengeance dire will quickly come;

God’s righteous wrath is never slow

To avenge the Christian home.

And so ’twill be till cause shall cease

To blight with crime our Southern land.

The poem, signed with the appellation “Justice,” ended with...

In all of the United States, I can find only one town called Newnan. Named after Gen. Daniel Newnan (1780–1851), who led volunteers during the Creek Indian War, it was established in 1828 as the county seat of Coweta County, which had been formed two years earlier. Newnan today is known as “The City of Homes” for the antebellum and late-nineteenth-century residences that still line the southern half of its main street. The downtown square, the four one-way roads enclosing at its center a stately courthouse topped by a grand cupola, is a mixture of old and new, but...

After it was over and the people of Newnan agreed to forget, Mattie Cranford lived a secluded life in the town raising her children. She died in 1922 of pneumonia, only fifty years old. Her brief, circumspect obituary made no reference to her role in Coweta County history.¹

Of the children, Mary Estelle, who was four at the time of her father’s death and who allegedly was cuffed to the floor by Sam Hose, never married. It was she who told her grandnephews and -nieces about the Cranford tragedy, much to the displeasure of others in the family. She died...