Remembering Ella: A 1912 Murder and Mystery in the Arkansas Ozarks

By Nita Gould

In November 1912, popular and pretty eighteen-year-old Ella Barham was raped, murdered, and dismembered in broad daylight near her home in rural Boone County, Arkansas. The brutal crime sent shockwaves through the Ozarks and made national news. Authorities swiftly charged a neighbor, Odus Davidson, with the crime. Locals were determined that he be convicted, and threats of mob violence ran so high that he had to be jailed in another county to ensure his safety. But was there enough evidence to prove his guilt? If so, had he acted alone? What was his motive?

This examination of the murder of Ella Barham and the trial of her alleged killer opens a window into the meaning of community and due process during a time when politicians and judges sought to professionalize justice, moving from local hangings to state-run executions. Davidson’s appeal has been cited as a precedent in numerous court cases and his brief was reviewed by the lawyers in Georgia who prepared Leo Frank’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915.

Author Nita Gould is a descendant of the Barhams of Boone County and Ella Barham’s cousin. Her tenacious pursuit to create an authoritative account of the community, the crime, and the subsequent legal battle spanned nearly fifteen years. Gould weaves local history and short biographies into her narrative and also draws on the official case files, hundreds of newspaper accounts, and personal Barham family documents. Remembering Ella reveals the truth behind an event that has been a staple of local folklore for more than a century and still intrigues people from around the country.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945624193

Book preview

PART 1

Ella Barham

A tall, slender, beautifully formed girl, with fair

complexion, golden hair and violet-blue eyes;

just bursting into young womanhood. This picture

before you is Miss Ella Barham, the daughter

of Mr. and Mrs. George S. Barham, who was so

cruelly and barbarously murdered on the 21st

of November last, near Pleasant Ridge, Ark.

She was kind, affable, tender-hearted gentle and

considerate to all, and at all times. She was a

general favorite of the whole community in which

she lived, and the pet of her family and relatives.

She knew no evil, did no evil, thought no evil, but

with a bright smile and kindly word, met all with

whom she came in contact. She was a great lover

of homefolks. She was a lover of flowers, of the true,

the beautiful and the good. She loved good books

and was therefore a constant reader. For some

years her father’s eyes had been bad, so that he

could read little. Miss Ella never tired of reading

to him, especially in the Bible—his favorite book.

But she is gone on a long journey. In the days,

months and years to come she will never return.

Such a life cannot be put out, but re-asserts itself

in a better country, where no evil or cruel person

can enter in. God, in his own way, takes care of such

lives as Ella Barham’s, and now defies a murderous

hand to touch his jewel.

D. T. WAYNICK

Harrison Times

December 21, 1912

1

Who Was Ella Barham?

There are few clues left behind to describe who Ella Lillian Ethel Barham was. She didn’t write diaries or leave oral history. Family descendants know little about her. After her murder in 1912, her immediate family seldom talked about Ella or her tragic death, as if silencing the memory would silence the pain. On the rare occasions when family members spoke about Ella, it took days for them to recover, so deep ran their emotional scars.

Few of Ella’s personal effects survive. However, these intimate belongings—combined with the knowledge of Ella’s family history and an understanding of the location, time, and circumstances in which she lived—help explain who Ella Barham was.

The Barham family came to Arkansas from Perry County, Tennessee, in the early 1840s and initially settled near Cass in Franklin County. Ella’s father, George Solomon Barham, was born in 1852 in Johnson County, Arkansas. He moved to Boone County in 1868 with his family. In 1891, he married Nancy Delilah Doretha Blevins (called Delilah), a woman sixteen years his junior who had a young son, Doyle Lee Blevins (called Doy). They settled in a community called Pleasant Ridge, located near Crooked Creek in Blythe Township, Boone County, a few miles from the Marion County border. Today, the area is called Harmon.¹

In 1890, more than 15,000 people called Boone County home. Nearly all were farmers; half were born in Arkansas. Blythe Township, where Pleasant Ridge was located, had 856 residents. Harrison, the county seat, had more than twice this population. The largest community in Blythe Township was Zinc, located five miles north of Pleasant Ridge. The name Pleasant Ridge did not designate any sort of incorporated municipality but, instead, it was made up of a small concentration of independent farming families who traveled to other locales for needs they could not meet themselves.²

The majority of the early settlers who came to the Arkansas Ozarks were of British ethnic extraction. Part of a wave of migration to the west, the immigration that took place from 1840 to 1850 nearly doubled the population of the Ozarks. Most of Boone County’s people had their national ancestral roots in Tennessee or Missouri. Others came from Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. In search of a better life, these pioneers chose Arkansas because there was plenty of land and because the terrain and climate reminded them of the home they left behind. They brought with them their customs, speech, and music.³

Ella was born on February 16, 1894, at home in Pleasant Ridge, where she lived her entire life. The closest physician was probably Dr. John Frank Lair, who in 1900 lived in Zinc, five miles away. Although it is possible the doctor was present, Ella’s mother was almost certainly assisted in childbirth by a local midwife—called a granny woman—and other neighboring women.⁴

Granny women relied upon herbs, pharmaceuticals, rituals, and superstitions to perform their work. Delilah Barham may have been given blackberry root tea to prevent hemorrhaging and raspberry leaves to relax her muscles. To comfort her, she may have held her husband’s hat—symbolically bringing him into the delivery room if he was not there, or drawing on his strength if he was. The granny woman may have put an axe, a knife, a broken bottle, scissors, or plow points under the bed to cut the labor pains in two. But if the pain got too intense, the granny woman would have reached into her pouch, pulled out a morphine tablet, and placed it in Delilah’s mouth. After her birth, Ella’s eyes may have been washed with her mother’s urine, which was used as a substitute for silver nitrate to prevent eye infections. For luck, Ella may have been wrapped in her father’s shirt or her mother’s petticoat. Having previously given birth to two sons, Delilah stayed in bed only two or three days before resuming her normal daily routine.⁵

Over the next seven years, Delilah gave birth to a third son and two more daughters, completing the family of three sons and three daughters: Doy Blevins, Edgar Peel (called Peel), Ella, Gertrude Priscilla (Gertie), George Dennis (Dennis), and Ruth Pearl (Ruth) Barham.

Ella’s father, George Barham, was well known in Boone and Marion Counties. At the time of Ella’s death, he was an established citizen who had earned the respect of his neighbors and friends as a farmer, stockman, and civic-minded man. He was described as an upright citizen, a kind neighbor, and a loyal friend. He was elected as a justice of the peace at least twice. One of the largest landowners in Boone County in 1908, he owned 725 acres in Boone County alone. In 1910, when Ella was sixteen, the average Boone County farm contained slightly more than 100 acres; only eighteen farmers in the county owned more than 500. Although Barham owned a great deal of land, not all of it was in cultivation. Like many men at the time, Barham supported his family through a variety of means. In addition to farming, he bought and sold real estate, and invested in some of the local zinc-mining operations.⁶

George Barham was also a merchant. In 1903, he and his younger brother, Elias, opened the Barham Brothers’ Store in neighboring Zinc, a booming zinc-mining town. Later in his life, George Barham operated another general store in Pleasant Ridge closer to his home. Aside from diversifying the family’s economy, these stores would have given the Barhams certain advantages over their neighbors. After all, conflicts between merchants and farmers regularly cropped up in the Ozarks, especially during times of economic hardship, with rural farmers resenting the town-based middlemen for their cut of the profits—a relationship often viewed by struggling farmers as fundamentally exploitative. However, the Barhams’ stores allowed the Barhams to sell produce from their own farms without a middleman merchant taking his cut, thereby keeping more money within the family.⁷

When Ella was a child, she walked with her brothers and sisters to Jones’ School, a one-room school. Other pupils in the community attended Bingham’s School, Harmon’s School, and Young’s School. Ella learned to read and write using McGuffey Readers, and similar books to study spelling, arithmetic, geography, and history. She attended school only through the eighth grade, as was common in the region at that time. If she had moved to Harrison and boarded with a family, she could have extended her education through the tenth grade. However, because she was the oldest daughter, Ella was expected to help her mother at home. Ella appreciated good books, and she read often. She read to her father, whose eyesight had gradually diminished with age, probably from cataracts.⁸

Many children living in rural areas in Arkansas were expected to help out on the farm, and so the school term was adjusted around the farming schedule. Because of his relative affluence, George Barham was able to hire help—something few Ozarks farmers had the resources to do—which made it highly unlikely that Ella and her sisters worked in the fields.⁹

Farmers in Boone County grew mostly corn, oats, and wheat. The hilly land featured thin, rocky soil, which made farming difficult. Some farmers grew cotton, and there was a cotton gin in Pyatt in neighboring Marion County. Farmers grew apples, peaches, plums, grapes, tomatoes, berries, and other small fruits. Dairying was prevalent. The land was thickly wooded, and timbering was one of the first industries in the area. Some farmers worked in the emerging timber industry in the off season to supplement their income.¹⁰

Farmers also raised cattle, hogs, poultry, and sheep. Most of the corn was fed to the livestock, especially hogs, to fatten them up before fall, when they would be slaughtered for food and shared with neighbors. Hogs were preferred because they required little care. They ran free, found their own food, protected themselves from predators, and reproduced and grew quickly. Pork was easier to preserve than beef, and the hill folks used every part of the pig.¹¹

The Missouri & North Arkansas railroad came to Harrison in 1901, and the Missouri Pacific, White River Division, reached Zinc a few years later. These improvements in transportation provided Boone County with access to new markets. Tomato canning factories became popular; W. B. Breece and Sons had one in Bergman in 1912, the year Ella died. Farmers could sell more of their goods, generating a heftier cash income, although the connection to national commodities markets promised by the railroad left smaller farmers increasingly subject to the capriciousness of the economy at large. For that reason, those farmers who had the resources to do so grew as diverse an array of crops as possible.¹²

Indeed, diversity in farming remained vital to survival, as explained by the Harrison Times on September 21, 1912, exactly two months before Ella’s death:

Farmers in this country are divided into two distinct classes—the prosperous and the unprosperous. The prosperous farmer never depends upon one crop to bring him a revenue, but plants a variety. He also has a good live stock and he grows every vegetable and all the fruit his family consumes and raises his own chickens. The unprosperous farmer plants only one thing and depends absolutely upon that to furnish him with money to pay his expenses. He never thinks of such a thing as wasting his time on a garden. Chickens are too great a nuisance and hogs too much trouble for him to raise. He is constantly crying hard times and complaining that luck is against him.¹³

Farm life in the Ozarks during the first decade of the twentieth century was hard, especially for women, and the backbreaking drudgery of everyday life prevailed. No electricity meant no electric stoves, washing machines, steam irons, refrigerators, or lights. Vegetables and fruits were preserved by canning and drying or were stored in a root cellar. Meat was cured and hung in a smokehouse. Dairy products were kept cool in a springhouse or in the creek. But these methods were not always effective and resulted in much spoilage. It was years after Ella’s death before some rural Boone County residents, including Ella’s mother, were fortunate enough to have ice. No indoor plumbing meant hauling water from the nearby spring for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. Outdoor privies, cold in the winter and hot in the summer, exposed their visitors to nature’s many creatures, friendly and unfriendly alike.¹⁴

After school, Ella tended the kitchen garden with her mother and sisters. Due to their careful planning, planting, and cultivation, the family ate green beans, peas, turnip greens, radishes, onions, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, okra, potatoes, and cabbage. Her younger siblings gathered berries and picked plums and peaches. Ella loved flowers, and the skills she acquired as a vegetable gardener enabled her to grow many beautiful blooms.¹⁵

Farm women in the Ozarks occasionally traveled to a local country store to market their eggs, butter, milk, produce, and possibly their poultry. They sold or exchanged this food for goods such as coffee, flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda. They also traded goods with neighbors and shared food with needy families. Neighbors watched out for one another. It is probable that Elias and George Barham accepted their neighbors’ goods on trade in their stores.¹⁶ The practice of marketing products to a business wasn’t limited to rural areas. Eulah MacMahan Hudson, born in Boone County the same year as Ella, sold her butter and eggs to a rooming house in Harrison and her chickens to Nathan Miller, who owned a produce store in Harrison from 1907 until 1921.¹⁷

Out of necessity and to prepare her for marriage, Delilah Barham taught Ella to cook. Ella helped prepare the family’s meals. Besides breakfast, the biggest meal of the day was what they called dinner, which was served at noontime. In addition to their garden’s vegetables, the family’s diet consisted primarily of pork. Because the family lived near Crooked Creek, the Barhams also ate plenty of fish. Ella’s father and brothers were good hunters and trappers. They brought home squirrel, rabbit, deer, and wild turkey. To provide variety for a Sunday dinner, Ella’s mother caught one of her chickens, wrung its neck, dressed it, and cooked it. She taught Ella these same skills. Because of the abundance of fruit, they made cobblers and fruit pies. Also available were molasses, cornbread, buttermilk, and sassafras tea.¹⁸

Ella probably sewed in the evening. Her mother taught her to be a good seamstress. Most likely, Ella could embroider, knit, and crochet. She bought cloth and made many of her own clothes, possibly on a treadle sewing machine. She may have participated in quilting bees.¹⁹

When she wasn’t in school or working at home, Ella ran errands and visited with friends. She traveled by foot, horseback, or horse-drawn wagon. No other local method of transportation was available. Railroads and hack lines connected larger towns but didn’t help the rural folk navigate their immediate community. Cars and bicycles, exceptionally rare in the rural Ozarks, weren’t practical. Rural roads were unpaved, uneven, often muddy, and full of rocks and sometimes tree stumps, and their paths frequently led through a creek. Fording a creek was treacherous, especially after a heavy rain or in a wagon, where wheels could sink between the small stones and get stuck.²⁰

Because both Harrison and Zinc were railroad towns, trains made it possible for Ella and her family to travel to other places. On at least one occasion, the Barhams traveled to Oklahoma. However, Ella seldom journeyed farther than a few miles outside of her community to nearby towns, including Harrison.²¹

Ella’s untimely death prevented her from experiencing the dramatic improvements in education, transportation, and industry made during the twentieth century. During her short life, changes had begun to occur, but she was too young to fully understand their significance. When Ella was born, a primitive telephone exchange existed in Harrison, but her family never had a telephone in its house during her lifetime. Ella was four when the Spanish-American War began, a war in which Boone County men served, calling themselves the Clendenin Rifles. When she was six, electricity came to parts of Boone County, but there was no electricity or indoor plumbing in her home during her lifetime. Electricity didn’t reach rural Boone County residents until the late 1940s. In 1911, the year before Ella’s death, automobiles and silent movies came to Harrison, and although she may have attended a movie, she never drove a car.²²

While Ella didn’t experience much first hand, she was knowledgeable of the events of the day and kept up with the latest styles. Although it is popular to think of the Ozarks in the early twentieth century as isolated and inhabited by backward people, these Americans had opportunities to be reasonably well informed. While radio and television weren’t yet available, newspapers were, and thanks to rural postal delivery, they could be mailed to those willing to pay for the service. The Harrison Times and the Harrison Republican were printed weekly. Local newspapers were published in small nearby towns such as Berryville, Alpena, Everton, Marshall, and Yellville. Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat and Arkansas Gazette provided significant information. Kansas Davidson, the Barhams’ close neighbor, regularly received Missouri’s Joplin Globe and the Republic, and it is likely that George Barham also subscribed to newspapers. Once read, newspapers were commonly shared with neighbors, allowing others to stay informed. In 1910, most people in Boone County could read and write. In fact, people in Boone County were more literate than most people in the state. Neighbors discussed current events, as they do today.²³

Women stayed up to date with the latest home and clothing fashions and trends. Newspapers were filled with advertisements for ladies’ and men’s clothing. Mail-order catalogs from Sears, Roebuck, and Company; Montgomery Ward; E. Butterick; and the Godey’s Ladies’ Books could be mailed to interested recipients; as historian William Cronon wrote, Mail order catalogs brought city and country together by affording their readers at least a fantasy glimpse of what civilized life was like. No matter how remote the community in which one lived, no matter how limited the retail stores in one’s neighboring village, one could open the catalog and take a stroll down State Street, the richest, most glamorous retail market anywhere west of Broadway.²⁴

Nearby small towns extended the boundaries of the Pleasant Ridge community: Zinc, Pyatt, Bergman, White Oak, Bellefonte, Olvey, Yellville, Keener, Everton, and Lead Hill were a few. Not having telephones, people communicated with one another through letters, postcards, and word of mouth. For entertainment, they gathered for a dance at someone’s home or a local school, or assembled at a nearby church or school to hear a sermon. Sometimes, on special occasions, they met in Harrison, the county seat, which broadened their contact with other counties, other states, and the world at large.

Despite the hardships of rural life, Ella experienced romance and courtship, or sparking, as it was called, and she had many suitors. However, her experiences were much less sophisticated than those had by the well-to-do in places such as Newport, Connecticut, and New York City, where wealthy families with unmarried daughters sponsored and attended high-society dinners, balls, and coming-out parties. These glamorous occasions provided opportunities for unattached females to meet eligible bachelors with the goal of landing a suitable marriage partner equipped with money and status. In that regard, this wasn’t much different than life in Boone County, where people always strived to better themselves.

Nevertheless, Ella may have read about these grand occasions in the newspapers, such the 1909 marriage of Sylvia Howland, the daughter of Hetty Green (referred to as the richest woman in America), to Matthew Astor Wilks, the great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. John Jacob Astor, an extremely wealthy man in his own right, died on the Titanic three years hence, a story Ella might have followed.²⁵

Although Ella never married, and her courtship period was abruptly halted by her death, correspondence to Ella from interested suitors shines light on her romantic life as well as the religious and entertainment customs of the hill folks in the Ozarks.

2

Courting Ella

A small, tin box with a rusty, hinged lid dutifully preserved the love life of Ella Barham for 103 years. Lovingly stored and loyally guarded, Ella’s box passed from sister to sister, sister to daughter, and daughter to cousin, its existence and treasured contents seldom discussed, a secret heirloom that was rarely, if ever, shared outside of the family.¹

In this box was a collection of letters and postcards written by young men to Ella from late 1908 until shortly before her death in November 1912. A popular young woman, Ella received mail from men who lived from as close as Pleasant Ridge, Olvey, Pyatt, and Zinc to as far away as Park Hill, Oklahoma, and Waco, Texas. Beautiful postcards, each bearing a one-cent postage stamp, depicted colorful Victorian florals and delicate romantic scenes. Most letters were stored intact in their envelopes, complete with their two-cent postage stamp and postmark. Almost all correspondence was formally addressed to Miss Ella Barham and usually included a date and location. This communication was filled with the popular sayings and abbreviations of the day, such as, I am all O.K., how are you standing the time?, (meaning, what have you been doing?), ans [answer] soon, keep company with me, and Hello kid. The handwriting, in both pen and pencil, varied from clear and fluid to faded, choppy, and difficult to interpret. Fragile with age, these letters were usually written on five-by-eight-inch loose sheets, much like those found in tear-away notepads today.

For would-be suitors, this written communication served as an introduction and invitation to meet at a properly supervised location in the near future. For those men who had moved away from the area, they were indications of homesickness and, often, loneliness. In almost all cases, they spoke of courtship and romance.

Although these ornate, colorful, and uniquely illustrated postcards and heartfelt letters tell the story of a popular, flirtatious young woman surrounded by numerous admirers, they also tell the story of rural courtship and entertainment customs common in the Ozarks during this era. Their messages speak of church gatherings, Sunday visits, spelling bees, pie suppers, picnics, Christmas programs, singings, parties, and dances.

Religion and church were central to the hill folks’ way of life. If a community lacked a church building, services were held in a school.² An unsigned postcard sent to Ella in August 1909 identified Young’s School as the location for Sunday services in Pleasant Ridge. On the card’s front was inscribed, To My Darling. The back read: I was aiming to come to Young’s Sunday but didn’t get to. . .

Sunday was more than a day for worship. It was a day for rest and recreation. For adults, it was the time to visit with neighbors, gossip, and discuss farming. For the young, it was the day to court. When a girl allowed a boy to sit with her in church or walk her home afterward, it meant they were sweethearts, but if she didn’t, it was said she had slighted him.³

Ella received a postcard from someone in the community of Olvey postmarked November 30, 1908. Its front was adorned with a spray of red and yellow roses and the inscription, Ella. The young boy told Ella that she had looked awful pretty at church the previous week and asked if he could sit with her during the next service. He signed it, "You know hoo [sic] wrote this."

Most hill folks were Protestant, Baptist, Methodist, Cumberland Presbyterian, or Church of Christ. In rural areas, the preacher usually preached a long, fundamentalist message. At least once a year, a visiting evangelist was invited to hold a revival, sometimes called a protracted meeting. These events lasted anywhere from a few hours to a few days and were well attended. The evangelist’s mission was to call the sinners to God and lead the lost to Christ. Depending on his denomination, the evangelist’s methods could be quite theatrical and might elicit an unrestrained emotional response from the