‘A hoot’ or ‘indefensible’? Town holds mock hanging By Emily Foxhall
Event celebrating Coldspring heritage disturbs historians
COLDSPRING — Some 60 people gathered in the rain Saturday, in front of the live oak tree. A long rope tied with a noose dangled from its branches. The crowd waited for the woman sentenced to be hanged.
“Oh look,” a mom said to her three children, turning to look to the left. “Here she comes.”
Welcome to Heritage Days in Coldspring, a rural community tucked between Lake Livingston and the Sam Houston National Forest, an hour’s drive north of Houston.
Roughly 1,000 people live here. Eighty percent are white and 20 percent are black. And, for each of the last five years, a group of them gather to remember their history with a mock hanging — complete with costumes, scripts and posters.
“We do it up right,” organizer Dale Everitt, 75, says.
It’s a tradition that delights many in a place that, as one resident pointed out, has no zoo or theater for entertainment. Everitt and others hope it is a fun and educational event that reminds people of how Texas once was, and prompts them to re-examine how things are today.
But, as viewed by several historians, holding the hanging is a perplexing — if not downright disturbing — decision.
To Karlos Hill, chair of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, the re-enactment is indefensible and tone-deaf. On the same day as the event, he was scheduled to lecture about lynching at the nearby Sam Houston State University. For others to find entertainment in
such a brutal part of history, he thought, shows a lack in understanding.
“What is the value of reenacting the last moments of someone’s life or actually trying to demonstrate what an actual hanging would have been like?” Hill posed. “What is the value in that?”
First, a wedding
The day’s affairs began a few minutes past 11 a.m., with a shotgun wedding. The setting was Old Town Coldspring, a grassy area near the former jail, where various other historic buildings — such as a post office and schoolhouse — were moved, making for a sort of museum theme park.
Volunteers open the buildings for tours one or two Saturdays a month, and other town events involve the locale throughout the year, including a haunted jail for Halloween and town lighting for Christmas.
Actors in layered period clothes that morning assembled in the muggy weather on an old store porch. A woman named Nelly was to be wed to Festus, whether either of them wanted to be married or not.
“Please allow me to set the scene for you,” the announcer began, bringing jovial crowd back to 1870, when Texas was rejoining the Union after the Civil War.
Everitt, the event organizer, assumed the role of the Rev. B. Moore Pious. Many of those acting alongside him were fellow members of the American Legion. He had a long connection to the area; the building where they stood was where his grandparents married nearly a century before.
As the reverend, Everitt described a state even then wary of immigrants and unwilling to grant women equal rights. (One character was a male German immigrant dressed in a woman’s disguise.) There was some reading of Scripture. A joke about politics. And then the couple was married.
“I may now pronounce you man and wife,” Everitt said.
The woman threw off her bonnet. The sheriff had shoved the handcuffed man forward. The crowd applauded.
Joe and Pam MacDonald of Livingston got up from their camping chairs. They had never heard of the event before they saw it in the newspaper this year. But they knew of other towns with similar history-focused days; that same night, they planned to go to a storytelling event in another town.
“We’re into the history of this whole area,” said Joe, 74. “That was great.”
They stood, held hands and followed the crowd toward the hanging tree.
Re-enactment debate
In the past organizers “hanged” white men. This year, it was a white woman, accused, among other charges, of voting and preaching while dressed like a man. Hers was a made-up story based loosely on research.
Debra Elledge agreed to play the part. She hadn’t known that women were among those hanged. Immediately, she said she was willing. Like her character, Elledge is a preacher. And like her character, she too gets questions about whether women should really preach.
“It’s history,” Elledge said. “If we don’t let people know what our history is, then … history repeats itself.”
Several historians, though, argued that re-enactments may say more about current times than offer accurate representations of the past.
“We’re inventing something that fits our modern-day needs and desires,” said Benjamin Park, assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. “The more they use actual historical sources and scholarly repositories of information, and less that they’re drawn more from cultural baggage and contemporary partisan debate, the better.”
Walter Buenger, of the University of Texas, shared this skepticism. Usually, he said, re-enactments are bad history. In this case, it’s also potentially disrespectful, both to women and African-Americans, he said.
And then there was the strangeness of it.
“That seems like a very odd way to acquaint people with history,” said Patricia Bernstein, on first hearing the idea. Bernstein wrote a book about a lynching in Waco. The new memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which recognizes black victims of lynching, seemed to her a better way to commemorating that history.
And yet, in Coldspring, Dorothy Donahoe, a member of the county historical commission who is black, said she supported the event. She thought it was history that was important to face.
“I thought it was a hoot,” said David Brandon, 65. “They’re really hilarious, and people get a kick out of it. It’s not in some people’s world probably politically correct, but it’s not meant to be one side or the other, or adversarial. It’s kind of meant to open up eyes.”
‘Is she really dead?’
As the minutes pushed toward noon, Elledge, 46, arrived on horseback, dressed in men’s clothes. Her long hair fell down her back. A judge read her crimes. Two men adjusted the rope around her neck.
It was quiet. Again, Everitt offered a prayer.
“She didn’t follow the laws,” he said to the drenched crowd. “She chose to go her own way.”
A choir began to sing. It happened quickly: The horse was taken from underneath her. Elledge, supported in a hidden harness, jerked her body, then, with eyes closed, went still.
“Is she really dead?” a 9-yearold, standing with her two other siblings, asked her mother, Misty Douglas.
Douglas was white, but her husband, the children’s father, was black. She thought the event would help open their eyes to history. But she said she was glad the victim wasn’t a black person.
“It’s fake,” she reassured her daughter. “She’s still alive.”
The mother expected there would be more questions once they got back to the car.
They went to say hello to Elledge, who smiled from her coffin.