Inherit the Land

Chapter 9
Scandal

We understand that you have proposed to your wife that you will return home if she will bring her two oldest daughters home and let you satisfy your carnal appetite upon them.
—MARVIN INDIGNATION MEETING, 1890

In late February 1890, Frank and Arkanta Crane were in Greenwood, South Carolina, when he told her that when they returned to Marvin, he wanted to sleep with her daughter. Arkanta left him and went home, one hundred fifteen miles away.

That evening, Frank ran into a Marvin neighbor, Turner Rodgers, who asked why Arkanta went home without him.

“I told her I wanted to sleep with her girls – the two oldest,” Frank explained.

Turner was shocked: “Was her complaint that you wanted to sleep with them to take care of them or to gratify your evil nature?”

“Because I wished to gratify my evil nature,” Frank admitted.

The scandal built in Marvin for months. Some whispered that the frequent liaisons had produced a baby Jennie carried in secret and, when she was born, Frank threw her down a well. Matters came to a head in May, when Arkanta sent Dr. Rone a note asking him to intervene with her unrepentant husband. He gathered the neighbors at his home, where they composed a letter to Frank:

“We, the undersigned citizens of Marvin vicinity, do hereby this day, this the 28th day of May, 1890, have decided that you F. S. Crane by your conduct have brought shame and reproach upon your family, and we have decided that we will tolerate it no longer, unless you change your manner of living and treatment to your wife and children if we have to appeal to the laws of our land to do so.

“We understand that you have proposed to your wife that you will return home if she will bring her two oldest daughters home and let you satisfy your carnal appetite upon them. (Signed by witnesses Thomas J. Ezzell, J.J. Rone, and others, L.A. Helms, W.J. Stephenson, G.W. Howey, William McIlwaine, S.P. Durant, Jeff McIlwaine, C.C. McIlwaine.)”

Following the biblical injunction to confront the wrongdoer with “two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established,” they commissioned Rone and Ezzell to hold an indignation meeting with Crane the next day. He admitted to keeping Jennie for three or four years, but not her younger sister Margaret.

“I am sixty-five years old,” Ezzell told Crane, “and this is the meanest thing I have ever known a man to be guilty of, Black or white.”

“Well,” Crane shrugged. “It’s the only mean thing you could bring against me.”

Two days later, Crane signed over the Crane Dwelling and Store tract to Dennis, Sallie, and Maggie Ross for five hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents plus the cancellation of the four-hundred-fifty-dollars they loaned him just four months earlier but made no payments. The Rosses agreed to rent the space to the Cranes so they did not have to move immediately.

A few weeks later, Arkanta changed course. She sent a letter to her lawyer in Monroe, denying the charges against Frank and asking the lawyer to initiate a prosecution of the men who were ill-treating her husband. Meanwhile, Frank and his allies pressed a rumor that Dr. Rone, not Frank, had been carrying on with Jennie Helms.

The personal indignity compounded Dr. Rone’s disgust at his neighbor, patient, fellow church member, and onetime friend. A decade earlier, he had provided the energetic young merchant and postmaster a small building on his land for his home, store, and postal station. Now Frank had betrayed the whole community with his unspeakably depraved lechery – and then sought to deflect his sin onto the righteous doctor, to the shame of Mary Lavinia and their young daughters.

On the day before Independence Day, with much of the community crowded into the post office and store ahead of the holiday weekend, Dr. Rone had had enough. He snatched a horsewhip from the display and thrashed Crane mercilessly until T.J. Ezzell intervened. The justice of the peace charged Dr. Rone with assault and battery and collected a fine.

In August, Frank filed a civil suit against Dr. Rone asking for five thousand dollars in damages for the horsewhipping – not so much the physical harm but especially the humiliation in front of the whole community in broad daylight. Indeed, the neighbors whispered that Dr. Rone had whipped Frank earlier, one evening at twilight at the bridge over Sixmile Creek, but he brought no charges to keep that humiliation private. Frank was represented by some of the leading lawyers in the county, including D.A. Covington and H.B. Adams of Monroe. When Rone was arrested, he posted a two-thousand-five-hundred-dollar bond with T.J. Ezzell’s help.

In January 1891, Frank Crane sold eight acres, including the Tipton place and land he had bought from Leander Helms, to the Rosses for three hundred dollars. The next month, a grand jury in Monroe convened to investigate Frank Crane and Jennie Helms for fornication and adultery. The jury indicted the two, calling them “lewd and lascivious persons.”

“On June 1, 1890, and on divers other days and times, before and since that day, at and in said county, unlawfully did associate bed and cohabit together, and then and there did commit fornication and adultery…against the peace and dignity of the State,” they charged. T.J. Ezzell, Dr. Rone, Nellie Gilmore, Bob Stevens, Cowser Potts, Perry Wolfe, and Will Godfrey, who were sworn and examined, endorsed the charge; Jennie Ardrey, Dallas Stevens, Mary McIlwaine, Jenny Garrison, and C.C. McIlwaine endorsed but were not sworn and examined.

Later that month, J.J. and Mary Lavinia moved to Pineville, ten miles away in Mecklenburg County, and took out a home mortgage of one thousand six hundred fifty dollars. He became a trustee of Pineville High School where his daughter would attend. They sold five tracts of their Marvin land, including their grand home, to Mizzle B. Williamson, who had taken Frank’s place as postmaster, for two thousand seven hundred fifty dollars.

On August 23, the body of an infant girl was discovered in a well on the Williamson land, confirming the rumors while attempting to frame Rone for the death, since it had been his land. Two weeks later, the coroner’s inquest determined that the baby was murdered – her neck was broken – but no charges were filed.

Meanwhile, the cases of State v. F.S. Crane and Jennie Helms and F.S. Crane v. J.J. Rone were working their way through the courts. Dr. Rone argued that the criminal fine he paid for the horsewhipping was sufficient punishment and he owed Crane nothing. His trial was scheduled for the September session of Union County Superior Court session, but Judge W.A. Hoke postponed it because Dr. Rone could not find Turner Rogers or Perry Wolfe.

State v. F.S. Crane and Jennie Helms came up during that same session. On September 21, prosecutors dropped the charges against Jennie Helms. Frank Crane pleaded not guilty. T.J. Ezzell testified about the day he and Dr. Rone went to the indignation meeting, and Dr. Rone read the community’s letter. Two others testified that Frank told them he had been bedding Jennie for two or three years. Frank took the stand in his own defense and denied everything. The charge, the judge told the jury, was based not on one, two, or three incidents but on a longstanding, unrepented habit of illicit s*x. The next day, the twelve men on the jury issued their verdict: Guilty. Judge Hoke ordered Frank to serve fifteen months in jail for his crime. Frank appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court and, with J.S. DeLaney, posted the required fifty-dollar bond. On May 3, 1892, the Supreme Court upheld Frank’s conviction, four to one, with Justice Alphonso C. Avery dissenting.

At the September 1892 term of Union County Superior Court, while Frank was in jail, Dr. Rone asked for a change of venue to Anson County. He did not believe he could get an impartial jury in Union County because, among other things, Frank’s relatives and friends had conducted a petition drive for his pardon that gained one thousand five hundred signatures. Frank claimed that number was wildly inflated and said he was too poor to pay for witnesses and counsel to travel to Wadesboro for a trial, but the judge ordered the removal and set a date of May 1893.

Before the trial, Dr. Rone claimed that Crane’s brothers, W.R. Crane and S.A. Crane, who had posted his plaintiff bond, were insolvent and Dr. Rone would be unable to collect what he was due. The judge ordered Frank to demonstrate his ability to pay.

At the trial, Frank’s lawyers put Jennie on the stand and asked whether she had a child before the day Dr. Rone horsewhipped her stepfather. “Yes,” she said. Who was the father of that child? “Dr. Rone.” Dr. Rone’s lawyers vehemently object; when the judge overruled them, they took exception.

The jury awarded Frank one thousand six hundred dollars, but the judge declared the amount excessive and scheduled a retrial for April 1894. That jury awarded one thousand two hundred dollars. When the new judge did not set aside the verdict, Dr. Rone vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, but he did not follow through. His life and Frank’s were moving in different directions.

On April 22, 1892, Rone’s three-thousand-dollar house in Pineville burned to the ground; two horses worth five hundred dollars each escaped the barn and were killed by a train. On September 14, 1893, everything he owned was sold to pay his debts, so far as it would go, to six tiers of creditors, including his home mortgage, a building and loan firm, and fourteen hundred dollars he owed his wife.

On April 25, 1896, the Rones moved to Doe Run, Missouri, where he became physician for a mining firm. Their daughter Annabel died at nineteen on February 28, 1899. Dr. Rone died on September 8, 1899, and was buried next to Annabel in Missouri. Mary Lavenia and Blanche returned to North Carolina.

Just before the scandal broke In February 1890, Frank Crane borrowed four hundred fifty dollars from the Rosses. About three months later, he had made no payments, so he sold them nine acres, including the Crane Store and Dwelling, for the debt and another five hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents. The next year, he sold them eight acres, including the Tipton house.

In 1892, the Rosses bought Dr. Rone’s mansion from W.D. Taylor and R.L. White, who had bought it from Mizzle B. Williamson. Williamson, who had bought it from Dr. Rone, was postmaster of Poortith for almost a year starting in November 1891. Dennis, Sallie, and Maggie brought with them Mittie Bell Ross, the daughter of Bob Ross, the Black man their mother had brought into the home in 1875 when he was five years old.