Earlier this year I posted this story to a different blog. The story is mine, except for the parts attributed to Miles Gardner’s book.
Several years ago as I was wandering around I visited the cemetery at Flat Creek Baptist Church.
In the cemetery are a lot of distant relatives. Some by blood, some by marriage. We’re all related one way or another here. I’m probably related to you if you’re reading this, in some way or fashion.
My family has known Gardner’s all our lives. I actually knew Amzie Gardner, mentioned in the story below, long ago when I was a boy. We called him Uncle Amzie. He was ancient to me then as he was a very old man. I wish I’d had the thirst for stories then that I do now.
Back to my part of this story. I found an interesting tombstone and I wondered for years what the rest of the story was (as Andy Rooney would have said), today I finally pieced stone and paper together completing a puzzle.
I’ve had the answer just off to my right on a bookcase all these years.
It would make you wonder as well.
From “Murder and Mayhem in Old Kershaw” by Miles Gardner
The Bill Gardner Murder Case
I guess I told a “tale” when i said my grandmother Roberts and her family held “the mother of all grudges” against the Meltons for killing Uncle George Cato. Because surely the most vitriolic hatred I have ever witnessed came from my Gardner relatives over the death of their brother, William Stewart “Bill” Gardner. Maybe this was because my grandmother and her brothers and sister and cousins were only nieces and nephews to Uncle George, whereas I knew many of Uncle Bill Gardner’s sisters and brothers. For them all, 1902 was like yesterday.
Uncle Bill was the sixth child of fifteen born to my great-grandparents, Isaac and Mary Ann “Mollie” Baker Gardner. He was handsome and spoiled, with sandy blond hair and a fiery but endearing disposition. At age twenty, in August 1901, he married Sallie Williams.
William Shelton Gardner
She was an eighteen-year-old who had lost her mother at age three and who had been reared by her father, Joseph Seaborn Williams, and his second wife, who had been her late mother’s sister. Both of Williams’s wives had been daughters of Lewis Phillips, supposed murderer of Steve Sowell.
From the start, that marriage went wrong. Sallie was in an advanced state of pregnancy when they wed, and evidently Bill was coerced into marrying her.
Their child, a girl baby, was born on 10 January 1902. People began telling Uncle Bill that this child was not his and that Sallie had ensnared him; his own family seems to have encouraged him against his wife, and his drinking problem worsened.
At that time he was running a little country store and probably doing some farming too. Anyway, one day he and Sallie had a big falling out, and he left and went to stay with his oldest brother and my grandfather, John Sumter Gardner, down on Sandy Run. Grandpa was working there at a sawmill (he was a blacksmith) and got Uncle Bill a job.
During the time he was away, he got several letters from relatives and friends here in Buffalo and at the Haile Gold Mine. These were later produced at the trial and throw some light on his character and feelings as well as the events then transpiring. He was writing them too, eager for news of home. A niece later said that he was desperately hoping to reconcile with Sallie, so perhaps he did love her despite his family’s animosity toward her and her relatives. His older brother, George, wrote to say that all was well and that the family, including their mother, were satisfied about Bill’s leaving and hoped he would wait a while before coming back. He said, “she took her things and yours too” and went back to her father’s.
He volunteered to go to Seabor “Sebe” Williams’s house and get Bill’s things if he wanted him to. He ended by asking Bill not to drink.
Uncle Bill’s first cousin, Francis Marion Gardner at Haile Gold Mine, wrote him in reply to a letter he had just received. “I will tell you all I know-not much. Sallie stayed to George Broome’s Monday night and moved Tuesday. T heard Mr. Williams say you’d be back in a few days. I heard bad news since you left don’t know if it’s a fact. I did not think you was right Sunday night but do now. If I was you I wouldn’t come back for awhile. Be a good boy and don’t drink none.” Perhaps the bad news Mation had trouble believing was that Sallie’s child was not Bill’s.
Minnie Wilkerson Gardner, Marion’s wife, also wrote to Bill. Her letter told him that his sister, Sallie, had visited her that day and that all were satisfied about the separation. “Old Man Seaborn Williams’s folks is rarin. Sallie has sold your store to Sam Williams and she is got the rest of your things. Bill, you done just rite in leaving and if I was you I wouldn’t never go where she could see me more. Mr. Williams said he paid $10 for the store. Your mother said she didn’t want you to come back.”
Well, of course he did go back after just three weeks. On Saturday, March Ist, he came home and told his mother he had made up his mind to see Sallie and get her to go back to Sandy Run with him. He said he would do all he could for Sallie and the baby. After luncheon at his parents’ house, Uncle Bill got his brother George to walk with him over to the Williams place, which was down in the woods behind where the Tom Holden house is now in Buffalo community. The Isaac Gardner family lived just south of them, on the west side of the present John Gardner Road. Bill left Uncle George at the gate and went down to where his wife was and talked with her. Afterwards the two brothers went to their sister Abigail’s; she had married John Franklin Williams in 1900, one of Seaborn’s sons.
Family stories say that Aunt Abby had earlier carried a note or notes from Uncle Bill to Sallie but that the Williams family would not let her go to him. When they left their sister’s, Bill gave George his pistol and suggested they go home a nearer way through a new ground. Then he said he wanted to go the old road and see Sallie, that “I mind to tell her one more word.” That was a fatal decision.
As they came up in the path near Williams’s barn, Sallie’s brother Wylie Aaron Williams appeared about fifteen yards off with a gun pointed down but with fingers at the trigger. Bill told George they should have gone the other way and added, “he is mad, I know.” Aaron walked up to about five paces from them, and they noticed that his gun was cocked. He said, “Bill Gardner, what you mean by boasting round here you God damned low down rascal?” “Nothing in the world, Aaron,” Bill replied, “I will throw up my hands.” “Throw them up and God damn you,” was Aaron’s response. About that time Seaborn Williams came up, carrying a “big stick resembling a handstick.” Seaborn himself testified that he heard gunshots just as he came in sight of these man, standing in the back of his lot. But George Gardner testified that Mr. Williams came up saying to Bill, “Yes, you been round here all the evening.”
(I suppose I should tell any younger readers or non-southerners that “evening” is what we used to call “afternoon.”)
As he said that, Aaron fired his gun, and Bill, who had been standing with hands up, fell over against a stump— as if he had fainted. Seaborn Williams then asked George Gardner “what the hell I had to do with it, and I told him nothing at all.” Aaron then said, “Bring me the other gun.” Bill was lying on his face and had no arms other than a broken blade knife. George maintained that both he and Bill had tried to make peace with the Williams men. “I asked Old Man Williams to help me to make peace, and he said, ‘God damn you, you have been round here all the evening’” George said, “I did not examine my brother after he fell or go close to him.” Mr. Williams told George Gardner to leave.
According to Williams “he jumped back and jerked out his pistol and shot three or four shots at Aaron.”
Then we all separated.
The whole encounter look only about ten minutes
A rain commenced, and Bill was taken into the Williams house. He was shot twice, once in the face, just under the nose, and that blast tore away his lower and anterior jaw, passed up and back through the nasal cavity and into the brain. The other shot went into his chest between the third and fourth ribs and penetrated the right lung. He was still conscious, though, and able to speak with his mother when she arrived. His one request of her was that she have him buried beside his father’s oldest brother, William Ransom Gardner, a veteran of the Mexican War who had died just over a year before.
“Have me buried beside Old Mexico, and I want you buried next (to me),” he said. Soon after (eight or ten hours after being shot, according to the Camden paper), Uncle Bill died and was buried at Flat Creek church in Lancaster county, the old Gardner home church. His tombstone is locally famous, as it depicts two hands raised and open, and the inscription tells onlookers that he was “Killed with his hands up while pleading for his life.”
Inscription
My grandfather, John Gardner, made a complaint against the Williams’s, and a warrant was issued on 3 March for their arrest. Next day both father and son appeared before a magistrate, and they were remanded into custody. Seaborn Williams applied for a writ of habeas corpus on the 10th, saying that he took no part by word or deed “but meant to stop the fuss.” He did admit to having carried a small stick.
But our family lore says that when he came up to Aaron and the Gardners, Bill was begging for his life, and Aaron dropped his gun. Then Mr. Williams told Aaron, “if you don’t do what I told you, I will do it myself.” His bail was set at $1,500 on the 12th, and he was released on bond on the 13th. He never came to trial. Aaron’s bail was set at $3,500 on 24 June. It had been reported on the 14th that he was ill in jail with a severe case of measles.
Meanwhile three different inquests were held over the body, on March 2, 5 and 7. Dr. W.C. Twitty testified at the first, presided over by Magistrate J.T. Cauthen, about the cause of death and described the wounds. On the 5th, Magistrate J.M. Sowell as acting coroner conducted an inquest at Flat Creek church, considered necessary because the first had occurred outside Magistrate Cauthen’s territorial jurisdiction.
But the big event was the third inquest and exhumation and autopsy of the body conducted by Dr. R.S.
Beckham, assisted by Dr. Robert C. Brown, on the 7th. This was a regular fete champetre for the local men. Cousin Sammie was there and described it in detail to mea vast crowd, all male, gathered to watch the body of a young man killed almost a week before carved up like a slaughtered animal.
I remember his saying the doctor took a medical saw and sawed off the top of Uncle Bill’s skull but wish I had had a tape recorder there, as it’s difficult remembering everything after forty years.
Eugene D. Blakeney and William D. Trantham were attorneys for the defense, and Capt. M.L. Smith acted for the prosecution. The case was responsible for a second tragic death, this time of a gifted and attractive young woman, Sallie Baker. She was my grandmother’s oldest sister and was twenty-five in1902. Because she had heard her first cousin, Aaron Williams’s wife Annie, say something about the animosity of the Williams family toward Bill Gardner, she was called to testify in Camden. While staying in town, she bought a bolt of purple flowered cloth to make a dress for her young sister, my grandmother.
Unfortunately she picked up something else in Camden that hot week in August-typhoid fever-and died soon after returning home. I still have the dress that was made from that cloth (though it’s completely white now) and one of Aunt Sallie’s books, “Kellogg’s Higher Lessons in English” (1893).
As often happens in the aftermath of domestic tragedy, almost all parties came to bad ends. George Gardner and his brother Tom never married, perhaps warned off it by Bill’s sad experience of wedded “bliss.” Brother Amzie Gardner kept the vest Bill had been wearing at the time he was killed for years; it had a bullet hole and powder burns. Aaron Williams was sentenced to life at hard labor on 11 September 1903 but was released in 1911 and died in obscurity in 1939. He had been married to his own first cousin, Sarah Anne “Annie” Phillips (who was also my grandmother Roberts’s first cousin and a daughter of Wesley Phillips). But after his crime they no longer lived together, and she resumed her maiden name after giving birth to a daughter in 1906. The Williams family saw a certain wisdom in moving to Rock Hill and later to Westville, where Seaborn Williams died in 1909, still just fifty-nine years old. John Williams and his wife, born Abigail Gardner, never got along with each other or with each other’s families after that. They moved to the Lancaster Mill Village, and there are still people who remember what a termagant she was to him, screaming imprecations that could be heard by all the neighbors round. His death in 1938 no doubt came as a gift from Heaven. Poor Sallie, who looks thin but attractive in the picture I’ve seen of her, ended up in the Hermitage Mill Village in Camden, where she contracted pellagra about 1910 and died at age thirty-two in 1915. Her death certificate lists her age as forty, and the informant was a relative, so she must have had an awful life. She did not remarry or have other children, and after her death her daughter, Ada Victoria, had a difficult childhood. But her appearance was a great vindication for Sallie and Bill’s thwarted love and an indictment of all those who were too quick to gossip and assign blame. Because anyone who ever saw Vickie Gardner Blackwell or her children knew that she was ALL GARDNER.
And that’s a long and satisfying if sad tale to end a search of over six years for me.
The actual incident took place probably not more than a mile from my house and I probably know the descendants of everyone involved in the story.
Miles Gardners book Murder and Mayhem in Old Kershaw can be found at AbesBooks.com.
S – 1/28/25 19:22
Searching The South 