Here, where brooks and branches meander southeasterly toward the Yadkin, you can walk a road now prophetically named Tom Dula Road, where you'll be mesmerized by the encircling mountains. Above you lies Laura Foster Ridge, named for the young girl who was murdered, allegedly by Tom Dula, (or Dooley) near this height of thick undegrowth. The first of the four graves—the temporary resting place of Laura foster—is on this ridge, beneath the tangle of laurel and ivy thickets. Away and down the slope is the burial place of Ann Melton, who was killed, many mountain folk believe, in retribution by God's just hand for her part in a terrible drama enacted here in Happy Valley nearly 125 years ago. Head southwest, through the foothills and you'll come upon a third grave, the final resting place for Laura foster. (Poor Laura's body was actually buried three times—once hurriedly on a hilltop where she had intended to rendezvous with and perhaps marry Tom Dula, her handsome lover; a day later on the ridge that now bears her name in a grave so shallow that some say her legs were broken to cram in her thin body; and finally in a lone grave outlined by a weathered white fence.)
The man who was hanged in 1868 for Laura's murder is buried in a family plot in the Ferguson foothills. His grave—the fourth—however, appears as solitary as the other three. Tom's stone, has been chipped and vandalized by souvenir hunters who know of Tom's demise in “The Ballad of Tom Dooley."
For a long time now. Carter has had a near obsession with this murder. She uses the tale to teach local history to school children who tour her museum. In Carter's paintings Tom is pictured as a gallant young soldier serving bravely in the Confederate Army. In portrait after portrait his smile is warm and friendly. He cuts a handsome figure striding down the road, returning from that bloody war with his fiddle in hand.
Ann, on the other hand, is shown as a sultry, but beautiful woman. Tom's lover before the war, she grew impatient and married while he was away. Now she casts a jealous eye on pretty Laura, Tom's new sweetheart. Jealousy, passion and murder—their dark story circles the walls of the Whipporwill. We see Laura ride out on her father's white mare to meet dear Tom on a hilltop and be married. We see the temptress, Ann, with her sultry eyes, as the evil source of Tom's undoing. Though the ballad—written, as legend has it, by Tom in his dark cell the night before his execution—exonerates Ann, many mountain folk believe she did the evil deed and allowed Tom to gallantly take full blame. As the paintings continue, we see Laura's father weep when his daughter's corpse is finally found. Ahead lies the courtroom and Zeb Vance's valiant effort to defend Tom and finally the stark gallows where Tom declares. "I didn't hurt a hair on the girl's head." This saga takes on a sweeping, romantic quality as it's told in the hills where families still claim ancestry to the principal players.
Actual places to visit include the four lonely grave sites, a dark cell in the Wilkesboro County Jail which housed Tom for several months until he was transferred to Statesville for his trial, a few artifacts upstairs at the Whipporwill Academy, and the old Stony Fork Road, now called Tom Dula Road, on which Tom walked toward his tragic rendezvous with Laura Foster.
West relied on an extensive account of the trial and execution printed in The New York Herald. For a New York newspaper to assign a reporter to this event indicates the sensational national coverage the murder received. The Yankee reporter characterized those involved in the crime as "ignorant, poor and depraved. A state of morality unexampled in the history of any country exists among these people, and such a general system of free loveism prevails that it is a wise child that knows its father."
If this viewpoint presents a Northern bias, recall that this was written in 1868, during the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War. Still, according to this account, the principal characters bear some resemblance, physically at least, to Edith Carter's portraits. Ann Melton is described as about 25 years old and "a most beautiful woman."
"She is entirely uneducated, and though living in the midst of depravity and ignorance has the manners and bearing of an accomplished lady."
Laura Foster is recalled as "a beautiful, but frail girl." The reporter depicts Thomas Dula as "about 25 years old, five feet 11 inches, dark eyes, dark curly hair; and though not handsome, might be called good looking. He fought gallantly in the Confederate service, where he established a reputation for bravery, but since the war closed has become reckless, demoralized and a desperado, of whom the people in his vicinity had a terror. There is everything in his expression to indicate the hardened assassin—a fierce glare of the eyes, a great degree of malignity, and a callousness that is revolting."
Pauline Foster, a cousin of Ann Melton, does not figure importantly in Carter's version of the story. But Pauline's testimony was vital to Tom's conviction. She is briefly characterized as "remarkable for nothing but debasement." As West traces the tale of Tom Dula, promiscuity figures prominently in this version of the infamous love triangle. Pauline crossed into Wilkes County from her bordering home in Watauga County in order to be treated for syphilis.
She hired out to work for Ann and James Melton, and while living in their home slept with Tom, among others. Tom, in turn, apparently had a number of sex partners, including Laura Foster and Ann Melton, with whom he slept in the presence of her husband. As the disease spread, Tom swore to kill the person who'd given him "the pock. "
Convinced that Laura was to blame, Tom arranged to have her meet him at the old Bates place on the pretense of getting married. When the horse Laura had stolen from her father didn't return, Laura's father, the aged weeping parent in an Edith Carter painting, said he'd kill Laura if he found her—all he cared about was his mare.
The evidence against Tom Dula was circumstantial. Perhaps the most incriminating fact was that he fled when ugly rumors connecting him with Laura's disappearance started circulating. Enter "Grayson" from the ballad. Dula, under the assumed name of Hall, worked for Col. James Grayson in Trade, Tennessee, for about a week before deputies from Wilkesboro, with the help of Col. Grayson, captured Tom and locked him in the Wilkesboro jail for almost two months before anyone could even prove a crime had been committed. It wasn't until early September that the corpse of Laura was found. The flesh was off her face and she had been stabbed in the left breast.
This "foul, inhuman murder" was apparently committed on May 25, 1866. On May 1, 1868, after nearly two years of appeals, Thomas Dula was hanged for the murder of Laura foster. The New York Herald reported:
By 11 a.m. dense crowds of people thronged the streets. The great number of females being somewhat extraordinary ... A gallows constructed of native pine, erected near the railroad depot, in an old field as there is no public place of execution in Statesville, was the place selected for the final tragedy ... Previously to his being taken from the jail to the gallows many of the condemned man's former companions in the army from the mountain region in which he lived appeared upon the streets ... Among them that it was generally believed he murdered the husband of a woman at Wilmington in this State, during the war, with whom he had then criminal intercourse. The opinion of all was that he was a terrible, desperate character . .. Few there pitied him, dying as they believed without a confession, and none sympathized with him ...
Unlike John Foster West, who no longer resides in Happy Valley, Carter still lives among the descendants of those involved in this tragedy. She accuses West of "wanting to make sure that everybody knows they were the trashiest people on the earth."
Regardless of which version of the Tom Dula story you subscribe to, there's no doubt as to its continuing popularity. Besides ballads, Tom has been featured in dramas, films and books. Recently his story was included in a National Geographic documentary about the Blue Ridge Parkway. Statesville developers are hoping to use Dula as a tourist attraction and a theme to help renovate the downtown area where the execution took place more than a century ago.
Carter recalls that when the song first became popular again in the '50s, "we couldn't keep a sign up to the grave. There would be so many people coming in here, I mean that hillside was covered all the time."
The footstone on Dula's grave has disappeared and reappeared over the years.
More recently the large, metal North Carolina Historical Marker giving directions to Tom's grave was stolen.
"You put one [sign] one day," Carter says, "it'd be gone by the afternoon. People just taking souvenirs."
"It was one of the three songs Frank [Proffitt] gave us the first afternoon we met him in 1938,” she writes. It was the first song he remembered hearing his father pick on a banjo. Frank's grandmother, Adeline Perdue, lived in Wilkes County and knew both Tom Dula and Laura Foster, the song's principal characters.
Frank Warner taught the song to Alan Lomax, who included it, minus the third stanza, in "Folk Song U.S.A." in 1947. By 1958, the Kingston Trio used the "folk Song U.S.A." version in a recording for Capitol Records—both on an album and as a single which sold more than three million copies. The song made the top of the hit parade.
Frank Proffitt has written about the song, which is part of the tradition of old English murder ballads (his spellings are left intact):
One can understand why a song could come from such a happening. The hills, the valley, and all combined gives one a desire to sing or tell something that's neaver been told before. It was good to think of Tom roaming as a boy here abouts in youthful innocents and of Laura following the path to the spring house for the milk crock ... I somehow think Tom will appreciate my thoughts of him. I sit as no judge by a man's grave. But allow him to exsplain the why to a merciful God.
The strange mysterious workings which has made Tom Dooly live is a lot to think about. Other like affairs have been forgotten. I feel sure you know and I don't have to exsplain that I don't ignore the lack of morals in this matter of long ago. My preference is to believe the old tale, that Tom was meek and repentant, rather than the sensational writers of that day with fiendish brazen pictures.
Tom was a personality I feel, weak, easily led. The best that could be said is he didn't conform to rules.
I have my picture, others can have theirs. For he was one of the mountain folk, and did cridit to himself singing among the homesick North Carolina Rebels during the war.
This impoverished Proffitt shared in the tragedy of Tom Dula long after Dula had surely "exsplained the why to a merciful God.” After a court proceeding concerning copyrights, Proffitt, who had since been forced to give up his unprofitable love of music and even sell his guitar, finally shared in a thin trickle of the huge royalties made by the internationally popular Kingston Trio version of "Tom Dooley."
Proffitt's ballad has carried the voice of these Carolina hills and the heart of its native folk far beyond the cradle of the fertile valley where the memory of murder is not only kept alive, but sung at family gatherings, taverns and as a sleep-song late at night, lulling children into peaceful dreams.
Chorus: Hang your head, Tom Dooley, Hang your head and cry.
Hang your head, Tom Dooley, Poor boy, you're bound to die.
I met her on the mountain,
And there I took her life.
And stabbed her with my knife.
Chorus
Hand me down my banjo,
I'll pick it on my knee.
This time tomorrow
It'll be no use to me.
This time tomorrow,
Reckon where I'll be.
If it hadn't been for Grayson,
I'd have been in Tennessee.
Down in some lonesome valley,
Hanging on a white oak tree.
"Tom Dooley"
Words and Music Collected, Adapted and Arranged by Frank Warner, John A. Lomax, and Alan Lomax from the singing of Frank Proffitt TRO-©Copyright 1947 (renewed 1975) and 1958 Ludlow Music, Inc.. New York, NY. Used by Permission.