The recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, remembers more than four thousand African American victims of racial terror lynchings. The Memorial’s main exhibit consists of steel columns that are engraved with the names of United States counties and identify lynching victims and dates of death. [1] The memorial column for Jackson County, Florida, lists nine names, included well-known victims of racial terror Claude Neal and Cellios Harris. The list for Jackson County, however, is headed by the obscure name of John R. Ely, Jr., with the corresponding date of December 13, 1891. Ely’s background likely makes him unique among the thousands of names commemorated at the National Memorial: he was white, the son of a Confederate officer, and grandson of two of the wealthiest land and slave owners in ante-bellum Florida. Ely’s murder was brutal, but his death was most certainly not a racial terror lynching. Instead, accounts of the extra-judicial murder of John R. Ely, Jr., tell a different story of the late nineteenth century, law-defying Alabama-Florida borderland where ruthless moonshiners held sway.
If anyone could claim the distinction of panhandle aristocracy, it was John R. Ely, Jr. On the eve of the Civil War, his father, John Randolph Ely, Sr., and his widowed grandmother shared ownership of 2500 acres and 101 slaves in Jackson County, Florida. Captain John R. Ely, Sr. served the Confederate cause as adjutant of Florida’s 6thInfantry regiment under Florida’s famed General Jesse J. Finley. During the war, John, Sr., married Susan Baker, the daughter of James L. G. Baker, also from Jackson County. The Elys were wealthy by any standard, but they were surpassed by the Bakers: the 1860 census lists John Sr.’s father-in-law as the second wealthiest man in the county and owner of more than 130 enslaved people.
John R. Ely, Jr., did not inherit his family’s fabulous wealth. The only son of John Sr. and Susan was born in 1867. After the Confederate surrender, the Ely family fell on hard times and did not recover from the loss of their slaves to Emancipation and much of their land to tax forfeiture sales. The early Reconstruction years were bitter for John Sr. He associated with the Regulators who wielded violence and terror to suppress black and Republican aspirations for political leadership in Jackson County. Many people, perhaps one hundred, mostly African Americans, were murdered during the “Jackson County War” that peaked from 1869 through 1871. John Sr. was suspected as the assassin of county clerk John Q. Dickinson, detested by local whites as a “carpetbagger” Republican who promoted the political rights of African Americans and speculated in land. The murder of Dickinson shortly followed the clerk’s announcement of the sale of Ely lands at tax auction.
Little is known of John Jr.’s life before his name burst into the regional press except that the young man was employed as a clerk in various operations in Greenwood, Florida, and worked for William G. Holloway, a merchant who ran an establishment near the Alabama border. In mid- December 1891, the New Orleans Times-Democratinformed readers that “John R. Ely who is highly connected and about twenty-five years of age was forcibly seized, bucked and gagged and thrown into a wagon and driven away from Greenwood, in Jackson county.” The article identified William G. Holloway and Sebe Espy as the alleged captors. [2].
William G. Holloway operated a mill by a pond along the Florida-Alabama border where sources suggest he was involved in an illegal distillery. One newspaper account summed up Holloway as “a man of violent temper and desperate character, especially when under the influence of liquor, which was not an infrequent occurrence” and alleged that he was “connected with several murders, but he always managed to escape punishment.” Sebe Espy, who went by several aliases, and whose name was creatively spelled in various sources, lived near Holloway and was described by the same reporter as a “professional murderer.” (New Orleans Time Democrat, Dec. 15, 1891).
The provocation for Ely’s seizure was consistently, but skeptically, reported in several accounts. Late on the night of December 3, 1891, thirteen-year-old Ruth Holloway cried out that a stranger had entered her bedroom. With the household alarmed, the invader escaped through a window before Ruth’s father, William G. Holloway, arrived. Initially, a black man was suspected and seized but he was released after providing a credible alibi. For reasons never explained, suspicion next turned to John R. Ely, Jr. Holloway and Espy searched for Ely at Gordon in south-east Alabama, and then scoured north-east Jackson County, Florida, until they found him in Greenwood, Florida, on Wednesday, December 9th, where they abducted Ely at the point of Holloway’s Winchester rifle.
Holloway and Espy brought Ely before a justice of the peace on the charge of attempted assault of Holloway’s daughter. The justice appointed Henry Simmons and Choice Adams as special constables to guard Ely. The four men then took Ely to Holloway’s store on the Alabama-Florida line. According to the lurid account offered at the preliminary hearing a few weeks later, another man, Buck Hall, then appeared. Adams and Simmons claimed that they were forced by Hall, Holloway and Espy to take Ely to a barroom that Holloway owned over the Alabama line. Adams and Simmons testified that as they were walking, one on each side of Ely, on the dam at Holloway’s mill, someone shot Ely from behind, killing him instantly. “Holloway then made Simmons go with him and get shovels, etc. and help bury Ely.” [Pensacola News, December 16, 1891; Savannah Morning News, January 8, 1892]
In the meantime, Ely’s family and friends had grown increasingly concerned over the young man’s disappearance and organized an armed posse to search for him. The exact timeline is murky, but the posse was likely recruited and dispatched on December 11th, two days after the kidnapping. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 13th the posse of forty men arrived at Holloway’s mill (one account says a group had previously surveilled the area where Holloway threatened them, raising suspicion). According to one account, as the men searched Holloway’s property and considered diverting water to search the millpond, “a hidden voice cried: ‘Look under the lumber.’ None of the party had made the remark and the source from which came the mysterious voice is still unknown.” Under a large lumber pile, the men found Ely dead, covered in sawdust “with a rope around his neck, sitting in an upright position, in a hastily dug hole.” He had been shot and beaten. [Atlanta Constitution, January 14, 1892]
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As the men carried Ely’s corpse to a wagon, Holloway emerged from hiding brandishing his Winchester rifle while “threatening and cursing the crowd.” Holloway signaled to his concealed friends and began firing toward the posse which returned fire and shot Holloway dead. “Both parties finally separated without further bloodshed.” Posting an armed rearguard, the posse withdrew to Greenwood with the body but without suspects for trial. Ibid.
Florida’s Governor Fleming offered a $400 reward to bring in Ely’s killers. Choice Adams, one of the purported guards, was arrested in Alabama and brought to Marianna for a preliminary hearing in early January 1892. Henry Simmons, the other guard, appeared as a state’s witness but during the course of the hearing was arrested as a suspect. The preliminary hearing lasted four days and drew great popular attention. It was noted that Choice Adams was the brother of the “celebrated Bill Adams, who has been charged with so many murders and other crimes in this and other counties.” Bill Adams had been arrested and held in Marianna two years earlier when an armed band of his friends broke into the jail and released him. There was some talk of preempting any such similar prison break by lynching Choice Adams, but no such “effort in either direction was made” as many armed men guarded the premises. At the end of the hearing, both Adams and Simmons were ordered to be held without bail pending trial. Pensacola NewsJanuary 9. 1892; Savannah Morning News, January 11, 1892.
Shortly after the preliminary hearing, a correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution who visited Marianna confidently reported that Ruth Holloway had denied that Ely ever entered her room. Ruth certainly knew John Ely, Jr. from his work at her father’s store and his previously living in the area, perhaps even in the Holloway home, and she certainly could identify him. Instead, the reporter noted, it was suspected that Ely “knew too much about illicit whisky-making and other crimes of which the Holliway [sic] gang are guilty….and [an] excuse was invented to kill him.” This intriguing conclusion, however, appears in no other sources. Atlanta Constitution, January 14, 1892.
The grand jury issued charges for murder against Buck Hall, Henry Simmons, Choice Adams, and Sebe Espy, with trials scheduled for Hall, Simmons and Adams during the circuit court session in mid-June 1892. Buck Hall had been arrested but Espy remained at large. State’s attorney, William H. Milton., Sr. - son of Florida’s Civil War governor and as patrician a figure as still lived in the panhandle - prosecuted the cases assisted by prominent attorney (and later Florida Supreme Court justice) Benjamin S. Liddon, and Capt. Ely’s friend Col. Hammond from Thomasville, Georgia, who had offered a $400 reward for Espy’s arrest. Defense counsel R. H. Walker of Columbia, Alabama, had obtained a severance of the trials from the court, and Buck Hall was up first. A reporter breathlessly insisted that “(n)ever in the annals of this county has so much interest been manifested in a criminal trial as in this one.” Savannah Morning News, June 14, 1892.
The three successive trials lasted the rest of June and extended into the first week of July. The jury found Buck Hall “guilty without recommendation for mercy” but acquitted Adams and Simmons. These results were expected. Adams, despite the reputation of his brother, was “reputed as a friend of Ely, and Ely having implored him to remain with him” during his captivity. The prosecution failed to convince the jury that Adams had taken part in Ely’s murder. The reasons for Simmons’ acquittal are not stated but probably similar. Buck Hall was sentenced to be hanged but was held pending his appeal to Florida’s Supreme Court. Hall gained his freedom the following March when the state Supreme Court overturned the jury’s finding Hall guilty for the reason that the jury’s verdict had not specified the degree of homicide for which Hall was convicted as was required by statute. Pensacola News, July 1, July 7, 1892, March 18, 1893; Buck Hall v. Florida, Florida Supreme Court, vol. 31, p. 176, 1893.
Holloway was gone from the scene but moonshining – and violence - continued in the vicinity of his old still. In April 1893, Deputy Sheriff Pope Gray tried to serve a two-year-old warrant for the arrest of Andrew Ferguson for operating an illicit distillery with an accomplice Thad Coonrod. A bloody shootout among five men ensued resulting in Deputy Gray’s death. Ferguson and Coonrod escaped into nearby Alabama. The story of the shootout and Gray’s tragic end are reported in dramatic detail in the Pensacola News. Pensacola News, April 25, 1893.
The Ferguson-Coonrod incident is relevant to the Ely story because of events that ensued a few weeks later after Coonrod was arrested in Alabama and brought to Marianna for trial. During Choice Adams’ trial for the murder of John R. Ely, Jr., a year earlier, Ben Tarver served as a guard. The story is convoluted, but during the Ely trial, John Quincy Adams, Choice’s younger brother, got into a dispute with Ben Tarver, possibly related to allegations that a couple of Adams bothers (there were seven all told) had intimidated witnesses set to testify against Choice. In late May, possibly related to the Coonrod trial and the re-trial of Buck Hall, the smoldering dispute between John Q. Adams and Tarver ignited and descended into a brutal fistfight which ended with John Q. Adams severely beating Ben Tarver until Jim Adams intervened to stop the altercation. The Adams brothers now also accompanied by another brother, Wright Adams, who, not surprisingly, was in the “bar business” near Crosby (cross-roads on the Alabama side of the border) headed home. As the Adams brothers passed through Greenwood, they were ambushed by Ben Tarver and his two brothers, Tom and Hugh, resulting in the shooting death of twenty-four-year-old John Q. Adams. While all this was going-on, Thad Coonrod was tried and acquitted of murdering Deputy Gray. Two of the Tarver brothers fled but Tom Tarver was held for trial the next March. Bainbridge Democrat, June 8, 1893; Pensacola News, June 30, 1893.
Buck Hall’s story was not over. At the same circuit court session as the Coonrod trial, Buck Hall was retried for Ely’s murder and this time the jury acquitted him. Later that year Hall was tried and acquitted of the charge of carrying a concealed weapon. In late 1894, Hall was tried yet again in Marianna and this time a conviction stuck when Hall was sentenced to twenty years for attempted murder of yet another man. Hall’s short and violent life came to a dismal end in August 1895, when, in custody, he cut his own throat, leaving behind a widow and five children in Jackson County. Ibid., Pensacola News, Nov. 22, 1893, Pensacola News, Dec. 8, 1894: Pensacola News August 19, 1895.
Choice Hall Adams, an initial suspect, purported friend of Ely, and the eldest of the volatile Adams brothers, seems to have settled down after a few more run-ins with the law. Adams continued to live in Gordon, Alabama with his family until his death in 1904 at the age of forty-five. SeeColumbia [AL} Breeze, October 4, 1894 (for a dramatic account of one of Choice’s adventures).
Notorious Bill Adams was arrested at gunpoint in October 1894 and taken to Marianna where he was wanted for murder, assault with attempt to murder, arson and carrying a concealed weapon. It was reported that he was also wanted for murder in Calhoun County, Florida, and Henry County, Alabama. He was returned to Alabama for trial where he was acquitted in 1896. Not surprisingly, Bill Adams was shot to death in Jackson County in April 1898 purportedly in revenge for yet another murder he committed. A third Adams brother, Harman, also met a violent end, further burnishing the family’s status as local legends. As one paper reported, despite the violence surrounding the Adams brothers, “the best citizens have always stood by them.” Eufaula Times and News, May 14, 1896; Columbia Breeze, October 15, 1896, April 28, 1898.
It took a few more years, but Sebe Espy was eventually brought to trial. In February 1896, more than four years after the Ely murder, a detective tracked down and captured Espy at a sawmill in Purvis, Mississippi, where he was working as a sawyer under an alias. A New Orleans newspaper described Espy as a murderer and counterfeiter and a “very bad man wanted in Alabama and other places for different crimes.” Nevertheless, Espy was acquitted of Ely’s murder later that year after convincing the jury that Holloway and Hall, both conveniently dead, were the killers. New OrleansTimes-Democrat, Feb. 12, 1896; Savannah Morning News, Dec. 24, 1896. Eufaula Daily Times, Dec. 29, 1896.
As far as Ruth Holloway, maybe the only completely innocent party in this turbulent story, in October 1894, when not quite sixteen years old, she became an Adams when she married Wright Adams, then thirty. One hopes that Ruth found happiness before she passed away at just the age of thirty-four, leaving behind at least four children.
John R. Ely, Jr., was murdered under murky circumstances and for an uncertain motivation. To add to the complexity of the narrative, we do know that at the time he seized Ely, William G. Holloway was in the midst of a series of convoluted and suspect financial transactions. Two months after Holloway’s death, creditors filed suit claiming that Holloway had defrauded them out of a mortgage that Holloway had taken out the previous fall when Holloway transferred the mortgaged property to his wife for allegedly worthless consideration on Dec. 11, 1891. As Dec. 11thtook place after Holloway and his gang abducted Ely and was the day, or the day after, they murdered him, it is impossible to believe that the timing of this transfer was a coincidence. It appears that Holloway was doing some prudent, although fraudulent, estate planning to benefit his family before perhaps intending to flee the state. Scott et. al. v. Jenkins et al., vol. 46, p. 518 (Florida Supreme Court), 1903.
In light of the associations of the individuals involved in the Ely murder, and the astounding amount of mayhem they perpetrated, it seems reasonable to conclude that the abduction and killing of Ely arose from some unknowable dispute involving the moonshining operations that were active in the Jackson County, Florida-Henry County, Alabama border region. Holloway’s financial situation likely played some role and it is conceivable that Ely was initially targeted as part of a desperate ransom scheme gone awry. Or maybe as a former, but not loyal, employee and recent Holloway-home tenant, Ely knew too much about Holloway’s illicit activities. In any event, there appears to be no evidence or testimony beyond William Holloway’s insistence to support accusations regarding Ely’s conduct toward Ruth Holloway.
The Equal Justice Initiative and the Memorial for Peace and Justice mistakenly list John R. Ely, Jr., as the victim of a racial terror lynching. [3] The Ely murder tells a different story where at least five men were present at Ely’s murder, but none were convicted of the crime. William Holloway, the ringleader went out in a hail of gunfire upon the discovery of Ely’s corpse on his premises. Four other men stood trial for Ely’s murder and all were eventually acquitted. Yet, the list of victims of this circle of men, as well as the suffering of the widows and orphaned children left behind, is long and tragic. It seems too easy, but accurate, to ascribe Ely’s murder to his unfortunate entanglement with moonshiners who all too frequently resorted to murder to settle their scores with little regard for the law, juries of their peers, and their neighbors. [4, 5].
[1]For the EJI’s report including its definition for racial terror lynchings, see https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/
[2]William G. Holloway was born in 1856 in Florida and is found in the 1880 census residing in Jackson County with his wife Mary Yarborough, and two children.
[3]EJI’s mistake that John Ely was a black victim of a terror lynching is repeated by the most thoroughly researched lynching database: http://lynching.csde.washington.edu/#/home. See alsoJean, Susan “’Warranted’ Lynchings: Narratives of Mob Violence in Southern White Newspapers, 1880-1940,” in William D. Carrigan, ed, Lynching Reconsidered: New Perspectives in the Study of Mob Violence(Routledge, UK) 2008, pp. 134, 144-45.
[4]Jackson County juries in the 1890s may have readily acquitted white men of murdering other white men but had no hesitation in convicting Jerry Olive, an African American, of murdering his wife and sentencing him to hanging, which was carried out within a few months before “an immense crowd.” Pensacola News, September 22, 1894.
[5]Remaining mysteries: I can’t find any record of the trial of the Tarver brothers, or information about Henry Simmons after his acquittal.
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