Remembering the Will Harris rampage

Here’s the 102-year-old story:

Will Harris had the devil in him as he staggered around Hell’s Half Acre, a rank corner of Asheville, N.C., fashionable with mopes, drunks and crooks. He gave the stink eye to anyone who crossed his path.
“I come from hell, from Charlotte, from state prison and from the chain gang,” he said, as the bourbon sloshed in the half-empty whisky bottle he carried. “And I’m surely going back to hell, sooner rather than later.”
Harris had arrived in Asheville by train on Nov. 12, 1906. His reputation preceded him.
Not yet 30, he had a rap sheet that cast a long shadow for theft, robbery and assault in Charlotte.
Several years before, the city had hired its first black detective, Van Griffin, for the sole purpose of tracking down Harris after the convict had escaped from a chain gang of black felons, according to Asheville historian Bob Terrell.
Griffin quickly arrested Harris, and he was returned to the county jail – then soon escaped again. Griffin hauled him back to justice a second time, and he was sent away to the state prison in Raleigh.
He cut his sentence short by escaping in a wagonload of bricks.
5 dead in 10 minutes
Harris made the prudent decision to abandon Griffin’s jurisdiction for Asheville, to the west in the mountains, where he hoped to find an old flame, Mollie Maxwell.
The little city had been a hillbilly backwater until the railroad arrived in 1880. Its fresh air and cool summer nights soon attracted wealthy vacationers looking for a mountain paradise off the beaten path.
Among them were John Roebling 2nd, of the family that built the Brooklyn Bridge, and George Vanderbilt, a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Staten Island-born steamship and railroad magnate.
George Vanderbilt created Biltmore, his 250-room castle, at the southern edge of Asheville, which lent the former frontier town a certain gentility.
But Wild Will Harris scoffed at Biltmore manners.
The morning after he arrived, he began to spend like a man who knew his tomorrows had run out.
He paid $35 for a Savage .303 rifle, then dropped nearly that much on a shirt and trousers, a set of overalls and a pair of tan shoes suitable for a dandy. He put on his new duds, bought a $3 jug of bourbon and eventually found his way to the home of Pearl Maxwell, his ex-gal’s sister, late that afternoon.
Mollie was living 20 miles away in Hendersonville, N.C., but proximity made Pearl Maxwell a more viable romantic alternative.
She cooked Harris a meal but warned him that she expected her boyfriend, Toney Johnson, at 11 p.m
Harris became ever more belligerent as he drained his whisky. By the time Johnson arrived, the escaped con was drunk, leering and lathered for a fight.
When Harris reached for his rifle, Johnson dashed to the police office.
“Be careful,” Johnson warned cops. “He’s drunk. He’ll kill somebody.”
Capt. John Page and Officer Charles Blackstock hurried to Maxwell’s home. Sensing commotion outside, Harris shouldered his rifle and fired a shot through the wooden door that caught Blackstock square in the chest, killing him.
A second shot passed through the flesh of Page’s right arm.
Harris slipped from the house and headed to the business district, firing along the way at anything that caught his eye.
He shot and killed Benjamin Addison, a black shopkeeper. Walter Corpening, another black citizen, was walking home from work when he was greeted with a fatal blast from the Savage. A third black man, Tom Neil, was shot and killed as he stood on his porch.
The wounded Capt. Page and another officer, James Bailey, ran toward the shots and exchanged gunfire with the killer. Bailey was fatally wounded – the fifth and final victim of the 10-minute rampage.
Harris made it to the woods at the edge of downtown and disappeared.
‘No cheering, men’
By the following daybreak, a throng of some 300 revenge-minded men had gathered on the town square. Police organized them into a dozen posses who were armed with 125 guns borrowed from a pawn shop and a hardware store, according to historian Terrell.
The local paper, the Gazette-News, proclaimed, “There is little reason to resort to mob violence. The mob spirit will be utterly lacking here.”
But New York papers, attracted to the far-away story by the cachet of Roebling and Vanderbilt, had a different take. Said one headline: “Negro Kills Five Men; Asheville Crowd May Lynch Suspect.”
A bloodhound named Biscuit Eater took a whiff of Harris’ empty whisky bottle then went baying into the woods, first north along the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers, then back south.
Near the confluence of the rivers, Harris took a nap in a Biltmore barn, then ran on to Fletcher, 8 miles from Asheville, where he tucked into another barn.
But area residents were on manhunt tenterhooks, and word reached lawmen of a stranger spotted near Fletcher.
A small posse headed by Frank Jordan, a railroad agent, caught Harris and chased him into a laurel thicket. A shotgun blast hit the outlaw, but he managed to empty his rifle at his pursuers.
They retreated and waited for reinforcements, who had commandeered a train in Asheville and were rushing to Fletcher. Nearly 100 men stood pointing firearms at the thicket by the time Jordan shouted, “Fire!”
A deafening volley went up – some 500 rounds fired into the bush. Jordan held up a hand, crept forward and peeked into the thicket.
“No cheering, men,” he said. “He’s dead.”
Was he ever. Someone counted 100 bullet wounds on the body.
There was some serious question as to the identity of the dead man. Eventually officials assured themselves that he was Harris – most probably. The body quickly disappeared, and to this day no one seems to know what became of the corpse of Asheville’s most famous outlaw.
“It is said that the doctors have it,” reported the Gazette-News.