Mary’s Vindication, Pt. 3 — The Unicoi County Mansion

 

Sorry for the late post, fellow Snouts. I hope you haven’t lost all faith in me. It’s taken a while to get pictures developed, and I’ve been lazy. But I think you’ll find it all worth your time. All of this is 100% true, although I don’t expect you to believe me. I hardly believe it.

The town of Erwin rests in the crook of a foggy mountain, on a flat triangular stretch of land with trees cutting at its corners. Elegant grey houses line the streets just before the downtown area, and then, like a veil lifting, the town stretches out before a large bowler-hat shaped mountain. As you turn past the courthouse, the first thing you see is a painting of a large disembodied hand holding a young pig-tailed girl on a swing, a bible verse splayed out in indecipherable, weathered cursive. Parallel to the buildings, loud and as mobile as ever, the Clinchfield Railroad reverberates over the town. As Amber and I first enter the town, we hear a song on the radio, “Waltz for the Baby Elephant,” a song that immediately puts us on edge but that we pass off as a funny coincidence.

A quick visit to the Unique Hair Boutique tells me that there are three good restaurants in town, that there are seven thousand people, and that everyone, literally everyone, who hears about Erwin hears about the hanging elephant.

The first place Amber and I visit is the library, a quiet, ornate red-bricked building carved out of an old railroad terminal. Amber sits on a large leather couch, poring through old Tennessee encyclopedias. I throw her a look saying we’ve got better things to do and then walk over to the counter to a middle-aged woman with a heavy grey sweater and a tight black bun. I whisper it, hoping no one notices my request. She looks up. There’s a second where we both hesitate, and I look out the wall of windows at the end of the room toward the crisscrossing tracks. When I look back, she’s got a book in her hand: How To Hang An Elephant. The front cover is of a cartoon conductor pointing at a large, foreboding crane. I sit next to Amber and start flipping through the pages. This ‘authoritative’ book is told in the form of a narrative, its sources questionable, all of it based on speculation. Amber hands me two large books with two short articles talking about the Mary incident. They’re not as entertaining as the illustrated narrative, but they’re definitely more accurate.

The first, and more informative article:

1916, Erwin

Big Mary, said by the Sparks Brothers Circus to be the largest elephant in captivity, was executed at the Cincinnati, Clinchfield & Ohio Railroad’s building and repair shops.

Big Mary had in her repertoire 25 tunes that she played on musical horns; she could ‘play baseball,’ with a batting average of .400; and she weighed five tons. But during a performance in Kingsport, she flew into a rage and killed her inexperienced handler. She then turned her attention toward the audience. Several pistol shots rang out, but Big Mary was unharmed. Her regular trainer calmed her down.The next day, Kingsport authorities arrested the pachyderm. Finally, since there was no weapon capable of killing Big Mary, it was decided to hang her.

At 6 P.M., nearly the entire population of Erwin witnessed the event. All the circus’s elephants were driven into the railroad yard, evidently to ‘witness’ Big Mary’s execution and learn an object lesson. About 8 P.M., a steel-rope noose was put around the condemned pachyderm’s ample neck. She was then slowly hoisted up by locomotive crane. Big Mary struggled for five minutes, then the steel rope broke. She fell to the ground dead.

It was afterwards discovered that the elephant had two abscessed teeth, the cause of her misbehavior in Kingsport. She was buried in Erwin, although no one remembers where.

Or so the article says. Amber and I haven’t given up on finding the grave and paying our respects.

We eat at one of the only restaurants downtown: Erwin Burrito. The inside is covered in bumper stickers, band names, and T-shirts. The only band more recent than Black Sabbath is Queens of the Stone Age, a band that somehow always manages to pop up alongside the illustrious Classics. Just before we leave, I see a band I hadn’t noticed earlier. Simple, white letters on a black background: The Swinging Pachyderms. I ask. The woman at the counter smiles widely and tells me they’re really good, that they come to the restaurant at least once a month to perform. Then Amber spots a few of their posters on the walls. On each poster is a backdrop of Hanging Mary, her face covered with big block letters. We leave, feeling somehow that this town might not exist, that such a strange, distorted history might have transformed the whole place into something not wholly real. Here’s a link to the Swinging Pachyderms for your morbid curiosity.

The next place we go is the address of the Hanging Elephant Gift Shop. I’ve already discovered that the place has gone out of business, transformed into a thrift shop for the local Battered Women’s Shelter. This is the same building that has the disembodied hand on its brick face. We walk inside, and Amber finds a really cool Erwin T-shirt, and I manage to find a colorful striped shirt that looks a little too tight on me but that I’m certain I should buy so I don’t feel bad about walking in simply to ask about Mary. At the checkout, I ask, once again in hushed tones, hoping no one notices. I somehow feel greedy; I’m almost certain everyone thinks I must be missing the point, sifting through some old rumor, a disembodied observer, a tourist, detached from the town and its real problems. Already I’ve felt this creeping up on me, threatening to ruin my fun little pilgrimage.

When does my morbid fascination, my Snout-like self, cross the line? When should I stop sniffing out new things just for the sake of interest? I mean, one of the most enjoyable things in my life is finding some sort of bizarre humor in everything. But do the people of Erwin deserve to rest?

The woman tells me that Ruth Piper, the woman who owned the Elephant Gift Shop, went out of business a few years ago, but that she came back in about two months ago to donate some money for the shelter. Apparently she’s now a real estate agent. I ask for a phone book, but I only find one Piper, and she doesn’t answer.

So Amber and I decide to go to the Unicoi County Heritage Museum to see if the ‘curator’ mentioned in one of the articles we read might know more about Hanging Mary. It’s located beside an old fish hatchery, in a plantation house that’s been restored with the help of the good ole taxpayer’s money. We have to walk up the drive, because there are prisoners repairing something on the roof. It’s raining, and the curator, an elderly woman with wiry grey hair and a face that looks consistently shocked, looks down at us disapprovingly.

”You should’ve parked up here,” she says, squinting through the rain. “It’s raining.” She says this matter-of-factly, as if we might not have noticed.

We nod and smile some, and I pull out my camera, a mistake, I can tell, as she squints even harder when she sees it. I ask her if I can take her photograph, and she tells me she’d rather not have her picture taken. I don’t press it any further, but I’m sorely disappointed that I don’t have something to show you fellow Snouts. She looks amazing, rest assured. Just what you’d imagine. We walk inside and she explains to us the history of the house, a history I’ve forgotten already. It has something to do with the fish hatchery. I am here for one reason only, and I can’t concentrate on anything else. She walks upstairs to turn on all of the lights and tells us to have a look around. We can hear her walking upstairs and the sound of the rain reverberates off the old roof. The entire house is covered in railroad signs, old kitchen utensils, random WWII memorabilia, and antique toys. In almost every room is a mannequin posing. Here’s a picture of the first room we see to our left. You should also take a look at this scary doll we saw in the attic.

After about half an hour, we walk downstairs, and the woman asks us (or quizzes us) about what we’ve seen. We mumble some answers and then she tells us to take some brochures with us. I ask, casually, “What’s this I’ve been hearing about a hanging elephant?”

The old woman motions us into her office and pulls out an old scrapbook. She turns to face us, and for the first time I look at her nametag: Martha Erwin. Sitting down and opening the scrapbook to the first page, a picture of Hanging Mary, she says, “Sit down, and I’ll tell you everything.”

(coming very soon: Part IV: All is Revealed!)

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