Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Ken McElroy's triumph over the legal system apparently did not relieve the pressure he felt. He could hear people at the cafe and the tavern saying Ken McElroy had gotten away with breaking the law again, that he never worked a day in his life and was nothing but a thief. And he wasn't imagining things: People were talking about him more often, and every time something was missing or stolen, it was blamed on Ken McElroy. As the complaints grew louder, his rage increased.
Ken would always pay well for a tool box, whether it had any tools in it or not, as long as it came from a farmer. One night, Tom and a friend stole a set of Snap-on tools from a farm off Route 22 and another big tool box from a farm south of Graham. When they went to Ken's farm, he gave them $250 cash. The two boys hung around talking until after midnight, when Ken said, "You boys want to have some fun?"
Of course they did.
Ken loaded the tool boxes into the green Dodge pickup and said, "Follow me."
He drove into Skidmore and then swung south on Highway 113 about a mile, down the long hill and across the Nodaway River bottoms. On the other side of the bridge, he made a sharp right onto a narrow dirt road that ran between a cornfield and the river. About 300 yards down the road, they pulled up at a clearing on the river's edge. The autumn night was clear, and the rippling water reflected a bright, crisp half-moon. Ken backed the Dodge up to the river and dropped the gate. He rolled the tool boxes off the truck onto the ground, not more than a foot from the bank, then grabbed a can from the truck and poured gasoline on the boxes, shaking the can over them until it was empty. He lit a match, dropped it on the boxes, and watched as they whooshed into flame. The orange light danced in his dark eyes, and a wide smile crossed his face. The boys glanced at each other and then joined in, smiling in appreciation. McElroy laughed a long, low laugh, then stepped forward. With his booted foot, he pushed the boxes one after the other into the river. The orange flames splashed on the white moon as the boxes fell hissing into the water.
"Like I told you," Tom said to his friend as they drove away, "getting back at people is the most important thing to Ken."
In 1865, Martenay Skidmore, a forty-year-old man who had knocked around the country as a farmer, boatman, and trader after leaving his native Virginia, purchased 700 acres of land, at ten dollars per acre, along the Nodaway River. Over the next few years, he added 300 acres, and in 1880, he platted and organized the town of Skidmore. He gave twenty acres to the Kansas City, St. Joseph and Council Bluffs Railroad, and envisioned Skidmore becoming a cattle and grain shipping center like Omaha.
For a while, his dreams looked possible. With plenty of moisture, the climate was perfect for dry-land farming, and the silty, glacial soil was suitable for growing heavy grains. The railroad laid track through the town, and farmers fattened hogs and cattle and drove them down the main street for shipment to Omaha and Kansas City. By 1910, the town had two banks, a hotel, two doctors, a justice of the peace, a lawyer, a newspaper, a dentist, and twenty-six businesses. A sawmill was operating, and a huge apple orchard produced 45,000 bushels of apples a year. Soon there would be liveries, an opera house, a theater, a funeral parlor, and a bandstand in the middle of the Four Corners intersection for Saturday evening concerts. Chautaquas were held in tents in the fields outside town on summer evenings. The population surged to 600, and businessmen foresaw a new St. Joe.
But if the railroads made towns like Skidmore, the automobile destroyed them. When the average farmer found he could afford a Model T, he also found he could save money by making one trip to Maryville or St. Joe to do all his shopping, particularly after the main roads were paved in the thirties. Also, the railroad discovered there were too many towns along the line seeking to become shipping centers, so the trains began skipping stops. The depression sank a number of banks and businesses, and they never reopened. By the thirties, young people were moving away for better opportunities. New people seldom moved to town. Skidmore, like Graham and Maitland and countless other small towns, settled into a long, gradual economic decline, managing to survive only because it was surrounded by farms and provided a few essentials, such as fuel, food, a bank, a place to drink, and a post office. The schools of Skidmore, Maitland, and Graham consolidated in 1964, and the churches of the three towns shared ministers. There has been no sense of forward momentum for a long time. Slowing the decline has been the most that could be hoped for.
In late July of 1930, a terrible event occurred in Maryville-an event that would be endlessly cited by those who argued that what happened in Skidmore some fifty years later was the work of a vigilante town.
Velma Coulter was an attractive nineteen-year-old schoolteacher at the small Garrett schoolhouse about three miles southwest of Maryville. As was the custom, she boarded with a farm family and walked a half mile to and from the schoolhouse every day. She usually stayed after school and swept the floors, emptied the trash, and erased the boards before going home. She followed this routine even after reporting some suspicious happenings around the school and telling friends she was frightened. On the night of December 16, 1930, when she hadn't come home by dark, her host family was not unduly concerned because they knew she was making Christmas decorations for the schoolhouse. When the farmer finally went to the school to investigate, he found her brutally beaten and stabbed to death.
Within three days, the police had picked up Raymond Gunn, a twenty-seven-year-old black man from Maryville. The only reason to suspect him initially was his previous conviction for assaulting a white college girl, for which he had served four years in prison. After eight hours of interrogation by three detectives, Gunn confessed. The police claimed they corroborated his confession with other evidence. He was immediately whisked in secrecy to the St. Joe jail, but crowds gathered and violence seemed likely, so he was moved to the jail in Kansas City, where he remained until his arraignment on January 12, 1931.
In the interim, the schoolhouse became a local attraction. On Sunday afternoons the road was lined with cars, and a long line of curiosity seekers formed at the door of the building. Fathers and sons walked slowly through the small structure, looking unashamedly at the remnants of the scene by the teacher's desk. One six-year-old boy cringed when the dried blood on the wood floor crackled under his feet.
The press and local authorities predicted that mob violence would occur when Gunn was brought back to Maryville for arraignment. The National Guard was put on alert, but never mobilized. Cars full of people began arriving in town on Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning, January 12, more than 700 people had gathered around the courthouse in 20-degree weather. A car pulled up, and a sheriff, a deputy, and Gunn started to get out. Gunn never made it to the door of the courthouse. He was "wrested" away from the sheriff and led across the fields, barefoot and shirtless, on the end of a seven-foot chain, to the schoolhouse. The authorities made no attempt to intervene. The action was well organized: twenty-five men with clubs formed a cordon around Gunn as they walked across the fields, and others drove to the school and removed all the furnishings of any value, including desks and slates.
By the time Gunn and his captors reached the school, an estimated 3,000 people had assembled. A few shouted, "To hell with the law!" when he arrived. Gunn was taken inside, where he allegedly confessed again to his captors. While some men pushed and pulled Gunn up a makeshift ladder to the roof of the schoolhouse, other men tore shingles off the roof and punched holes in it. Once on top, Gunn was told to spread-eagle himself on the crossbeam, and his legs were stuck through the holes, dangling inside the schoolhouse. One man looped a chain around Gunn's body and through the leg holes and drew it tight. Others doused the roof with gasoline. Several people shouted, "Want some water?"-a reference to the published reports that Velma Coulter had begged her killer for a glass of water just before she died.
An eyewitness account in the St. Joseph Gazette described what happened next:
The Negro was then left alone on the roof facing the swarm of people below with an impassivity that was marked. The building was now fired and within a few minutes flames and a dark cloud of smoke burst forth obscuring the figure on the roof. Then the flames began swirling about Gunn and he strained back in a futile effort to escape the up rush of heat. He twisted and revealed a huge blister ballooning on his left upper arm. Pieces of his skin blew away to the wind as the blistering heat became more intense and soon his torso was splotched with white patches of exposed flesh. His hair burned like a torch for a moment and then his head sagged. His body writhed. It took on the appearance of a mummy.
Gunn screamed once in agony. Twice he swung an arm outward despairingly. He was conscious for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Within half an hour from the time the flames reached him, he was dead. The flesh was burning from the top of his head and his neck, exposing the white skull to the view of the hundreds massed on the hillside east of the burning building, and on the west, the watching crowds saw his legs draw upward with the heat as in a kneeling position before the body fell with the roof.
When the fire had died, souvenir hunters supposedly combed through the ashes for bones and teeth.
The Matyville Daily Forum reported the next day that the "Negro Murderer" had been "Burned to Death by Mob," and in a subsequent editorial the paper condemned the burning and expressed fear that Maryville would become forever identified as the place where they "burned the nigger." The prosecuting attorney called the event a "regrettable incident" and the sheriff, who was in bed with a sore shoulder from the "wresting," said he was "very sorry it all happened and [he] hated it very much." Gunn's mother said she wanted to go "back there and search around. There might be something left [she] could bury as a body."
A few men from Skidmore attended the burning and can recall it vividly fifty years later, but none of them was ever implicated in any way.
Like their ancestors, many people around Skidmore were independent farmers who held the same strong beliefs in self-determination and self-reliance. A man should be able to make his own way in life; what he did with himself was his own business, as long as it didn't interfere with others. Old ways died hard, new ideas were slow to be accepted, and people wasted little energy keeping up appearances.
These characteristics, coupled with the steady economic decline, created a community without a strong center. Skidmore had no real leaders, no person or persons who held things together in times of crisis. To be sure, the respected elders-Q Goslee, Pete Ward, Sandy Lemon, Junior Linville, and Charlie Lawrence-had served the community over the years and could influence events when they chose to, but they did not chart the course of the community. Skidmore had fraternal organizations, the most important of which was the Lions, but their purpose was to raise funds for charity and to hold social gatherings. The two churches in town were well attended on Sundays, but neither church exercised the strong influence of, say, a Baptist church in a small southern town.
A sense of community did exist in Skidmore: The residents organized a volunteer fire department; the Community Betterment Association converted the old railroad depot into a museum and tore down numerous derelict buildings; and tremendous energy went into staging the annual Punkin' Show. But the sense of community was passive, surfacing only when specific tasks needed to be done. The group was not necessarily more important than the individual.
Government was a minimal proposition in Skidmore. The town had a mayor and a board of aldermen, consisting of five people elected every two years from different sections of town. Little or no campaigning occurred, and most candidates ran unopposed. The board met once a month to deal with issues such as loose dogs, vandalism, cable TV rates, water and sewage systems, road grading, and missing street signs. Many competent people wouldn't run for the board, because they understood that their fellow citizens might complain about their neighbors' activities one day and then condemn the board for interfering the next. Also, membership on the council was limited to residents of the town, and many respected citizens lived on farms.
City elections were held in April of 1980. Steve Peter ran unopposed for mayor. At twenty-seven, with a college degree in engineering, Steve was one of the younger and better-educated members of the community. Ruggedly handsome, with bushy brown hair, a thick mustache, and dark brown eyes, Steve was soft-spoken and hard working. He understood when he ran for mayor that it was primarily a caretaker's job, carrying little prestige or responsibility. He would preside at meetings of the board of aldermen, present awards at a rodeo or two, and mediate an occasional dispute.
Mayor Peter took a passive approach to his responsibilities. If a problem arose-a neighbor's dog running loose in another's flower garden, or neighbors arguing about trash in the alley-Peter figured the parties should settle the matter themselves rather than involve the town. He also knew that he could easily lose at least one friend if he stuck his nose into a dispute.
Mayor Peter's attitude reflected the community's general tolerance of minor rule-breaking. No one wanted to point a finger at a neighbor's kid for vandalism or petty theft, for flipping a high-speed U-turn in his pickup at the main intersection, or for towing sheds down the main street on Halloween. Most residents had pulled these pranks or similar ones at some point, and someday their children or their grandchildren would, too. But more than that, minding your own business and letting the other fellow mind his was how people got along.