A Few Thoughts

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley

by Alice St. Clair

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley

The story of Tom Dula is a lurid tale, full of unbridled lust, cloak and dagger mystery, and the crushing poverty of the defeated South in the wake of the Civil War.

Thomas C. Dula was born June 23, 1844 in Wilkes County, NC. Little is know about his childhood, but it is recorded that he enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army in 1862. He served in Company K, 42nd NC Infantry Regiment. His two brothers were killed in the war, leaving Tom as the only son of the family when he was released at the war’s end in April 1865.

Tom Dula was known in his Wilkes County community to be a “ladies man.” This is a very generous term. After his return home, he continued a relationship with a woman named Anne Foster Melton. The fact that Anne was married a man named James Melton was evidently not a deterrent to the two enjoying each other’s company. At the same time, Tom began an intimate relationship with Laura Foster, Anne’s cousin.

Fact and fiction are very intertwined in the Tom Dula story, and it’s almost impossible to separate the two. But we do know that on May 25, 1866, Laura rode away from her home on her father’s horse, never to be seen alive again. Allegedly ( a term which has to be used often in this story) her relationship with Tom had resulted in a pregnancy, and she had spoken of their plans to elope.

There were no wedding bells in Laura Foster’s future, however. There was only a stab wound to the chest and burial in a shallow grave in the hills of Wilkes County.

Folks in the small community were in a panic over the missing young girl. And then- someone remembered Tom Dula saying that he was going to “do in the one who gave me the pock.”
The pock is an antiquated term for syphilis, and Tom made statements to the effect that he believed Laura Foster had infected him with it.
When this story gets around Wilkes County, things do not look good for Tom. He goes on the run and ends up in Trade, TN. He works for a week for a man named Colonel James Grayson. When Grayson found out Tom was wanted for murder, he aided the Wilkes County authorities in capturing him. He was taken back to Wilkes and put in jail.

The scandalous tale of a murder, a love triangle (Laura, Anne, and Tom) and a Confedrrate veteran being accused of said murder somehow made its way to Zebulon B. Vance, former NC governor. He offered his services to Tom Dula pro bono. Vance was successful in getting a change of venue for the trial from Wilkes County to Iredell County, as he argued that Dula would not get a fair trial in Wilkes.
Dula was convicted in the first trial, but won an appeal and was granted a new trial. The second trial also resulted in a guilty verdict. Dula went to the gallows in front of a huge public crowd in Statesville on May 1, 1868.
His last words were (once again, allegedly): “I did not harm a hair on the girl’s head. But I deserve death.”

Now……why would Tom say such a strange thing as eternity approached? Well, many people (myself included) are of the opinion that Dula took the rap for his lover, Anne Melton, who stabbed Laura to death in a jealous rage when she heard the news of Laura and Tom’s pending elopement. Tom’s only involvement in the case may have been helping Anne hide the body.
Anne herself had been arrested as a co-conspirator in the case, and she was tried and acquitted. However, rumors ran rampant that on her death bed several years later, Anne Melton screamed that she saw the gates of Hell burning at the foot of her bed. Fact or fiction? Once again, we cannot say.

Our little murder story may have been only a slight foot note in history if it had not been for a folk group called the Kingston Trio. “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” was originally put to music by Frank Proffitt, a known collector of mountain ballads, who first heard it as a child from his aunt. In 1958, Capitol Records released the Kingston Trio’s version, and it sold six million copies. It also topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Chart.
“Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” is credited by many as starting the wildly popular folk music craze of the late 1950s and early 60s.

Tom Dula’s life did end (justly or unjustly) at the end of a rope, but a Southern murder ballad nearly a century later immortalized him.