The legend of Frankie Silver
By Lauren Williamson
THE NEWS HERALD

Click here to read "The Ballad of Frankie Silver"

MORGANTON — A young beautiful wife, married to a man rumored to be a drunk and philanderer.

Later,bones and pieces of a body were found in the couple’s fireplace and on a stump in the yard.

Sounds like something from a murder mystery — but it’s not. It’s taken straight from Burke County ’s own unique history.

For more than 170 years, the legend of Frankie Silver has fascinated residents of Burke County and people all over the state of North Carolina and across the country.

The story has all the elements of any good movie plot — adultery, violence, murder, courtroom drama and suspense.

Various yarns have been spun over the years about what really happened to Charlie Silver,husband of Frankie,who lost his life in the winter of 1831.

One local resident, Howard Williams, has devoted years of his life to researching the legend of Frankie Silver.

Williams, a former drama and language arts teacher at East Burke High School , said the fascination with Silver has been instilled in him since his youth.

“I was born and raised here,” Williams said. “I heard the story all my life, growing up in the Salem community.”

Taking his love of drama and writing and combining it with his passion for Silver and her plight, Williams spearheaded the efforts of the “Frankie Foundation.” Williams has written a play that details Silver’s life and the events leading up to her execution.

“Frankie moved from Anson County to Burke County , up on Deyton Bend,” Williams said. “Charlie was a native of what was then Burke County and now Mitchell County . Frankie, just a young girl, met and fell in love with Charlie and they were married.”

Frankie and Charlie had a baby daughter, Nancy, not long after their marriage, and settled into their home on the crook of the Toe River .

Williams said he consistently found through doing his research that Charlie

was not the picture-perfect husband — he was rumored to be a drunk and philanderer.

“Charlie was a hunter, and stayed gone a lot,” Williams said. “Nobody

knows whether he was out hunting or cavorting with women.”

Some of Williams’ digging found that Charlie’s cousin, Nancy Lee Wilson, was one of his girlfriends,as was the undertaker’s wife, Sandra Cranberry.

Wilson served as a witness at Frankie’s trial where a guilty verdict was handed down. Coincidence?

Around Christmas time, 1831, Charlie turned up missing and no one knew where he could be.

Frankie told her friends and family that he had left to go hunting and had never returned. He didn’t show up for Christmas and by January, he was still missing.

A search party was sent out all around the Black Dome, which is now Mt. Mitchell and the Toe River .

Williams said a nosy neighbor entered Frankie’s house one day and searched the home from top to bottom — and found some pretty deadly things.

“Bits of bone were found in the ashes of the fireplace,” Williams said. “A slab of floor was taken up from the floor and a circle of blood as big as a hog’s liver was found, as well as a gash on the mantle.”

Sheriff John Boone was brought in and investigated the scene.

His findings led him to arrest Frankie, her brother, Blackstone, and her mother, but he later released the brother and mother.

Frankie was tried, convicted and sentenced to die by hanging.

After a failed appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court, she broke out of jail with the help of her family.

Sheriff Boone and his posse eventually caught up to Frankie, who was disguised

as a man and was walking behind her uncle’s wagon.

She was returned to prison and her execution was set for July 12, 1833 , on the knoll which is now Valdese Avenue and White Street in Morganton.

As one story tells it, when the day arrived, Frankie was led to the scaffold, where the sheriff asked if she had anything she wanted to say.

Before she could answer, her father yelled, “Die with it in ye, Frankie!” However, she told the sheriff that she did have something to say, but she wanted to sing it instead. After she finished her lonely ballad, the noose was placed around her neck, and she became the

first woman to be hanged in North Carolina .

Since no one was allowed to defend themselves in court until 1856,Williams believes Frankie didn’t receive a fair trial.

“She hasn’t had her day in court,” Williams said.“Even the great Sen.Sam Ervin thinks that she killed in self-defense.”

Williams’ version of Charlie’s death goes a little something like this: “Charlie came home drunk, and hadn’t bought little Nancy a Christmas present.He and Frankie started fussing and he asked her to pull his boot off. As she did, though, it twisted his ankle. He

looked at Frankie and told her ‘I’m going to give you another beating.’

Williams believes Frankie took the ax and killed Charlie in self-defense, then didn’t know what else to do after she realized what she had done — that’s why she cut his body into pieces and burned them.

“All of the evidence was circumstantial,” Williams said. “You can come up with all sorts of different versions of what really happened.”

Did Frankie kill in self-defense, or was it a calculated, premeditated murder?

Did Charlie just choose to disappear, so that he could run off with one of

his alleged girlfriends?

Maybe what happened will always be a mystery.