This is another article written in the 1970s magazine in Austin, Texas called Free and Easy. The author is unknown. This is at the Austin History Center. If you ever want to read more from the old Free and Easy magazine.
The story was titled. A different sort of necktie for Christmas.
Wynn’s attackers were known to be frequent visitors to dances given by fiddler Pat Earhart in the nearby community of Blue.
The committee persuaded Earhart to put on another dance in the near future, hoping that the men would attend. Sure enough, they fell for the bait. Moreover, they brought with them several other undesirables wanted by the vigilantes. While Earhart stretched his bow, the men were quietly called outdoors, one by one, marched to a tree and lynched. Four men were hanged, the 5th managed to escape. The dance ended abruptly when word of the lynchings spread around the barn. Most people went home, expecting that friends and kin of the dead men would come to exact revenge on all who are at the dance, a few stayed near the tree and watched the swinging bodies with morbid fascination.
The night before the incident at Milton’s, on Christmas Eve, a group of 80 men set out to finish ridding the community of crooks. They mastered outside Nash’s saloon and called out the names of three troublemakers. When they came out, they were captured and carried to a tree a mile from town. Amid taunting and jeering, they were hanged. Their bodies remained in the tree until the next day.
Jephthah Billingsley remembered the events of Christmas morning in an early edition of the Bastrop Adventiser.
The action of the committee on the previous night began to be broadcast, and those who would dare came in to get the particulars. The bodies were still hanging in the tree where they had been strung, waiting for the sheriff from Bastrop to come up and handle the matter. About the middle of the morning, Deputy Sheriff Syd Jenkins, Will Bell, and H N Bell arrived in a large crowd of us went along to witness the proceedings. I was in the crowd and helped to cut the ropes that the men were hung by, I knew all of these men pretty well, and the sight of them with their twisted faces and nooses hanging at different angles about the victim’s necks necks was about the most gruesome thing I had ever witnessed. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.
Pat Murphy, driver of the wagon that hauled the bodies to town, commented about one of the dead man’s fate. “Be Jesus, if Thad had been a foot higher, he would have been a living man yet”.
The three brothers who came to Milton’s later that morning were friends of the hanging victims. They had attempted to protest the killings and asserted their own innocence. To avoid further reprisals from the dead men’s friends, the town folk moved all five bodies to a vacant house in the country where the Kin could pick them up.
Mcdade’s Christmas lynchings lacked nothing in drama, but within a few days the story had been enhanced by both the media and the residents of the town. The Austin paper reported that 11 lynched men were seen lying on the Mcdade Depot platform on Christmas morning. In fact, not a single body was seen lying on the platform.
A few town folk related the tale of three children walking home on Christmas Eve who came upon the bodies in the tree and were struck speechless by the sight.
The house where the bodies were taken became Mcdade’s haunted house. Several passers by recalled seeing the ghosts of the dead men hooting, hollering and cavorting in the yard. One man claimed to have seen a wrath like form enveloping almost the full width of the height of the doorway. But this phenomenon was later attributed to a large dog that had been owned by one of the dead men and was keeping vigil by his master’s body.
Three years after the lynchings, the Katy Railroad line was completed through Elgin and Mcdade’s pre eminence in shipping came to an end. The town began to slow but steady downhill decline as Elgin became the center of commerce in northern Bastrop County. Today, Mcdade is no more than a wide spot in US 290, known mostly for its watermelons, which, according to local farmers, make Luling melons look like marbles by comparison. It is also remembered as the birth place of the 1950s actress Gail Storm.
