Wicked Atlanta: The Sordid Side of Peach City History

By Laurel-Ann Dooley

This true crime history reveals Atlanta’s frontier brothels, daredevil bootleggers, killer politicians, Reconstruction Era rogues, and much more.
 
Over the centuries, Atlanta has seen its share of sordid and salacious stories. Wealthy felons once hosted elaborate parties inside the federal penitentiary. Billionaire bootleggers and murderous socialites practiced corruption that reached all the way to the White House. The city’s fast and fearless drivers, complete with glamorous reputations and criminal careers, gave rise to auto racing.
 
In Wicked Atlanta, author and local historian Laurel-Ann Dooley digs up some of the most shocking and fascinating true tales from Atlanta’s infamous history. She reveals a colorful past of murder, kidnapping, bribery, wives hiring hit men and all sorts of criminal debauchery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625845580

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE BEGINNING

Bars, Brothels and Bad Neighborhoods

It’s been known as many things: the Capital of the New South, the Gateway City, the City Too Busy to Hate. A place where business booms and growth is a given. A cradle of gentility, hospitality and soft melodious accents. Atlanta is all of these things.

But it didn’t start out that way. In its infancy, Atlanta was a rough-edged frontier town, a Wild West settlement in the heart of the Deep South, known for bars, bordellos and unrestrained lawlessness.

A RAILROAD TOWN ON THE GEORGIA FRONTIER

If Atlanta’s birth date were to be named, it would be the day in 1837 when, in the heart of present-day downtown, a stake was driven into the red Georgia clay, marking the spot of the future railroad hub of the South.

Prior to that fateful day, Atlanta was just a sparsely populated settlement of about thirty-five families, approximately 253 people in total scattered from present-day Grant Park to Buckhead. It was a span of thirteen miles—a long way to go to visit a neighbor, especially by horse-drawn carriage. Far from being on its way to becoming a major city, Atlanta wasn’t even headed in the direction of becoming a village. Then came the day that changed everything.

It happened like this: State legislators had started to notice that Georgia was missing out on lucrative trade opportunities to the west. The reason wasn’t hard to figure out: there was simply no way to get there. Georgia needed a westbound railroad, and the legislature voted to build one.

The plan was to create a railroad from Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two existing railroads, one between Macon and Savannah and the other between Athens and Augusta, would be extended to the new line’s endpoint in Georgia.

The question was: where should the endpoint be? To find the optimal site, surveyors were deployed to determine the location. Their quest ended in northern Georgia, just southeast of the Chattahoochee River. They drove a stake into the ground and changed the destiny of that barely settled area forever.

Eager settlers rushed to the promise that a railroad town held, and not just any railroad town, but one that would link a network of rails heading in all four directions. The lure was too much to resist.

A flow of railway workers, fortune hunters, gold prospectors, land speculators and enterprising pioneers poured in. More than three hundred of them were Irish, who mainly came looking for railroad work. The Irish alone more than doubled the population.

It was hot, isolated and not for the faint of heart. After all, it was a frontier town, with all that that implies. Saloons and brothels sprang up quickly, and the settlement soon gained an unsavory reputation as a place of debauchery, where liquor flowed and painted ladies strolled the streets. The typical hallmarks of a growing community—schools, residential neighborhoods, places of worship—took awhile to take root, at least in any significant number. Indeed, the first tavern opened for business ten years before the first church was built.

As growth continued, the seedier elements became centralized in three areas, all close to today’s downtown. Murrell’s Row was a favorite hangout for thieves, gamblers and prostitutes. It was named for John Murrell, a notorious bandit who ran a thievery network rumored to include hundreds of participants with outposts in Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia. Whether Murrell ever got as far east as Georgia is unknown, but the name Murrell’s Row is unquestionably a reference to the lawlessness of the area. Murrell’s Row started at the intersection of Line, Decatur and Peachtree Streets, today’s Five Points, and progressed eastward toward Pryor Street.

Slabtown was the second of the blighted areas. Built largely with abandoned concrete slabs used for construction, it was a red-light district located where Grady Memorial Hospital now stands. Third in the triumvirate was Snake Nation, so named due to the large number of snake oil salesman and the generally bad characters who called it home.

Nothing serves as a reminder that Atlanta was once a frontier town more than the history of its early shanty town settlements in the late 1840s and 1850s, writes author Vivian Price in The History of Dekalb County, Georgia, 1822–1900. Snake Nation, she says, was devoted almost entirely to the criminal and immoral element. Snake Nation, Murrell’s Row and Slabtown were pockets where drinking, gambling and brothels were common, and murders were not uncommon.

Arrests were practically pointless because the small wooden jail, measuring only twelve square feet on the outside and eight on the inside, was not sturdy enough to keep anyone locked up for long. About two criminals per day were brought there, and they could easily dig their way out. When there were enough of them, they just flipped the flimsy structure over. Once, when a big uproar had filled the prison, friends of the incarcerated arrived in the middle of the night, lifted the building off its foundation and held it up while the jailed men emerged from underneath.

Noted Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett describes the situation: By 1851, law and order in Atlanta had come perilously close to extinction. The authority of the municipal government was being openly flouted by ‘toughs’ from Murrell’s Row and Snake Nation.

THE REIGN OF THE ROWDIES

It all came to a head in the mayoral election of 1850, a bitterly fought political battle between the two parties that had always divided the town: the Free and Rowdy Party and the Moral Party. Needless to say, they had very different outlooks.

Consisting mainly of the Irish, the Rowdies had run the show in Atlanta since its founding, many owning saloons, distilleries and brothels. The first three mayors—Moses Formwalt, Benjamin Bomar and Willis Buell—were all Rowdies.

The first election took place in January 1848. The Rowdy candidate, Moses Formwalt, was the owner of a tin shop on Decatur Street, where he made and sold liquor stills. Only twenty-eight when he ran for office, Formwalt garnered the majority of the 215 votes cast, but victory did not come easily. Election day was fraught with violence, and approximately sixty fights broke out before it was over.

Grave site of Moses Formwalt, Atlanta’s first mayor. Formwalt’s body was moved to this location in Oakland Cemetery, and the monument was erected in 1848. Author’s Collection.

Violence continued to run through Formwalt’s life. After completing his one-year term as mayor, he became deputy sheriff of Dekalb County. Two years later, while Formwalt escorted a prisoner from council chambers, he was stabbed to death with a jagged knife. He was originally buried in an unmarked grave in Oakland Cemetery, but in 1907, the city council decided to build a memorial more suitable for Atlanta’s first mayor, and Formwalt’s casket was exhumed and moved to a more prominent place in the cemetery.

In direct opposition to the Free and Rowdies, the Moral Party promoted temperance, chastity and a government of law and order. Temperance and chastity were clearly not in the business interests of the Rowdies: their governing approach was more a containment of chaos, through force if necessary. But in 1850, the Rowdies’ rule was about to come to an end. A successful businessman was running for mayor as the candidate for the Moral Party. Things were about to change.

Jonathan Norcross was a man with roots that ran deep in American soil. A descendant of one of the original pilgrims to come from England and settle in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Norcross had Puritan blood in his veins and a strong work ethic in his soul. He arrived in Atlanta in 1844 and quickly established a thriving dry goods business and sawmill operation. Interestingly, the discarded timbers from the Norcross Mill were used to build the shanties of Slabtown.

In 1848, Norcross entered politics and ran in Atlanta’s first mayoral election. But it was still Rowdy time then, and Norcross came out the loser. Two years later, he tried again. This time, the outcome was different, but only after heated and divisive campaigning. Norcross, the candidate representing clean living and civil obedience, was up against Rowdy Leonard Simpson, whose followers owned the town’s forty-plus bars and thriving brothels. Their election tactics underscored their differences: while Norcross handed out apples and sweets, Simpson gave away whiskey. In the end, temperance and candy prevailed, and the Moral Party took the election.

Jonathan Norcross, the first Moral Party candidate to be elected mayor. Creative Commons.

With or without a majority, the Rowdies weren’t about to turn the reins over without a fight. At the time, whoever was mayor was also the superintendent of the streets and the chief of police. In those capacities, he presided over the trials of municipal law violators. This was no small part of the job because Atlanta, although it had an increasing number of law-abiding citizens, was still a town of rough edges.

It didn’t take long for the first violator to appear in police court. No more than two days into Norcross’s term, a burly offender was brought before him for creating a disturbance in the streets. His offense was most likely just a contrivance to cause trouble for the new mayor. Suspicions arose that a whole group of Murrell’s Row ruffians planned to follow this up by getting themselves arrested as well. That way, they could attack the mayor in the courtroom when the first man was brought to trial.

Despite concern over possible violence, the matter proceeded without incident. Norcross found the man guilty, imposed a fine and moved on to the next case. But before he could begin, the convicted man leapt to his feet,