[NOTE: The post below is an unpublished essay that I wrote for the Daily Advance. Although my weekly column ended back in 2016, I do sometimes send essays to the newspaper’s editor, Michael Goodman. At times I discover something that is outside of my current research but is just too interesting to set aside. I sent this to him back in September. It was never published—which is fine with me, because I understand that it is easy to lose track of emails. I assume mine got lost. A few weeks after I sent it, it became public knowledge that a new book had just been published on the mystery I discuss below. The book, written by an attorney named Charles Oldham, is entitled The Senator’s Son: The Shocking Disappearance, the Celebrated Trial, and the Mystery that Remains a Century Later. I have not read the book (although I plan to do so). Although the Kenneth Beasley disappearance has only a little to do with African American history, the mystery does shed some light on just how rough life was like back in 1905. I hope readers will find this of interest and will excuse my going down a rabbit trail. Shouldn’t happen again.
Sometimes people pine for the “good old days,” but do they even remember what those days were even like?]
Today, Currituck County is renowned for its wines. The same could be said back in 1903, but in a completely different way. Indeed, wine–of all things–became the basis for one of the northeastern North Carolina’s most intriguing yet unsolved mysteries.
Back then, in the General Assembly, Currituck was represented by one of Poplar Branch’s most successful farmers, Samuel Mordecai Beasley. With short hair and a large forehead atop of a slight frame, Beasley Iooked more city than country. In the early twentieth century, the Progressive spirit of social reform was in the air, and in 1903 Elizabeth City forbade the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Currituck, however, secured a different kind of prohibition, one marked by personal animosity.
The Harrison clan had roots in Currituck dating to the 1670’s. In the 1870’s Joshua Harrison married Anna Jarvis, a member of the county’s most famous family. By the early 1900’s, however, he had become the county’s most despised figure. A hulking, bearded farmer in his mid-60’s, he had a side business in which he sold wine, to the delight of his customers, but to the disgust of his neighbors. They petitioned Representative Beasley to present a bill in the General Assembly to stop Harrison, and so he did. It passed. Harrison himself believed that the new law—listed in the 1903 Public Laws of North Carolina as Chapter 378–was specifically meant for him. He was almost certainly right, as the complex law that prohibited “manufacturing and selling certain liquors, cider or medicated bitters…including vinous liquors” only in certain parts of Currituck was written with such precision that it probably should have been called Harrison’s Law. Bitter, the winemaker cursed Beasley and threatened to tar and feather him. Threats the representative could handle, just as long as his family was kept out of the political crossfire.
On Monday, February 13, 1905, eight-year old Kenneth Beasley left home to walk to the local Odd Fellows Hall for school. After class was dismissed at noon for lunch, the blond, blue-eyed third-grader headed toward home but never made it. By 1:30 the school principal became concerned, especially as snow had started falling. A 30-member search party quickly grew up 300. Every area mill, barn, and potato house was searched. Bloodhounds were released, and streams and swamps, dragged. Seemingly all of Currituck was frantically looking for the boy save for one Joshua Harrison. After two weeks the search party was disbanded.
Over the next year, suspicion grew that Harrison had kidnapped the Beasley child. The Raleigh News and Observer received an anonymous letter from Currituck that claimed as such. Months after the disappearance, a concerned citizen approached the now-senator Beasley at the county courthouse and told him that Harrison himself had bragged to him that he was going to keep Kenneth until the reward was increased. Beasley had heard enough: he swore out a warrant charging Harrison with kidnapping. Harrison was indicted in September 1906 and placed in protective custody because of talk of an impending lynching. He would outlive the threat of what was sometimes creepily referred to as a “necktie party,” but would he survive the penetrating eye of a jury?
Thomas Jordan Jarvis was a self-taught lawyer who rose to become governor of North Carolina and a U.S. senator. Now that his sister’s husband was on trial for his life, he helped organize a legal dream team consisting of himself and former governor Charles Aycock, as well as future federal district attorney E.F. Aydlett and future gubernatorial candidate Isaac Meekins. Arguing that the hated Harrison could not get a fair trial back at home, they successfully had it moved to Elizabeth City. Leading the prosecution was future congressman H.S. Ward, who had already gotten the nickname “Hot Stuff” for his fiery courtroom rhetoric. Assisting him were the presumably “cooler” J. Heywood Sawyer and Walter Cahoon.
On March 14, 1907, the case was called before Judge W. R. Allen. The defense’s primary witnesses were Harrison’s wife and two sons, all of whom testified that the defendant had never left home the day of Kenneth Beasley’s disappearance. The prosecution’s witnesses challenged the family alibi. One testified that he had spotted Harrison at a Norfolk saloon the morning after the disappearance, and three others claimed to have seen a mule-driven buggy that looked like Harrison’s speeding rapidly carrying a boy wearing what looked like little Kenneth’s blue cap and blue socks. The spectacle must have mesmerized the beyond-packed Pasquotank County Courthouse. Anyone lucky enough to get a seat, according to the News and Observer, “held to it with a deathlike tenacity” As the paper put it, “a more able array of legal talent” had never before been gathered in this courthouse.
Nevertheless, the odds were against them. Harrison was an unsympathetic client, having already been accused—and acquitted—of bludgeoning his father to death, as well as murdering an African American boy. Even if Jarvis, Aycock, Aydlett, and Meekins had been the legal equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they could do little to destroy the prosecution’s case, even though it was built only on eyewitness testimony, without a gram of physical evidence. On day five, Ward closed his case with a syrupy jolt of emotion, claiming that if the jury found Harrison guilty, little Kenneth would be returned. After Ward’s speech, some in the audience cheered with such gusto that the judge sentenced one overly enthusiastic observer to five days in jail for contempt!
The jury was sent away to deliberate. So many hours went by that many assumed that the Harrison was going to be acquitted. But at 10 PM on March 20, the jury pronounced him guilty of kidnapping. Former-governor Aycock asked that the verdict be set aside, but the judge refused this and all other such requests by the defense. The next day, Harrison was sentenced to 20 years in state prison. His legal team immediately filed an appeal to the North Carolina State Supreme Court. On September 17, the Court affirmed the verdict.
On that day, Harrison was out on bond, residing in a Norfolk hotel. He had threatened suicide before, so the police who came to bring him in tried to reach him before he heard the news. By the time they arrived at his room, it was too late. With only 55 cents in his pocket, Harrison had penned a suicide note in which he proclaimed his innocence, condemned the “cruel ones” who convicted him, and asked God to bless his “precious family,” after which he shot himself in the right temple. As for Samuel Beasley, whose prohibition bill unknowingly seems to have put the tragedy in motion, he died away three years later in a Norfolk hospital after being mangled in a horrific boating accident.
But what about the boy? Over a century later, that question remains answered.
Did Kenneth Beasley die in captivity, helpless to escape? Did he accidentally drown in Currituck’s seemingly countless swamps and streams? Did he venture off in the snow and die of exposure? Did Harrison (or someone else?) murder and then bury him in an unmarked grave somewhere along the fifty miles between Poplar Branch and Norfolk? Or did he somehow–against all odds–live to adulthood with some other family?
Having four times (and growing) the population it did in 1905, Currituck today has little in common with this past era– other than this still-unsolved mystery. Like the number of sand grains on the county’s beaches, the fate of Kenneth Beasley will almost certainly remain forever unknown.
The African-American Experience in Northeastern North Carolina 