Small wonder: Where they hanged 'Boy Hero of Confederacy'

The Sam Davis Memorial Museum on Sam Davis Avenue in a residential area of Pulaski, Tenn.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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NOTE: The museum closed in 2023. Its collection was transferred to the Giles County Public Library in Pulaski, Tenn..

In Pulaski — the “Wild Turkey Capital” of Tennessee and original home of the KKK — they honor Confederate spy Sam Davis in the state’s smallest museum on the very grounds where the U.S. Army hanged him in 1863.

A copy of this image, purportedly
of Davis, is displayed in the Sam Davis
Memorial Museum.

“The gallows were right here,” says my guide, 76-year-old Sam Collins, as we stand near the middle of the 15 x 22-foot Sam Davis Memorial Museum, dedicated in 1950. (Eerie? Yup, but this tale gets more twisted. Stick with me.)

Soon after we meet, I know I’m going to enjoy the visit with Collins, a gruff, no-B.S. Pulaski lifer who serves as the local historical society VP. The 76-year-old Vietnam vet wears bib overalls and clenches a toothpick between his teeth. 

Collins enjoys telling stories and life’s simple pleasures — he still uses a flip phone, doesn’t own a credit card and drives a yellow 1984 Silverado pickup truck that I want. His father served a manager at Milky Way Farm, the local estate once owned by candy magnate Franklin Mars. The place produced the 1940 Kentucky Derby champ and enough stories for Collins to fill a book.

Pulaski’s mini-museum must have peaked in popularity decades ago. Visitation over the past few years has averaged roughly 200 people annually, Collins tells me, even fewer since the COVID pandemic hit in March 2020. 

“Every one of the locals,” he explains, “has already seen it.”

A close-up of the front of the museum.

In Pulaski, Tenn., they salute the humble wild turkey.

The son of slave-owning parents from Smyrna, Tenn., Sam Davis served with “Coleman’s Scouts,” a cavalry/intel unit attached to the Army of Tennessee. On Nov. 20, 1863, U.S. soldiers captured the 21-year-old Davis at Minor Hill — a few miles from the Alabama border — with intelligence regarding the Union Army in Middle Tennessee. Vigilance may not have been embedded in his DNA — according to local lore, the soldiers found Davis asleep under a plum tree.

Union General Grenville Dodge
 interrogated Sam Davis,
 Confederate spy. (Library of Congress)

Jailed by the U.S. Army in nearby Pulaski as a suspected spy, Davis endured interrogation by the provost marshal and General Grenville M. Dodge, the local commander.

Reveal your sidekicks or else, Dodge demanded of Davis. 

“He very quietly, but firmly, refused to do it,” the general wrote decades later in The National Tribune, a newspaper for Civil War veterans. “I therefore let him be tried and suffer the consequences.”

Found guilty of espionage by a court-martial appointed to try him, Davis received a sentence of death by hanging. On the morning of Nov. 27 — on a “pretty eminence, northeast of Pulaski, overlooking the town” — U.S. soldiers led Davis to the gallows. Hundreds of them, many of whom admired Davis’ bravery as he faced his demise, witnessed the execution.

Dodge, meanwhile, angrily dismissed protests by local citizens.

“I want him hung where all of you can see him,” the general said. “There are more of you guilty of his crime – I know it – and if I ever get my hands upon you, d—d you, I’ll hang you upon the same gallows.”

Offered another chance to reveal his informants, Davis again refused. The executioner sprung the trap door of the gallows, and Davis writhed in agony for several minutes.

A bronze plaque mounted on the front
of the museum.

“I remember that when he reached the platform his head struck the noose and that he stood and looked at it for an instant,” an Iowa veteran who witnessed the grim event recalled decades later. “Then the rope was adjusted, a lever was touched, the drop fell, and we marched back to our quarters conscious that we had seen a hero die.”

“All nature seems to be in mourning,” wrote a Cincinnati newspaper reporter who attended the execution, “and many warm hearts, loyal and true, but more that were not, melted into sympathy.”

"It was a heart-rending, sickening sight to me," a 7th Iowa veteran recalled, "and every heart went out to [Davis] in sympathy and sorrow."

“[O]ne of the fates of war,” Dodge called the hanging.

Three decades after his death, Davis The Spy became a Lost Cause martyr, propped up mostly by the publisher of the Confederate Veteran, Sumner Cunningham. In 1906, Pulaski dedicated a monument to Davis on its public square. Three years later, nearly 4,000 people attended the dedication of a Davis monument outside the Tennessee State Capitol building in Nashville. (Dodge and other Union soldiers donated money for the monument.)

“In all the glorious gifts or treasure and honor and courage and life and heroic devotion the South had to give, and did give freely,” the Nashville Tennessean wrote about the dedication, “it gave nothing more sublimely noble and heroic than Sam Davis.”

A monument at the site of Davis' capture in Minor Hill, Tenn., near the Alabama border.

In 1926, at the site of his capture, nearly 2,500 people attended the dedication of another Davis monument. “I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend or be false to a duty,” read words attributed to Davis inscribed on the gray-granite stone.

Even more than a half-century after his execution, the mythologizing remained at full blast.

The monument to Sam Davis in front of
 the county courthouse in Pulaski, Tenn.
"The prettiest county courthouse in the 
state," says my museum guide, Sam Collins.

“Highways are being built all over the state,” the Tennessean wrote in 1926. “What highway could be more sacred than a national highway to Sam Davis, perpetuating the memory of his bravery and teaching the younger generation how to live and how to die?”

Davis has streets and least one park in Tennessee named after him. His boyhood home in Smyrna, roughly 20 miles from Nashville, became a virtual shrine and a state landmark. Davis' story tugged at the heartstrings of generations. 

"Sam Davis' death a great American epic," read a headline over a lengthy story about the spy in The Rutherford (Tenn.) Courier in 1942.

At a pageant at the Davis family plantation in 1951, the woman who played the soldier’s mother wept — for real — during a scene. A woman in the audience “fainted and others had to go the back yard to get a grip on themselves” when the actor portraying a dead Davis appeared during the play. 

In 1999, 137 years after his death, a bronze statue of Davis was installed at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. Davis attended Western Military Institute, a predecessor of the academy. (The statue was removed in 2020.) The "Boy Hero of the Confederacy” eventually had a Tennessee highway named after him, too.

In 1950, the State of Tennessee appropriated $15,000 to build the Pulaski museum/memorial on the very site where Davis was hanged.

 “[The museum] provides space for numerous historical articles of the Confederate era that were formerly housed in the brick building on West Madison street [in Pulaski] where the Ku Klux Klan was organized,” the Nashville Banner wrote the day of the dedication.

   GOOGLE STREET VIEW: The Sam Davis Museum at 134 Sam Davis Avenue in Pulaski.

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Museum artifacts, including the shackles (left) used to restrain Davis on his execution day.

The museum today stands in a residential area on Sam Davis Avenue. In a display case, iron shackles used to restrain Davis at the execution catch my eye.

“That’s about as cool as it gets,” says Collins, a retired science teacher/former school superintendent. Almost as cool is a large inscribed stone against the far wall – it once marked Davis’ execution site.

Other artifacts and memorabilia in the museum are more mundane: books about the boy “hero,” a trunk used by Davis while he was a student at Western Military Institute, two pieces of rock from the chimney of a house the spy used as a hideout, a photo of Davis’ elderly sister, a 20th-century painting of the hanging, group images of Confederate veterans and a few Civil War-era weapons. There simply isn’t room for much more.

A large, inscribed stone that once marked
the Sam Davis execution site.

The State of Tennessee once asked Collins for an emergency preparedness plan for the museum, among the smallest in the U.S. (A museum inside an elevator shaft in New York City is the teeniest. Or is it the one in a converted shed in Arizona?)

“If something happens, you go out the door,” Collins says with a smile about his “plan.” Then he eyes the only exit, five steps or so away.

Before we depart, Collins tells a final story. 

He points to a depression about 15 yards from a bed of irises in front of the museum. A fire destroyed the  house that once stood there, killing the woman who lived inside. She was a victim of an arsonist, as it turned out, her son. The courts convicted him of murder and he received a life sentence.

What a place.

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SOURCES 

• Cincinnati Commercial, Dec. 8, 1863
• The (Nashville) Tennessean, April 30, 1909, May 2, 1926, Sept. 28, 1952
• Nashville Banner, Nov. 27, 1950
• Smith, Henry I., History of the Seventh Iowa Veteran Volunteer Infantry During the Civil War, Mason City, Iowa, E. Hitchcock Printer, 1903
• The National Tribune, Sept. 15, 1904, July 4, 1907