Near this spot on the night of January 15, 1869, a group of masked horsemen lynched Wash Henley, a black Union army veteran, after he and Susan Jones, the white teenage daughter of his employer Philip T. Jones, left home together the previous night. Henley, born about 1841 in Mississippi, had served as a blacksmith for Company B, 59th U.S. Colored Infantry with the rank of private from March 1864 until January 1866, and in 1864 he married Emily Black in Memphis. After the war he worked near Bartlett, probably as a blacksmith, for farmer Philip T. Jones, where he met Susan, who was about 16. On the night of January 14, Susan Jones took $445 of her father's money and left home with Henley; local newspapers reported it as an elopement, though the motive was not clear. The next day Philip Jones found his daughter in Germantown and took her home, and that same day six of Jones's friends captured Henley, probably in Collierville, while intending to turn him over to the authorities in Bartlett. Before they arrived, about 25 masked horsemen intercepted them, seized Henley, and lynched him. One newspaper reported that he was hanged and set afire before being shot, while a coroner's jury found that he was killed by pistol balls at the hands of unknown parties. His body was found on January 16 near Fletcher's Creek, no effort was made to investigate, arrest, or prosecute the lynchers, and his burial site is unknown.