Bridge Burners

After Unionists burned several East Tennessee railroad bridges on November 9, 1861, Confederate engineer Colonel Danville Leadbetter soon arrived to rebuild the bridges and capture those responsible. Later that month, his forces captured Henry Fry, Jacob Hinshaw, and Hugh Self and confined them in the Greenville jail. A court martial convicted them on the morning of November 30 and sentenced them to death, but Self’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment because he was only 16 years old. That afternoon, Fry and Hinshaw, with hands bound behind them, were marched up Depot Street in a hollow square of soldiers, crossed the railroad tracks near the depot, and went up a gently sloping hill to the edge of the woods, where two ropes hung from a limb of a huge oak tree. At 2 P.M., they were hanged, and their bodies remained hanging until 4 o’clock P.M. the next day. Unionist prisoners cut the bodies down and buried them under the tree. Confederates later reburied them on Andrew Johnson’s property west of town on a rise west of present-day Nanci Lane, calling the burial ground the Rebel Graveyard. After the war, their families reburied them again, Hinshaw in a private cemetery and Fry at Blue Springs Cemetery.

Greeneville, Tennessee · United States