Cold Case Files: War crimes in Newton County's Limestone Valley linger in the shadows of the Hanging Tree
In the remote hollows of Newton County’s Ozark highlands, the absence of comprehensive records on violence has been a persistent feature of rural American life.
From the mid-19th century through the early 20th and well beyond, official documentation of crimes and wartime killings in such places was often fragmentary--dependent on scattered pension files, local depositions, oral accounts, and occasional county histories rather than systematic investigation or complete court dockets.
Guerrilla actions, bushwhacker raids, and summary executions frequently left little beyond family memory and the physical traces that survived.
In Limestone Valley, three silent graves in the Steel Creek area remain the primary visible signs of the bloodlust that claimed three men on a single tree in the spring of 1863.
On March 24, 1863, Captain James R. Vanderpool of Company C, First Arkansas Infantry (Union), under Colonel James M. Johnson, received orders at Fayetteville to take a scouting party into Newton County. Captain Abial Stevens of Company E joined with additional men. The expedition encountered significant Confederate forces. The main body retreated toward Fayetteville, leaving several Union soldiers behind in the county.
When those men later reached the post, they found it had been evacuated on April 16. Cut off and at high risk of capture, they went into hiding.
The known soldiers left behind included Gilbert Smith, David Flood, James Smith (Gilbert’s brother and David’s brother-in-law), John Standridge, Kelsey Gilmore, O.C. Bright, and possibly Daniel Tennison and James Criner.
They were eventually taken prisoner, along with Berry Stone, a civilian neighbor of David Flood who lived in Union Township and was not listed as a Union soldier. Stone may have been sheltering the men.
At some point one of the captives obtained a knife; several cut themselves free and escaped. David Flood, James Smith, and Berry Stone did not.
Confederate forces hanged the three on the same tree in Newton County, reportedly in Limestone Valley. Family and later accounts attribute the action to forces under Capt. John Cecil, CSA.
.Cecil, born in 1822 in Morgan County, Tennessee, had settled in the area that became Newton County, served as the county’s first elected sheriff in the late 1840s and again in the mid-1850s, and was widely known for his knowledge of the local terrain and people.
After Arkansas’s secession he enlisted in Confederate service, fought at Pea Ridge where relatives were killed, and by 1862 commanded an independent guerrilla company authorized under General Thomas Hindman’s broader effort to harass Union forces in northwest Arkansas. His band operated effectively in the hollows and used the county’s caves and dense cover.
Union forces burned much of Jasper while hunting him; his own brothers James and Samuel served on the Union side, heightening the personal stakes of the local conflict. Limestone Valley itself contained many Confederate sympathizers, and the area around Union Township—where Flood and Stone resided in 1860—was a logical place for such an execution.
David Flood’s wife, Martha Hampton Flood, followed the captors, pleading for the men’s lives. Her appeals were ignored.
The three were hanged together. Isham Wheeler later stated in a deposition that the rope marks remained visible on the tree a year afterward. The bodies were taken to the Steel Creek area of Limestone Valley and buried in what became an unmarked grave (now associated with Steel Creek Cemetery).
David Flood’s Civil War pension record fixes the date of death as May 29, 1863; Walter Lackey’s History of Newton County listed June of that year.
Survivors such as Kelsey Gilmore and John Standridge eventually rejoined their command.
Standridge later returned to Newton County after learning of family deaths and was himself killed by bushwhackers on February 19, 1865. His widow, Susan Cagle Standridge, was unable to collect his pension because of his absence without leave, though she was entitled to the enlistment bounty.
Local tradition, including accounts from the late Remmel Flud, sometimes spoke of as many as seven men hanged; examination of pension and military records confirmed only the three. James M. Criner, listed in one regimental source as dying in Newton County in June 1863, in fact survived, married, and lived until 1906.
Newton County’s isolation shaped both the event and its documentation. The 1860 population stood at roughly 3,400, with only a handful of enslaved people. Divided loyalties produced neighbor-against-neighbor violence; some residents lived in caves for safety.
Formal military actions were limited--saltpeter works raids, skirmishes, and pursuits of guerrilla bands such as the April 17, 1864, engagement in Limestone Valley against Cecil’s men--but irregular killings left thinner paper trails.
Union pension files, depositions from men who served in the First Arkansas Infantry, and family research by Evelyn Flood (published in the Newton County Family History Book in 1992) became the principal sources. Official military records noted scout duty but rarely detailed the local fate of the abandoned men.
In October 2021 the Newton County Historical Society placed a marker for the three men at the site, with landowner permission. Find A Grave memorials for Pvt. David Flud (Flood) and Pvt. James Smith record the hanging under John Cecil and the Steel Creek burial. Oral tradition continues to circulate accounts of the tree--sometimes described as a beech near the rive--and the visible rope marks.
The exact location of the hanging tree remains a matter of local discussion, but the graves and the marker now stand as the tangible record.
No one was cited, arrested or even investigated for what was clarly three murders that occurred outside the accepted treatment of prisoners of war, even in such a divided time in our country, state and unfortunately, the deep hollows of Newton Cpounty.
The Limestone Valley hanging was one episode in a wider pattern of irregular warfare that the remoteness of the Ozarks both enabled and obscured.
Where systematic criminal investigation or complete contemporary reporting was rare, the three graves at Steel Creek preserve the outline of what occurred when scouting parties were cut off, prisoners taken, and summary justice carried out under the pressures of a divided mountain county.
