True Crime Chronicles: Land dispute murders and a single strawberry left on a headstone every Memorial Day

The cotton stood knee-high in Lee Township when Jesse Nickels and J.R. Hodges rode out on the evening of May 30, 1897, to drive a cedar stake into ground the Days family had cleared with their own hands after the war.

Nickels kept the only store south of the railroad tracks; Hodges hired out by the day. Both were white, both were broke, and both believed the forty-acre wedge belonged to them.

Jim Jackson and Will McCray stepped from the tree line with rifles. Nickels took a .38 slug through the meat of his left arm. Hodges spurred his mule and lived to reach the sheriff.

By Tuesday, John Wesley Cummings. forty-five, broad as a barn door, owner of one hundred and sixty acres and a reputation for settling arguments with lead, had gathered four kin and ridden for the Days cabin. He found John Days on the porch, shotgun across his lap, Mary Days in the doorway cradling their youngest, a two-year-old girl the newspapers would only call “the infant.”

Cummings demanded they vacate by sundown. Days refused. A single command--“Stand aside, John”--was the last thing the child ever heard.

The posse fired first. Buckshot tore through the cabin wall. The toddler dropped without a sound. John Days returned fire; a bullet caught Cummings square in the chest. He was dead before he hit the dust.

When the smoke cleared, two Days lay dead beside the porch steps. Fourteen-year-old Elijah limped away with a shattered femur. The posse scattered, leaving Cummings’s body for the coroner.

Sheriff James N. Cypert arrived at dawn with a wagon and a warrant. He found the Cummings brothers, William, forty-one, and George, thirty-seven, plus cousins Tom and Eli Rankin hiding in a corn crib. A coroner’s jury ruled all three deaths homicides by ten o’clock.

The prisoners were chained together and marched the twelve miles to Russellville under militia escort; someone had telegraphed Little Rock that Atkins was fixing to burn.

In the spring of 1898 the case came before Judge Jephtha H. Evans in the Russellville courthouse. The Days survivors, John, Mary, and Elijah on crutches. sat behind the prosecutor.

No Black faces in the jury box, but no ropes in the gallery either.

The evidence was simple: .38-caliber slugs pulled from the cabin wall matched the posse’s revolvers. Elijah testified in a voice still cracking: “They shot first. My sister never made a sound.”

The defense claimed they had gone only to serve notice.

On May 14 the jury returned: William Cummings, manslaughter, ten years; George Cummings, seven; Tom Rankin, five. Eli Rankin and the fifth man walked free. The Days kept their forty acres. No reparations, no apology.

John Wesley Cummings lies beneath a cedar in Atkins City Cemetery, stone carved simply: "J.W.C 1852–1897".

Two small fieldstones mark an unmarked rise behind the old Days homesite. Local memory says one is the child, the other her grandfather.

Wild periwinkle grows there still

The convicted served their time in Little Rock and drifted west. Elijah Days farmed the same forty until 1932, dying at forty-nine of lung fever. The land passed to his daughter, who sold it in 1958 for the Atkins bypass.

Today the cedar stake is rotted, the cabin gone to termites, and the creek rerouted by the Corps of Engineers. But every Memorial Day someone leaves a single strawberry on the child’s stone, --an old Pope County custom for the innocent dead.

The Atkins Chronicle had the last word in 1898: “Justice was blind, but at least it kept its eyes open.”