True Crime Chronicles" The Boone County legend of Matilda "Granny" Dukes and her 1884 "death" by drowning

Deep in Boone County’s Bear Creek Hollow, where kudzu has nearly erased the last traces of an 1870s log cabin, the story of Matilda “Granny” Dukes still clings to the stones like damp moss. \

Born Matilda McCarty in 1830 near Knoxville, Tennessee, she married stonemason Elias Dukes in 1851 and followed him west after the Civil War, settling on a 40-acre claim along the wagon trace that would become Bear Creek Road. when Elias died of lung fever in 1872 and their three sons scattered to California gold, Texas cattle drives, and a third to a prison stint, she stayed on alone, trading herbal remedies, midwifery, and laundry for cornmeal and salt.

Sharp-tongued but fair, literate enough to sign tax receipts in a neat slant, she kept a milk cow, a dozen hens, and a garden of beans, squash, and healing plants, her dog-eared copy of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal the only book for miles.

Then came the merciless summer of 1884: no rain from May 18 to August 10, wells failing, corn curling black, and forty head of cattle owned by neighbors John Capps, Henry Yarbrough, and Silas Meeks, staggering, frothing, collapsing with eyes clouded white and hides blistered as if branded;/

A Little Rock veterinarian confirmed arsenical poisoning, though no arsenic was ever found.

Suspicion settled on Granny: she had quarreled with Capps over a fence, Yarbrough claimed she cursed his plow when he refused payment for a fever tonic, and Meeks swore he saw her scattering powder along the creek at dusk.

On the night of August 12, twelve lantern-carrying men, Capps, Yarbrough, Meeks, blacksmith Thomas Boone, and nine others, marched the half-mile to her cabin, found her at supper (cornbread and beans still warm), bound her with plow line after she laughed off demands to confess, and dragged her to the knee-deep creek;

Thomas Boone later deposed that they held her under until she stopped kicking, yet when they let go she sank straight down like a stone and vanished. The coroner’s inquest the next day lasted twelve minutes, ruled accidental drowning, and closed without charges; the cabin door stood open, lamp burning, supper uneaten but steaming.

Three days later the drought broke with three inches of rain, the surviving cattle recovered, and the cabin was never lived in again.

By 1890 the roof had caved; by 1903 surveyors found the chimney stones warm at dawn though no fire had burned in nineteen years; in 1885 hunter Amos Keeter saw a blue light hover above the ruins for seven minutes before rocketing skyward.

Iin 1908 schoolteacher Eula Maples heard a woman humming "Barbara Allen"inside the collapse with no footprints in the morning dew; in 1932 revival preacher Clyde Tabor fled after a ball of cold fire scorched his Bible yet left his hands unmarked; and in 1955 moonshiner Otis Harlan met a black-shawled figure who offered a mason jar of liquid tasting of winter creek water and iron. He drank, woke miles away with frost on his beard though the night was 68°F.

Today the chimney rises twelve feet, mortared with creek clay, its hearthstone bearing a faint cross-shaped scar.

A rusted 1870 iron pot sits in the ashes, though locals insist it wasn’t there the year before, and every August 12 someone leaves a square of cornbread on the doorstep stones.

By morning it is gone., the smell of beans and cooked squash lingering in th Ozark air.