The Ballad of Tom Dooley

• he would live either close to Laura’s home in German’s Hill or close to the Bates’ place.

Within hours, Christy Earp had found him in the 1870 Caldwell County census. John Anderson, mulatto, was twenty-one-the same age as Laura-in 1866, and at the time he lived on the Anderson farm (Eliza’s, with her widowed mother and her brother Wash, who was Tom’s best friend). When we discovered that the Anderson farm adjoined the Bates’ place, I got chills. We knew we had found a crucial piece of evidence.

WCC-Ashe professor Shannan Roark was my connection to the experts in Wilkes County, and she went along on our trek to Ferguson, photographing sites and measuring the distance from one place to another, as we tried to make sense of what really happened.

Mr. Zelotese Walsh of Wilkes County has amassed detailed genealogical records of Wilkes County’s people, and he sorted through the Foster “begats” for me, in an attempt to pinpoint the lineage of Pauline Foster.

Dr. Randy Joyner of Wilkes County, a descendant of the Andersons, checked family records for me in connection with Wash and Eliza Anderson, provided me with a number of physical details about the county that helped me to construct the narrative, and took me to the grave of Tom Dula. My thanks, too, to genealogist Andy Pilley for his help with the background and photographs relating to the people in the story and to attorney David Hood of Hickory, North Carolina.

Michael Hardy, North Carolina’s Historian of the Year for 2011, is an author of North Carolina regimental histories and an expert on the Civil War. It was he who tracked down the war records of Thomas Dula and James Melton, discovering connections between them that had not previously come to light.

My thanks to my son Spencer McCrumb who spent a morning at the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh, obtaining for me the trial transcripts and any relevant documents concerning the case of Tom Dula.

When I realized that the Tom Dula story was an Appalachian parallel to Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Baird Hardy, a Western North Carolina English professor and author, heard me out, leaping to the connections as fast as I did, and we had a wonderful time finding a literary template for this most famous of mountain legends. I am grateful for her encouragement and her friendship.

The psychological aspects of the story were important. While most people have dismissed “the servant girl” as a minor character in this incident, I concluded that the catalyst in this story was Pauline Foster, and that her malice and discontent caused the deaths of Laura Foster and Tom Dula. Ann Melton’s narcissism made her indifferent to the suffering of other people. To understand Pauline’s sociopathic disorder and Ann’s narcissism, I was fortunate to receive guidance from Forensic and Consulting Psychologist Dr. Charlton S. Stanley of Tennessee, who helped me understand the psychology of these two pivotal characters, and to determine how their mind-sets would be manifested in their behavior. Dr. Martin E. Olsen, director of OB/GYN at East Tennessee State University, helped me to determine whether an autopsy would have showed if Laura Foster was pregnant.

It took many hours of talking to a great many people to enable me to sort out the facts and the personalities that shaped this story, and I am grateful to everyone who listened.

Sharyn McCrumb

Sharyn McCrumb is the author of The Rosewood Casket, She Walks These Hills, and many other acclaimed novels. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She was named a “Virginia Woman of History” for achievement in literature in 2008. She lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than a hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790 in the Smoky Mountains that divide North Carolina and Tennessee.

For more information, please visit her Web site at www.sharynmccrumb.com.

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