On July 1, 1930, the front page of The Chatham Record was devoted entirely to reporting the demise of various local citizens:
Note that while Mrs. London “passed quietly away at her home” with “dignity and charm . . . dressed in lavender with a countenance serene,” the fate of Roy Carroll was considerably more violent. Rufus Johnson, having enjoyed a twenty-year reprieve from his own predicted sentence, seems to have made the best of his lot – at least until Thursday morning, when “he had gone to the mail box for the mail, [and] he dropped dead.”
Three neighbors, three deaths, one front page. And an unusual window into the varied lives and radically different experiences people had in one small county.
