ABSTRACT
On the evening of 25 June 1900 in Polk County, Florida, a black man was lynched for the murder of a white man. Although multiple, extant newspaper accounts describe the affair in some detail, it is impossible to determine the names of either of the two dead men, the circumstances surrounding the original murder, or the actions of the lynch mob. The surviving accounts agree on a few details — an axe, a hiding place, and a posse's gunfire — but the rest of the story transpires very differently depending on which newspaper one reads.
