ABSTRACT
Around midnight on the unusually cold evening of 30 December 1887, Constable David E. Garvin drove his buggy over the railroad tracks in Central, South Carolina, heading north along the hilly road to Pickens. On the seat next to him, arms tied, sat Manse Waldrop, identified that afternoon at the coroner's inquest as the man who had raped and killed Lula Sherman, the 14-year-old daughter of a sharecropper. Before the buggy made it a mile down the road, men drifted out from the darkness, grabbing the mule's harness. Garvin tried to get the buggy turned around and moving back toward the relative safety of the hotel at Central, but it was too late. The men had grasped Waldrop and dragged him from the buggy, into the woods.
