For a month after Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, the Civil War continued in the mountains. The last clash — or skirmish, or battle — east of the Mississippi occurred May 6 on Hanging Dog Creek.
Hanging Dog Creek tumbles through what is now the Nantahala Game Land, north of Murphy, and flows into the Hiwassee River, passing under Old Joe Brown Highway, once a Tennessee-North Carolina toll road. Along this road, during the final actions of the war, a deserter-turned-raider named Capt. Aker directed his band of men across the mountain boundary into North Carolina.
In Murphy, Aker's group set fire to the courthouse. It then headed north up the Valley River Valley to Valleytown, as Margaret Walker Freel documented in her Cherokee County history, “Our Heritage.” The raiders were after food. Unlike East Tennessee, eaten up by camping armies, Western North Carolina had game — and livestock.
“With only a small home guard and the women folks left to protect the vast rugged terrain, raiders found it easy pickings,” says Bill Carver, native Cherokee County author and storyteller. Carver points out that the Buncombe Turnpike and its feeder roads supported a cowboy trade here that beat what would pass out West.
A great memorial to that era survives in the Old Tatham House in Valleytown, near Andrews. In 1833, Thomas Tatham built a two-story log structure for his young wife, Polly, and their future large family. Writer John Parris celebrated Polly in a piece titled “A Breath of the Past.”
Barely 110 pounds and just 5 feet tall, Parris relates, Polly raised sheep, wove wool, plowed fields and chopped wood. “Her home,” he notes, “was a haven for neighbor women during the Civil War, when her own husband and five sons were off fighting for the Lost Cause.”
Aker's raiders never threatened Polly, for they'd turned and headed home when they discovered that Confederate soldiers under the command of Stephen Whitaker (of Thomas' Legion) were encamped there. “These men were definitely still in Confederate service,” says Terrell Garren, local author and Civil War scholar.
Gen. James Green Martin, commander of Confederate troops in Western North Carolina, had not surrendered to the local Union commander, Col. William C. Bartlett, until their meeting in Waynesville on May 7. When Whitaker heard, he surrendered in Franklin on May 12.
Rob Neufeld writes the local history feature, “Visiting Our Past,” for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of “A Popular History of Western North Carolina” and “Asheville's River Arts District.” Contact him at
RNeufeld@charter.net or 768-2665.
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