The Famous Dar Murder Mystery (7 page)

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Authors: Graham Landrum

BOOK: The Famous Dar Murder Mystery
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I finally flew out of Three City Airport at 3:00 the following afternoon.
 
 
Helen Delaporte
Down here in the South, people don't consider that they know a person until they know what his family is. Your family is who you are. It's cozy, and it's an attitude that makes it easier for a lot of women in this region to get into the DAR. But more of that shortly.
That was quite a storm we showed Hornsby Roadheaver. But it meant that we got to know him, and through him we had finally got official recognition of García's identity. Although Roadheaver was not the type, he had studied for a year at Juilliard; and he knew Julia and Mac Chapman. He also managed Rachel Gillfallon, a flutist whom I knew at Eastman.
Actually, when I said good-bye to Hornsby at Three City, I thought the DAR part of the DAR mystery was over.
Of course I was mistaken. The headlines of the next morning read DAR REGENT RIGHT ABOUT MURDER. Then there was a ream about me and the chapter, all of it a recap of what had already been printed. At that point I had not yet found out that Elizabeth Wheeler had been bribing the newspaper for publicity. Of course every scrap of publicity we got in that manner was tweaking the nose of Butch Gilroy, not to mention Ron Jefterson.
I was immediately the town celebrity, and as soon as the telephone rates went down that evening, I found that I was a big hit with the Daughters all over the Commonwealth of Virginia.
“We're proud of you, Helen,” the State Regent assured me. Actually, I was a little nervous because National is very touchy if we don't live up to their standards of dignity. For example, there are rules as to where we can and can't wear the DAR insignia. And there is a general atmosphere that, if not defensive, is at least cautious. And all the media are only too glad to ridicule us if we do anything in the least silly.
I got calls from Tazewell, Roanoke, Bedford—just everywhere.
Mabel Hazelhurst from the Royal Oak Chapter said, “Now, dear, you must go right ahead and solve that mystery.”
She seemed to be serious about it, but I had no idea at all that our chapter would become further involved.
Nevertheless we did, and things began to stir the very next Sunday. Nearly everybody had left the church, and I was winding down the postlude when I looked up and saw Frances Vogelsang, who was on altar guild that month. Her round, bland face appeared above the console like a moon fifteen minutes above the horizon.
“I read about you,” she cooed.
“I'm notorious.”
“That Mr. García,” she said, “he's the one that married Evelyn Haverty, isn't he?”
“Oh?” I was gathering up my music.
“Yes. Her mother was a Drover from Benhams.”
I am generally accepted by the people in this area; nevertheless there are ways in which I am very much an outsider and always will be. Benhams I had heard of, but I had never been there. And as for Havertys, I had never heard of them. But the prospect of increasing my knowledge about the murdered man roused my interest.
“Evelyn Haverty, you say?”
“My sister Elaine, the one who lives in Knoxville, was in school with Dora Drover. Dora went out to California—oh, at least thirty-five years ago. I am just about sure that her daughter Evelyn married a man named García.”
Frances Vogelsang's name pretty well describes her, and I never had thought that she was strong on brains, but people like that often know things that nobody else knows, and I have to hand it to them.
I went right home and called Elizabeth.
 
 
Elizabeth Wheeler
I had no idea that I was getting further mixed up in our famous “murder” when Helen Delaporte called me that Sunday afternoon. I thought at first she was calling about some lady wanting help with a DAR line. But this little project sounded a lot more exciting.
I am not
really
what you would call a professional genealogist, but I have always been interested in families. When I was just a little girl, I loved to listen to my grandmother and aunt Mattie as they would sit on the porch and talk about relatives for hours—not just our relatives, but the relatives of everybody in the little mountain town where we lived. Papa was the town doctor, and he used to go to all the hollows and across the ridges, and I soon learned that I had kinfolks in just about all those places. And those who weren't kin to me were kin to those who were.
Well, after I went off to school, I got interested in the history of Virginia. For most people that means Williamsburg
and the Carters, Byrds, Lees, and Washingtons. But I was interested in Dr. Thomas Walker and Colonel Patton and Colonel William Preston and Madam Russell and the Over-Mountain Men.
And that's pretty much how I got my reputation for genealogy in southwest Virginia—just always trying to find out as much as I could about the past of the area where I grew up.
Now I had the problem of Evelyn Haverty. At first the name didn't mean a thing to me. Her mother was a Drover. Well, the hills are full of Drovers. Then it came to me that she must be part of the Quin Drover clan.
When I was a very small girl in Hogg's Gap, I remember seeing Quin and his nurse in a big old Pierce Arrow touring car. In those days he had to ship that car by rail to get it in and out of Hogg's Gap.
Quin lived up in New Jersey—which might have been China for all it meant to me—and just came to Hogg's Gap rarely.
His wife was buried in the Hogg's Gap Cemetery in a great huge granite mausoleum. And then when he died, they buried him there too. That mausoleum was a show in itself, but I won't get off onto that.
When I run a genealogy, I go to the courthouse for the real evidence that I can use as proof. But first I try to find somebody who knows what the facts are, more or less, so I'll have something to start on.
This time I knew exactly where to go—Ella Fisk. Ella has lived in the mountains her whole life—almost ninety years now. After Wilber Fisk died leaving Ella with four little boys, she worked as district nurse for about fifty years. There's no creek in the hills that she doesn't know, and the miners and moonshiners think she is just about Mrs. God. She was bound to know about all those Drovers—the ones that were in the penitentiary as well as those who were out. I was pretty sure she would give me just what I needed.
My sister-in-law had been in the hospital for an operation the Wednesday before Helen Delaporte called me about the Drover genealogy. They took her home from the hospital the next Tuesday; so I had to go to Bluefield to be with her until she was able to take care of herself a little. I stayed with her ten days—which made me miss the DAR meeting—but on the way home I stopped by to see Ella Fisk and get everything she knew about the Drovers.
It is something to do to get to Ella's house. You go off the “big road” at Barnett's Chapel, and then you wind around up the hollow following automobile tracks till you come to a gate. After that it seems like a quarter of mile you have to walk before you get to the house.
It's the house where she was born. She lived in Hogg's Gap while she was district nurse—on account of the telephone, you know. But when she moved back to the home place, the boys had electricity and a telephone line put in. And I'd say that if Ella needed help, she could get it quick enough from folks that think the world of her—but that hollow is remote, and only a real mountain woman would think of living there.
It is a log house—a good, large-sized one—and the boys put a nice new roof on it. And she has a great high television thing up there.
I went trudging up the hollow in my overshoes, and it really takes lots of breath. I was right glad to see the smoke rolling out of her chimney, because the wind was whistling down the hollow, and in spite of the exercise, I was chilled all the way through.
Ella's boys all turned out well. One is a surgeon, one is a G.P.; one is a civil engineer, and the youngest—Douglass—is a high-school teacher in Grundy.
Doug has got the house fixed so that it is very comfortable and looks very nice.
It had been at least a year since I last saw Ellen, but she was the same as ever. She is quite a bit older than I am, but she
used to work with Papa, and they just thought the world of each other. So if there was ever anybody like a big sister to me, it was Ella.
I explained what I was after.
“Quin Drover—” she said. “Yes, it was Quin, Jr., whose girl married the Haverty, and it seems to me her name was Dora. Yes, it was.
“You know, Quin, Jr., went to Emory and Henry College, and that's how he got to know Eudora Monahan. Her father was well-to-do in Benhams, and her brother was at Emory with Quin. I think she died when their only child was born. And so Quin gave her to Dora's mother to raise.”
“Did he marry again?” I asked. When you are working on genealogy, you must always ask as many questions like that as you can.
“No—” Ella hesitated. “I don't believe he did. The daughter—her name was really Eudora—was just as well off being reared by the Monahans. And of course there was any amount of money ready for her.”
I was trying to write all this down just as quick as Ellen said it. It's a good idea to keep an older person talking when you're asking for information, because once they begin remembering, there is no telling what you will learn.
“Now, was her father the one who used to come to Hogg's Gap in that great big Pierce Arrow?” I asked.
“No, no,” Ella replied. “That was Quin, Sr.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Know about him? I guess I know everything about him.” Ella looked at me as if I had lost my senses. “Oh, you know all about him, don't you?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” Ella said, “if you had as much to do with his poor relations as I have had, you'd know everything about him and a good deal more. He treated them like dirt, and they got
even with him by telling every mean thing he ever did. But at the same time, they were proud to be related to him because he was rich; and they bragged about him at the same time that they hated him.”
Ella was a great help. If I hadn't had her, it would have taken months to do all the work that I did in just a week.
The first Drover in the mountains was Jacob Drover. He came to southwest Virginia soon after the Revolution with his wife, who was just Susan. Her maiden name is lost. He had twelve children—all of them sons. That's why the hills are so full of Drovers, although they were a quarrelsome lot and tended to get themselves shot early in life.
One of the sons was Andrew. He married Elizabeth Quinby. They say she was a shrewd, hard-driving woman; and though she had several children, the only one that had her brains was Quin Drover, Sr.
I later got his dates without any trouble right off the mausoleum in Hogg's Gap. He was born in 1840 and died in 1917. That made him just twenty-one years old when the War between the States broke out. Quin was wild and smart at the same time. Instead of going with the North or the South, he went with the bushwhackers. Soon he got to be their leader. He would go down toward Marion and just carry off everything he wanted from rich farmers and planters.
After the war had gone on quite a while, he saw which side would win. He went over into Kentucky and joined the Union army. By the time Lee surrendered, Quin Drover was a lieutenant.
When he got home, Quin knew how to steal, kill people, and make whiskey. But Quin was smart enough to make his whiskey the legal way, and he had enough money from his bushwhacking days to set up a still. He called the product Dixie Rose and began to get rich.
Quinby Drover, Sr., had five children; and the richer he
got, the higher they all got into society. After a while Quin got a bank. Then he got another one. Then he was principal stockholder in the R&HG railroad. After that he was just way above anybody else in the mountains. He got himself a private railway car and sent his boys to military schools and to college and his girls to finishing schools.
I've already mentioned Quin, Jr. Dora Monahan was a real beauty. She and Quin, Jr., were the grandparents of Evelyn Haverty, who was the one that married Luis Garcia Valera. So that is how Mr. García Valera was related to the family.
Frank and Abner Drover went to Washington and Lee. Euphemia Bascomb was a friend of Frank's sister Martha at Laurel Hill College in Borderville. She came from a good family without money, but she was pretty and Frank married her. They lived in Washington until Frank died. Then Euphemia came back to live on the farm she had inherited from her father in Burke County; that's the one just below the Virginia border.
Frank and Euphemia had four children. The two older boys both died before they were twenty-five. St. Elmo was a broker like his father and committed suicide when he couldn't cover his commitments in 1929.
Their sister, Pearl Drover, married into a society family, but her husband never amounted to anything and was killed in an accident in '68, leaving one child: Bettye VanDyne.
Bettye VanDyne, then, was the only living descendant of Quin Drover, Jr.'s second son, and Ella thought Bettye was living on the old Bascomb place not far from Borderville.
I said, “Ella, how in the world do you know all this stuff?”
“Oh, the Drovers know all about it,” she said.
Ella knew a great deal about Martha Drover's branch of the family; but there is no need to go into all the ins and outs of it (I've got it all written out in the chart) except to point out that Martha married Baker Comming—a lawyer for many
years in Borderville and president of the Borderville State Bank that went under in 1932. After the bank failed, he ran the Drover and Sons Transfer and Storage until his son Allen came home from the war. Allen, Jr., took over when his father retired in 1967 and changed the name of the business to Borderville Transfer.
It's an interesting thing about Allen! There are still people around who blame the Commings for the bank failure.
Jane Drover married in Collinwood, New Jersey, where old Quin moved about 1900; and as you can see from the chart, there's only the one living descendant: Duncan Yardley. But there's a widower of Jane Drover's granddaughter: Dr. Anthony Hancock.
A. R. Drover, the last son of old Quin Drover, has a granddaughter still living—Dorothy. She grew up in the East. Kenneth Raebon was just a boy from Hogg's Gap who put himself through law school. Somehow he got to be attorney for the Drover interests in southwest Virginia (they had coal before it was all mined out) and met and married Dorothy. They live in Hogg's Gap.
So all told, there are only four direct descendants of old Quin Drover left. They are Bettye VanDyne, Allen Comming, Jr., Duncan Yardley, and Dorothy Raebon. In addition to these, Dr. Hancock is a grandson-in-law, and Luis Garcia Valera was a great-grandson-in-law.
Of course after Ella had given me all the information she could remember, I went to the library. Most of my dates, etc., I got from obituaries, because although most of the Drovers lived away from the border country, they still made a noise in the
Banner-Democrat
when they died.
It would pay to study the family chart. I put a lot of work into it. But it was all worth it because the chart was very important in solving the mystery.

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