Sacred Ground: Harness Cemetery
Editor’s Note: The Harness Cemetery has been the subject of previous stories published by the Independent Herald. For the Sacred Ground series, we are revisiting every cemetery in Scott County.
Located deep in the forest on the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area is a small cemetery containing just two graves: Talitha Brown Harness and her son, Peter Harness. They were brutally murdered in 1889.
Today, the Harness gravesite is largely forgotten. A descendant of the Harness family will venture into the mountains on occasion to tend to it — it’s only accessible via four-wheel-drive vehicle — but for the most part it’s left to the passage of time and the elements. A wire fence enclosing it is mostly still intact, but the gate has fallen and the cemetery is not mowed or regularly maintained.
There’s no real road leading to the cemetery; a faint road trace through the woods is the closest thing to it. The cemetery is located on what is called “The Jerry Trail” on the North Cumberland WMA, which links the Bull Creek Settlement Trail with another trail near the base of Round Mountain. The Harness Cemetery is only a short distance from the larger Rob Sexton Cemetery at Round Mountain.
The Harness family
In his 1994 book, “Cemeteries of Scott County, Tennessee,” historian Robert Bailey notes that the Harness Cemetery is the resting place of the wife and son of Jerry Harness, who were killed by Berry Bowling in 1921.
There aren’t many errors in Bailey’s exhaustive work, but in this instance the author confused two separate murders. Berry Bowling was accused of murdering William Harness and his wife, Mary Jane Lawson Bowling, in 1921. He was later lynched by a mob. William Harness and Berry Bowling are both buried at the Bowling Harness Cemetery on Bull Creek, at the base of the mountain from where Talitha Harness and her son are buried. Mary Jane Bowling was buried at the Lawson and Brown Cemetery a few miles away.
Talitha Harness was the wife of Rev. Thomas Harness of Bull Creek.
Thomas Harness may have been the son of John Harness (1775-1845) and Mary “Polly” Wilson Harness. Several of John and Polly Harness’s children moved to the Bull Creek settlement in the 19th century, including brothers Samuel and David. David Harness is buried at the Bowling Harness Cemetery near the head of the valley, and Samuel Harness may have been as well.
While available information indicates that John and Polly Harness had a son named Thomas, family genealogists often place his birth at an earlier date, which may make him too old to be a brother to Samuel and David Harness. Rev. Thomas Harness told census-takers at various points that he was born between 1817 and 1825.
In any event, the Harness family was quite a significant part of the Bull Creek settlement by the latter part of the 19thcentury, and Rev. Thomas Harness was tied to them in some way — perhaps as John and Polly Harness’s grandson rather than their son.
The origin of Talitha Brown Harness is even more difficult to nail down. There were multiple Brown families living in the area at the time. In fact, another, younger, Thomas Harness (born 1846) married Nancy Brown.
Thomas and Talitha Harness had several children. In 1860 they had five children listed: William was the oldest, age 12, followed by Jacob, Partilia, Jeremiah and John.
In 1870, additional children included Leonard, age 9, followed by David, Noah and James.
Peter Harness first shows up in the 1880 census. He was age 8 at the time.
A gruesome murder
The events that led to the establishment of the Harness Cemetery on the mountain played out in June 1889, as detailed in the Independent Herald’s Murder in the Heartland series. Two men — identified as 45-year-old Elias R. Reynolds and his 20-year-old nephew, Thomas J. Lloyd — went to the Harness home with intentions of robbing the family.
Rev. Thomas Harness was away from home that night. Only his wife, Talitha, and their teenage son, Peter, were at home. Both were killed in what the Knoxville Daily Journal called “the foulest and most unprovoked murder ever perpetrated in Scott County.”
Talitha Harness was shot to death. Peter, who was mentally handicapped, was hacked to death with a garden hoe. Their home was burned to the ground with their dead bodies inside.
According to reports, Reynolds and Lloyd knocked at the door and demanded money. Talitha refused, and one of the men shot her with a pistol. Peter Harness escaped through a side door but was chased down and killed with a garden hoe.
The men allegedly stole about $74 — or the equivalent of about $1,700 today — before setting fire to the home. Neighbors discovered a grisly scene the next morning, with young Peter’s legs sticking through what had once been the front door.
A telegraph was issued for the arrests of Reynolds and Lloyd, and they were captured inside a saloon in Jellico the following afternoon. Milton H. Hollingsworth, a former sheriff in Campbell County, took the men into custody, and put them on a train to Buckeye — where present-day Pioneer is located. There, they turned them over to the Scott County sheriff and his deputies.
The sheriff — Frank Hughett — didn’t expect to make it back to Huntsville with the two men alive. He did, but it was only a matter of days before an angry mob kidnapped them from the jail in Huntsville.
At about midnight on June 12, 1889, a large crowd — one newspaper wrote “fully one hundred well armed and determined men” — showed up at the jail and demanded the release of the prisoners. When the jailer refused, a sledge hammer was used to break into the jail. Reynolds and Lloyd were hauled a quarter of a mile away from the jail, where they were made to confess to killing Talitha and Peter Harness. Once they had done so, they were hanged. Their bodies were left swinging from ropes, along with a note: “Any man who saw this and gives it away or meddles in it in any way shall go the same way or be hanged until he is dead, dead, dead.”
The deaths of Reynolds and Lloyd were the first lynchings ever reported in Scott County.
Rev. Thomas Harness died four years later, in 1893. The last of his and Talitha’s surviving children, Noah Harness, died in Briceville, Tenn. in 1948.
Inconsistencies
It is commonly believed and accepted that Talitha Brown Harness is buried at the mountaintop cemetery above Bull Creek. However, it should be noted that the headstone reads, “Almiry Brown Harness Born 1854.”
While Almiry was likely a nickname for Taletha, it’s unknown where the birth date comes from. Taletha Harness would have been born well before 1854 — likely in the 1820s or 1830s.
Thomas and Taletha Harness did have a daughter born around 1854 (the dates 1853 and 1854 were alternately given to census enumerators). But her name was Partilia, not Almiry. And she is not buried at the Harness Cemetery. She married George Anderson and was buried at Riverview Cemetery when she died in 1923.
This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.