Today, July 12, marks the 191st anniversary of the hanging of Frankie Silver in 1833. The summer heat was already rising that day when Frankie took her place under the rope. At her trial the previous year, Frankie had not been allowed to speak in her own defense. Her lawyer didn’t put up much a fight during the two-day proceeding, and the jury convicted her of killing her husband Charlie. The trial started on a Thursday, and by Friday afternoon it was all over but the hanging.
(Later, some of those same jurors signed a petition for Frankie’s freedom, and a few expressed regret at their decision to find her guilty. But their actions were too little, too late.)
Fifteen months after the trial, Frankie was hung to death in front of a large crowd of people gathered to see the gruesome end to her life. She declined to say any last words. By most accounts, her father said it all when he shouted, “Die with it in ye, Frankie!” And that’s exactly what she did. “Take it to the grave!” Frankie never said a word. She stood stone silent and offered no explanation, confession or apology. The hangman covered Frankie’s head with a bag, slipped the noose over her neck, and tightened the rope. Seconds later, Frankie dropped. After an agonizing amount of time twisting and thrashing at the end of the rope, she finally died.
Following the hanging, and with Frankie’s body starting to wilt in the afternoon heat, her parents Isaiah and Barbara Stewart buried their daughter a few miles west of Morganton, NC. There is a grave marker in Burke County that was placed in the 1950s. But no one knows for sure the true location where Frankie is buried.
The Hanging of Frankie Silver is a figurative telling of what happened in the last moment’s of her life, and is not intended to be a literal account of the event. The goal of this movie is to humanize Frankie, to show her as a real person - a teenage wife and mother, and also perhaps an axe murderer - who experienced a hellish last two years on earth, all of which came to a horrible end when she was hung to death in front of a large gathering of people sprawled across the hillside in Morganton.
In the actual version of Frankie’s hanging, she was hung from a rope stretched over a tree limb. She stood in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, and when the wagon rolled away, Frankie was left to dangle violently until she died, which took a while. The actual hanging was very sadistic and brutal. For this movie, we weren’t able to shoot that version for various reasons.
But we still wanted to show the last moments of Frankie’s life. So, we built a make-shift gallows to portray Frankie dropping when a trapdoor is sprung by the hangman’s command. She falls as the noose tightens, which snaps her neck and kills her. The crowd noise fades out as she dies, and Frankie silently twists in the wind as her soul departs her body.
Legends, even true-life ones, are always open to interpretation and dramatic license, especially a story from 200 years ago. Tell it the way you want to tell it, and invite people into the story and let them decide how they feel about it.
Ultimately, this movie shows Frankie's hanging in a way that people haven't seen before, even if it's not the literal account that some folks would like to watch. However, if any viewers come away from this movie curious about factual, historical details of Frankie and Charlie, there are several exhaustive books available.
The point of this movie is to remind people that Frankie and Charlie, and their daughter Nancy, were real human beings, and not just made-up characters in a mountain legend from 200 years ago. In fact, at the end, the movie shows real photos of Nancy Silver Parker, her husband David Parker, and Nancy's grave in Macon County. Nancy passed away in 1901.
So, it is with all due respect, that we enter this movie, The Hanging of Frankie Silver, into the ongoing, timeless legend of Frankie & Charlie.
In the end, Frankie & Charlie both suffered terrible tragedies, and both missed out on the last 50 years of their lives. But there is one bright spot in all the misery. They had a daughter named Nancy, who grew up to be a beautiful young woman, married a man named David Parker, and went on to have 6 children. Sadly, David died in the Civil War in 1865. Nancy lived another 36 years before passing away in 1901 at the age of 70. Nancy is buried in the cemetery at Mountain Grove Baptist Church in Macon County, NC.
Charlie is buried in three separate graves at Kona Church in Mitchell County, NC. That's a whole other story....
Descendants of Frankie & Charlie still gather together for family reunions.
One of the best contemporary songs about the legend of Frankie and Charlie is "Take It To The Grave" by the band Couldn’t Be Happiers, available on their RU-vid channel. Verse by verse, they tell the entire story.
This movie was filmed in 2012, and edited in 2024, by Chanse Simpson.
Email: KonaGraves@gmail.com
11 июл 2024
