Before the recent term of court in Caldwell County a young grass widow of Buffalo Cove had filed for divorce with Attorney Wakefield of Lenoir, and it seems now that she was already engaged to a young man of the county and they were to be married as soon as the divorce could be obtained.
On Monday of the term at which the divorce suit was to be tried, the young widow was arrested and on the charge of keeping a disorderly house, was thrust in jail where she stayed over night pending the preparation of her bond. This suit now took precedence over the divorce suit. Attorney Wakefield cleared the young woman by proving that she had not kept house, but had lived with relatives who kept house on her place, and that the warrant was malicious and taken out to break the match between her and the young man.
Our talented and popular Johnson J. Hayes made a strong effort to convict the widow by trying to prove that she kept a disorderly briar patch near the house, but friend Wakefield, with his becoming silvery locks, countered by proving that his client went into the briar thicket frequently for the purpose of driving out disreputable trespassers who were gathering the blackberries that belonged to her.
The next day the divorce case came up and the widow won out. The third day her intended drove her into town and they went to the Mayor’s office to get married. By this time the court proceedings and the court crowd had stirred the people into both sympathy and admiration for the widow, for she had been prosecuted under a malicious indictment; she had been wrongfully confined in jail, and the state had made a strong effort to drag her nice blackberry patch into the slums—now she was to be honorably married. The members of the bench and bar, including one ex-Lieutenant-Governor, were all at the wedding. The jurors, sheriffs and the people in general were there. The outside of the Mayor’s office was fortressed with cars, the inside was crowded for standing room, and heads darkened the windows so the lights had to be turned on. Thus Lenoir became the rival of Dayton.
--S.M. Dugger, Buffalo Cove, N.C.
From page 2 of the Watauga Democrat, Boone, N.C., Thursday, Sept. 24, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn82007642/1925-09-24/ed-1/seq-2/
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