Carthage, Nov. 2—Two little girls, Margaret, age 10, and Beulah, age 15, were rescued from a life of torture, in many respects the barbarous cruelty of the middle ages, when their father, Jim Wallace, a farmer and carpenter of the Pinehurst section, was sentenced to serve three years on the chain gang by Judge of the Recorder’s Court George H. Humber. Then the two children were turned over to the care of Miss Lucile Eiffert, the county welfare officer.
Although the warrant charged cruel and excessive punishment, and the verbal evidence was horrifying, the brutality of Wallace was more strikingly exposed by his various instruments of torture which were introduced into the records as exhibit A. They included hickory switches of various length and thicknesses, a large mallet and a dozen boards also of different sizes and weights, and an iron poker.
Another exhibit, alone sufficient to convict Wallace, was the photograph made of little Margaret’s body on the evening of the day of which she received her last and worst whipping. They showed more than 60 stripes, several deep blue spots, ad two little toes almost mashed off, it is accused by the crushing heel of her father’s shoe. Visible, too, was a bruised spot on her forehead where she had been struck.
No one, it is said, will ever know the cruelty those two little girls have suffered since their mother and father parted eight years ago. He would beat them on the slightest provocation fancied. In an unusually bad frame of mind, it is said, he would swing them up to a joist by their hands, letting them suffer excruciating pain, as the nooses pulled tighter and tighter around their waists for an hour at a time.
The only defense of the father was his allegation that the girls were hard to manage, that they had a habit of going to the spring as an excuse to slip off from home.
Wallace’s indictment and arrest came the early part of the week, the day after the distressing plight of little Margaret was called to the attention of Miss Effiert by her teacher, who in turn had been told of the severe whipping by Margaret’s cousin. It was on this occasion that the little girl had been whipped because the father thought she tarried on her way to the spring to get him a bucket of water. Margaret said that she went to the spring, but finding the surface of the water covered with leaves, she was forced pick them out. She was engaged in this task when her father, enraged by the delay, came upon her with a hickory switch in his hand. Seizing her roughly by the hair, he is declared to have literally blistered her bare legs. Then he led her screaming under the terrific pain of 60 lashes to the house where he strung her up to a joist. He refused to give her dinner nor would he grant her plea for water as she hung helplessly from the joist for several hours.
For mistreating Margaret, Wallace received two years on the roads. In the other case, cruelty to his older daughter, he received one year, this sentence to commence at the tie when the first expires.
From the front page of the Harnett County News, Lillington, N.C., Thursday, November 5, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84006598/1925-11-05/ed-1/seq-1/
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