The Flewellen Poll

The election held in Washington County on 2 November 1886 is known to historians as the Texas Election Outrage. The Handbook of Texas puts it plainly: ballot boxes from Black precincts were stolen, three Black leaders were lynched, and white Republican leaders were run out of the county. The man killed at the poll was Dewees Bolton, a white farmer of twenty seven, shot at Flewellen's store in the northeast of the county. The Brenham Daily Banner, two days later, reported that a man said to be named Polk Hill had fired on him from outside. The sheriff arrested eight Black men over the killing, and at one in the morning on 2 December a mob the Banner put at twenty to seventy five men overpowered the jailer and took three of them out. They were Alfred Jones, sixty, Shed Felder, forty five, and a third man of forty whom the Brenham paper and the county's legal papers call Ephraim Jones while the Republican petition calls him Stewart Jones, a difference no document explains. All three were held as accessories rather than as the killer. Polk Hill had been arrested on 10 November and sent up the line to Cameron for safe keeping, so the three taken from the jail were the ones still in it. Their bodies were found that morning hanging from a pecan tree a mile out on the Independence road. A petition later laid before Congress called them colored Republicans arrested on pretended and malicious charges and surrendered by the civil authorities into the hands of armed and disguised men. Nobody was convicted of any of it. A federal trial the next August ended in acquittal and the lynchers were never identified.