Main Street Murder and Mayhem: Gunfire in the streets
Courtesy of Lisa Christman
Robert Latimer Morrow was in his early 20s when he posed for this portrait.
Observer-Reporter archives
This Washington County Courthouse was demolished in 1898 to make way for the current courthouse. The sheriff’s residence is at right. On the left of the courthouse is City Hall, which was moved to Brownson Avenue.
This advertisement for Boyle’s Shoe Store appeared in the Nov. 2, 1864, edition of The Reporter and Tribune. The store was located on Main Street between the Fulton House (present location of the Washington Trust Building) and Coogle’s Franklin Inn.
The story so far: On Halloween night, a week before the 1864 presidential election, the little borough of Washington was on edge, politics having poisoned the atmosphere. With guns and alcohol so prevalent, there was bound to be trouble. It all came to a head when two men faced each other in a saloon across the street from the county courthouse.
Chapter Two
The two men destined for a deadly confrontation – Robert Morrow and John Lennox – had little in common, other than their patronage of the borough’s pool halls and saloons. Their age, their political beliefs and even their social standing differed.
Morrow had marked his 31st birthday one week before that fateful Halloween night in 1864. He was the second of five children of Sofia Hallam and John Morrow, who was a blacksmith and owner of livery stables at Main and Wheeling streets.
Robert had fallen short of the achievements of his older brother Adam, who had attended Washington College and owned a successful dry-goods store. According to the 1860 U.S. Census, Robert was then living alone, while his wife, Sarah, and their two daughters, Sofia, 9, and Elizabeth, 4, were living with his parents. In 1863, draft registration records list his occupation as a baker. Later that year, he was granted an Internal Revenue Service license to operate an “eating house.”
John Lennox was a teamster, a wagon driver. Census records indicate he could neither read nor write. On the night around which this story revolves, Lennox was the father of seven: John, who was then serving with Company K of the U.S. Cavalry’s 2nd Regiment; Elizabeth, 16; Andrew, 15; Sarah, 10; Lilly, 9; Samuel, 5; and Melvin, 3. His, wife, Permelia, 43, was eight months pregnant at the time.
Testimony at the inquest that followed their confrontation was recorded by hand and in such detail as to make the following account possible.
A deadly showdown
Morrow, standing in Coogle’s Franklin Inn at the end of the bar closest to the street, was still arguing about politics with William Coogle when Lennox and his followers entered the tavern. The others continued in while Lennox stopped and stood alone facing Morrow, who took his hand down off the counter and put it partly in his pants pocket.
“You son of a bitch, don’t you pull a pistol on me!” Lennox said, drawing open his coat to reveal his revolver.
“I am not,” Morrow replied.
The crowd closed in, and one of Lennox’s men approached Morrow and said, “That was a niggardly trick you done this evening, Bob,” referring to striking the sheep man with his key.
William Coogle stepped between the two, and his mother, standing behind the bar, said she would not allow any fuss. Lennox was handed a revolver and told to shoot Morrow with it, a witness would later testify.
Morrow then pushed his way through the men and ran into the dining room and from there out a side door and into the street.
Morrow ran across Main Street and onto the pavement in front of the sheriff’s residence, which was at the southwest corner of Main and Beau streets. Sheriff James M. Byers was standing there with a few other men who had been at the Republican meeting at the courthouse.
“Robert Morrow came running up to us and said that a party of scoundrels had made an attack on him at Coogle’s,” Byers would testify. “He said they were there in the dark, waiting to shoot him. He was speaking rapidly. I caught him by the arm and said he shouldn’t be there. I found he had a pistol, which I caught by the barrel.
“Just then, Benjamin Brady came up and took him by the arm and said, Bob, come along with the sheriff and me.’ I still held the pistol.”
Morrow grew more agitated. “Do you think I’m a damned coward to leave the street?” he asked. Then he turned to the figures lurking in the dark across Main Street.
“Come on out you cowardly son of a bitch and fight me where my friends are!” Morrow yelled.
Brady and Byers were coaxing Morrow toward the residence when John Lennox appeared in the dim glow of the gas streetlight about 10 paces away.
“Here I am and ready to fight, you son of a bitch, crack away!” Lennox hollered.
Byers still had hold of Morrow’s gun when Lennox fired his first shot.
“Damn it, will you see a man killed in cold blood?” Morrow said as he ripped his gun away from the sheriff’s grasp and fired at Lennox, just as Lennox fired again.
They blasted away at each other several times, yet despite how close they stood to each other, incredibly, neither one was hit. Sheriff Byers ducked out of the way and ran along the iron fence toward the courthouse. Just then, he heard Brady yell, “I’m shot!”
Chaos on the street
At the same time, witnesses said, guns blazed from across the street and from the steps of the courthouse.
Byers took Brady into his residence, where they discovered that a bullet had only grazed Brady’s arm. From there they could hear more gunshots ringing out.
One of the many bullets fired had gone through a display window of the Smiths’ new Ironfront building, past which Morrow ran, chased by Lennox.
“I keep a small confectionary on Main Street opposite Mr. Templeton’s drug store,” James Hook would testify. “As I was sitting by the fire, I heard seven or eight shots fired. I got up and went outside the door. I observed two persons running up street. I recognized Robert Morrow by the light from Seaman’s or Foster’s window, and I heard the report of a pistol in the hand of a man eight or 10 paces behind Morrow. I could not recognize the person who fired. I do not know if the shot struck Morrow or not, but both parties were running. Morrow was opposite my window across the street. As he was crossing I saw and heard the report of a pistol a second time from the same person behind him. The ball passed close to me and went through my window across the room, struck the back door, knocked a small piece out of the door and fell to the floor… I thought he was running to my house, but he turned from there toward his own house. Morrow appeared to be running very fast, as if for his life.”
Just as Morrow reached the door of his residence near the northeast corner of Main and Beau streets, he was struck by a bullet in the buttocks but was able to get inside.
When he heard all the shooting, John Brady walked up Main Street from his meat shop, where Lennox had been earlier that day. Brady’s brother Benjamin was the man who had just been wounded.
“I met John Lennox between Chambers and Matthews corner and the Court house,” Brady testified. “I took his pistol away from him. I asked him if he had shot Morrow.
“I don’t know,” Lennox told him. “I shot at him.”
The bullet that entered Robert Morrow’s buttocks may have entered directly or by ricochet from the pavement, or it may have come from the barrel of some other gun than the one held by Lennox. Morrow may have thought that he had been wounded but had narrowly escaped death. The bullet, however, had taken an upward course into Morrow’s abdomen, and in 1864, before antibiotics and sterile surgery, a “gut shot” had but one outcome.
Next: More violence in the streets