In the 1830s and 1840s, the clerk of tiny Harlan County, Kentucky, signed court papers with a practiced hand. On Revolutionary War pension files and land disputes alike, the formula appears over and over: “I, John G. Crump, clerk of the court of Harlan County, do hereby certify…”
From that courthouse world on the upper Cumberland came a son who would spend his life on a very different frontier. George James Crump, born in Harlan County in 1841, carried the habits of the courthouse into war, Reconstruction politics, and finally into the grim corridors of the Fort Smith federal jail that reporters called “Hell on the Border.”
By the time he died in 1928, Arkansas newspapers remembered him as Confederate officer, legislator, lawyer, and former United States marshal. What they did not say outright was that his story begins in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, in the same courthouse where his father certified the pensions of old Revolutionary veterans.
This article sketches that life from Harlan to Harrison, drawing first on primary sources like military records, newspapers, and family papers, then on the excellent modern biography by Nita Gould in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and earlier county and state histories.
Harlan County beginnings
According to both modern biographical work and nineteenth century obituaries, George James Crump was born 13 June 1841 in Harlan County, Kentucky, the son of John G. and Eliza Crump.
The father, John G. Crump, shows up repeatedly in Harlan County records as clerk of both the county and circuit courts. In an 1834 transcript of Revolutionary War veteran Thomas Coker’s pension application, he certifies that the copy “contains the original proceedings” of the local justice and affixes his seal as clerk.
Other surviving documents, including land and pension material for Benjamin Howard and a court record printed by USGenWeb, likewise bear his formula as clerk at Harlan Court House.
Later genealogical summaries, based on census and court material, remember him as a Virginian who settled in Harlan and served for many years as clerk of both the circuit and county courts.
For George, growing up in that household meant a childhood surrounded by legal paper, litigants, and visiting attorneys. Although surviving Harlan school records are thin, the family clearly belonged to the county’s small legal elite. That background helps explain why the younger Crump spent most of his adult life in courtrooms and law offices, rather than behind a plow.
Around 1854, when George was in his early teens, the Crumps left the Kentucky mountains for western Arkansas. Contemporary obituaries and later county histories agree that the family settled on a farm in the Crooked Creek valley of Carroll County, in the Ozarks.
From Crooked Creek to the Sixteenth Arkansas
In Arkansas, young Crump attended private school at Carrollton, the old county seat. That education was cut short by secession and war.
The Confederate compiled military service records show a “G. J. Crump” enlisting in Company E of the 16th Arkansas Infantry in 1861. He later appears as a junior second lieutenant in Company H, a promotion that matches the officer ranks recalled in postwar narratives.
Civil War memoirist Joseph M. Bailey, whose reminiscences were edited by T. Lindsay Baker, remembered Crump among the local men who first turned out in a home guard company, then entered regular Confederate service with the 16th Arkansas.
The 16th Arkansas fought in the western theater, including Oak Hills (better known today as Wilson’s Creek), Farmington, Iuka, and Corinth. Crump was captured during the long struggle around Corinth and later paroled.
One dramatic wartime incident comes from Fay Hempstead’s Pictorial History of Arkansas and later writers. After the Confederate surrender of Port Hudson in 1863, a group of captured Arkansas officers were placed aboard a Union transport. Rather than accept prison, several jumped overboard and swam for shore. Hempstead lists “Lieutenant G. J. Crump” among those who escaped in this way, a story echoed in modern summaries of his wartime record.
The official record grows thin after mid 1863, which Nita Gould notes in her modern biography. She reconstructs the rest of his war years from later newspaper profiles that stress his rise in rank and his reputation as an able officer by 1865.
Lawyer, legislator, and the Brooks Baxter War
Like many former Confederate officers, Crump returned home to a defeated South and tried to turn his training into public office.
Soon after the war he was elected clerk of Carroll County. Reconstruction politics, however, were not kind to former Confederates. Crump lost the position as federal authorities and Republican state leaders reshaped county offices across Arkansas.
Undeterred, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1869. He opened a practice in Carrollton, then helped build a new firm in the emerging railroad town of Harrison, which became the Boone County seat in 1869. A 1918 national bar directory still lists him as part of the Harrison firm of Crump and Crump.
Crump also entered state politics. The Daily Arkansas Gazette reported on the Third Legislative District Democratic convention in October 1870, which nominated him and three others for the state House of Representatives. He won the race and served one term in the Arkansas House from 1871 to 1873, representing a district that included his Ozark home country.
During the 1874 Brooks Baxter War, the violent struggle over Arkansas’s governorship, Crump received a promotion to lieutenant colonel in the state militia. Contemporary and near contemporary histories treat him as one of many conservative Democrats who backed Governor Elisha Baxter against the Republican claimants.
Later Boone County commemorations placed his name on the Confederate memorial at the courthouse in Harrison, linking his local identity to his wartime service.
Harrison, Boone County, and the Crump household
While he built his legal and political career, Crump also built a family in Harrison.
In 1866, poet and writer Josephine Bonaparte Greenlee, a widow with a young daughter, married Colonel George J. Crump. The biographical note in the Crump Garvin family papers at the University of Arkansas describes him as a Confederate veteran, legislator, and later United States marshal.
Those same papers, together with the larger Josephine B. Crump collection, preserve letters, reminiscences, and family documents spanning from the Civil War era into the twentieth century. Josephine’s journal and essays include vivid accounts of her own wartime experiences in Little Rock, her work in a Methodist women’s missionary society, and a late nineteenth century journey with her husband as he transported federal prisoners east by rail.
Boone County histories by Ralph Rea and Roger Logan portray Crump as a leading Harrison attorney, banker, and civic figure. They emphasize his role in the new county’s politics and his long association with the Arkansas Industrial University board, later the University of Arkansas.
For an Appalachian historian, it is striking how thoroughly he rooted himself in the Ozarks. By the 1880s he was no longer “the Kentuckian” in local accounts. He was simply “Colonel Crump of Harrison,” a man whose Harlan origins hid beneath layers of Arkansas officeholding and family ties.
“Keeper of the Gates of Hell”
Crump’s best known office came late in life. In April 1893 he was appointed United States marshal for the Western District of Arkansas, the federal jurisdiction that included Indian Territory and the notorious Fort Smith court of Judge Isaac C. Parker. The official chronological list of U.S. marshals notes his service beginning 15 April 1893 and ending 1 June 1897.
As marshal, Crump was responsible for the Fort Smith jail, for supervising deputy marshals who rode out into Indian Territory, and for carrying out the death sentences imposed by Judge Parker.
The Fort Smith jail had already acquired the nickname “Hell on the Border.” In an 1885 visit, writer Anna Dawes described a dark, crowded basement dungeon with terrible smells and no separation between hardened criminals and minor offenders. Under Crump’s tenure in the 1890s, federal reports and later historical work show efforts to improve conditions, including better separation of prisoners and some attention to the needs of women confined in the jail. A Fort Smith library summary of Dawes and later reforms notes that in 1894 Marshal George Crump advocated setting aside separate space for female prisoners as part of broader changes to the jail.
S. W. Harmon’s late nineteenth century book Hell on the Border and later scholarship on the Fort Smith court repeatedly mention Crump’s term, especially in connection with the long line of executions that made Parker famous.
One of the most discussed cases was that of Crawford Goldsby, better known as Cherokee Bill. Modern research into the Goldsby execution notes that Marshal Crump supervised preparations for the 1896 hanging and ensured heavy security as crowds pressed to witness the event.
Josephine Crump’s reminiscences add a domestic layer to this period. In her journal she recalled traveling with her husband as he escorted prisoners to Kings County Prison in New York and visiting Arkansas congressman Samuel W. Peel in Washington, experiences that placed this Harlan born mountaineer squarely in national networks of law and politics.
A later article in the Boone County Historian by Sammie Rose and Pat Wood, titled “Keepers of the Gates of Hell,” builds on these records to tell a detailed story of Crump’s marshalship, from his appointment through daily administration of the jail to his return home after his term ended in 1897.
World’s Fair politics and one last campaign
Crump did not retire quietly after leaving the marshal’s office. In May 1901 he received appointment to the board of directors of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the St. Louis World’s Fair that opened in 1904. Within a year, however, he was replaced. An April 1902 article in the Arkansas Democrat announced that J. C. Rembert had succeeded him on the exposition board, reflecting the intense Democratic factional politics of the time.
Even in his eighties, Crump remained drawn to public life. In March 1922 the Arkansas Democrat ran a feature headlined along the lines of “Confederate veteran to be member of Arkansas Senate,” profiling his announced candidacy for the state senate’s third district seat.
At first he appeared to face no Democratic opposition. A June 1922 issue of the Mountaineer Echo in Harrison promoted his candidacy enthusiastically. Before long, though, Roy Milum entered the race and charged that Crump had attempted to blackmail him. Crump’s lengthy printed reply, “Facts from Crump Against Milum Falsehoods,” ran in the Mountaineer Echo that July.
Statewide papers followed the contest. The Daily Arkansas Gazette speculated in August 1922 that Republicans might put up nominees in response to such heated Democratic primaries. Official returns printed in the Harrison Daily Times show that Milum defeated Crump by a narrow margin in the Democratic primary, ending the old colonel’s last bid for office.
Death and memory
In December 1928, after a long illness, George J. Crump died at the Harrison home of his stepdaughter. He was eighty seven. Obituaries in the Star Progress and the Mountaineer Echo summarized his life as Confederate officer, legislator, lawyer, and former United States marshal, noting that he had practiced law almost to the end of his life.
An out of state notice in the St. Louis Globe Democrat carried the headline “Capt. Crump Dies,” a sign that his name was known beyond northwest Arkansas.
He was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery at Harrison, where later genealogical compilers and Find A Grave contributors have linked his grave to those of his wife Josephine and their children.
Mid twentieth century Boone County histories continued to treat him as an important local figure, while the University of Arkansas’s institutional history remembered his service on the Arkansas Industrial University board.
In recent years Nita Gould’s biographical entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas has offered the most complete and carefully sourced overview of his life, tying together Kentucky roots, Arkansas politics, and marshal duty at Fort Smith.
For Harlan County, he remains a shadowy figure. The county’s surviving nineteenth century records preserve his father’s handwriting on pension files and court certifications, but local histories rarely trace what became of John Crump’s son after the family left for Arkansas. Reconnecting that story places a Harlan born lawyer at the center of one of the most notorious federal courts on the western frontier and reminds us how Appalachian families carried their skills and ambitions far beyond the mountain counties.
Sources & Further Reading
Crump/Garvin Family Papers (MC 846). Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.
https://uark.as.atlas-sys.com/repositories/2/resources/645
Josephine B. Crump Papers (MC 845). Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.
https://uark.as.atlas-sys.com/repositories/2/resources/57
Compiled Military Service Record, Crump, George J. U.S. Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Arkansas, 1861–1865. National Archives Microfilm Publication M317, roll 150.
https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1932365
“Pension Application: Thomas Coker, 1834 (Harlan County, Kentucky).” FamilySearch.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/memories/memory/150423487
USGenWeb Harlan County, Kentucky. “Cox, Bingham, Green.”
https://www.usgenwebsites.org/KYHarlan/cox_bingham_green.html
“George Brittain Family of Harlan Kentucky.” RootsWeb.
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~seky/famfile/brittain/brittain.html
Gould, Nita. “George J. Crump (1841–1928).” Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/george-j-crump-19040/
“George J. Crump.” Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Crump
Reynolds, John Hugh, and David Yancey Thomas. History of the University of Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1910.
https://archive.org/details/historyofunivers00reynrich
Herndon, Dallas Tabor. Centennial History of Arkansas, Volume 3. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8Ro7AQAAMAAJ
Logan, Roger V., Jr. History of Boone County, Arkansas. Harrison: Boone County Historical and Genealogical Society, 1998.
https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/biblio/id/18686/
Rea, Ralph R. Boone County and Its People. Little Rock: Democrat Printing and Lithographing Company, 1955.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7345831W/Boone_County_and_its_people
Fort Smith Historical Society Journal, Volume 11, No. 2 (1987). Fort Smith Historical Society.
https://uafslibrary.com/fshsj/11-02_Complete_Issue.pdf
Harman, S. W. Hell on the Border: He Hanged Eighty-Eight Men. Fort Smith: Phoenix Publishing Company, 1898.
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hell-on-the-border-book-13786/
“U.S. Deputy Marshals Who Rode for Judge Isaac C. Parker.”
http://sites.rootsweb.com/~rkinfolks/deputies.html
United States Marshals Service. “State-by-State Chronological Listing of United States Marshals.”
https://www.usmarshals.gov/sites/default/files/media/document/Chronological-List-of-US-Marshals.pdf
Bailey, Joseph M. Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph M. Bailey. Edited by T. Lindsay Baker. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Confederate_Guerrilla.html?id=KnFrEAAAQBAJ
Hempstead, Fay. A Pictorial History of Arkansas, from Earliest Times to the Year 1890. St. Louis and New York: N. D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1890.
https://archive.org/details/pictorialhistory00hemp
Fifield, James Clark, ed. The American Bar. New York: J. C. Fifield Company, 1918.
https://books.google.com/books?id=uDYMAAAAYAAJ
“Boone County Confederate Memorial (Harrison, Arkansas).” Historical Marker Database.
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=143894
The Genealogy Center. Periodical Source Index (PERSI) search results for Boone County Historian / Oak Leaves (Crump-related articles).
https://www.genealogycenter.info/results_persilocation_detail.php?cosearch=USA&loc=AR&rectype=ML&sort=title&subloc=Boone
“Col. Geo. Crump Dies at Harrison.” The Star Progress (Harrison, Arkansas), December 13, 1928, p. 1.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-star-progress-col-geo-crump-dies-a/30775006/
“Death Claims Colonel Crump.” The Mountaineer Echo (Yellville, Arkansas), December 13, 1928, p. 1.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-mountaineer-echo-death-claims-colone/137756481/
“Capt. Crump Dies.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 10, 1928, p. 16.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/st-louis-globe-democrat-capt-crump-die/137743312/
“Third Legislative District Convention.” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 19, 1870, p. 4.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-arkansas-gazette-third-legislative/137760279/
“Rembert Succeeds Crump, Lake Succeeds Cohen.” Arkansas Democrat, April 19, 1902, p. 5.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/arkansas-democrat-rembert-succeeds-crump/137759392/
“Crump, George J. Confederate Vet to be Member of Arkansas Senate.” Arkansas Democrat, March 12, 1922, p. 12.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/arkansas-democrat-crump-george-j-confe/124957851/
“Hon Geo. J. Crump of Harrison for State Senator.” The Mountaineer Echo, June 15, 1922, p. 1.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-mountaineer-echo-hon-geo-j-crump-o/137757177/
“Facts From Crump Against Milum Falsehoods.” The Mountaineer Echo, July 27, 1922, p. 1.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-mountaineer-echo-facts-from-crump-ag/137757611/
“Republicans May Oppose Democrats.” Daily Arkansas Gazette, August 16, 1922, p. 9.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-arkansas-gazette-republicans-may-o/137758294/
Find A Grave. “LTC George James Crump Sr. (1841–1928), Rose Hill Cemetery, Harrison, Arkansas.”
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30149287/george_james-crump
Find A Grave. “Josephine Greenlee Crump (1840–1921), Rose Hill Cemetery, Harrison, Arkansas.”
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30150453/josephine-greenlee-crump
WikiTree. “George James Crump Sr (1841–1928).”
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Crump-2492
Geni. “Col. George James Crump (CSA).”
https://www.geni.com/people/Col-George-James-Crump-CSA/6000000021367994692