Appalachian History Series – “Bloody Madison”: The Shelton Laurel Massacre and a Divided North Carolina Mountain County
High on the ridges above the French Broad River, the road into Shelton Laurel still feels like a place that time would rather forget. The pavement narrows, the houses thin out, and the holler closes in until there are more trees than mailboxes and more old stories than street signs. In the winter of 1863, that quiet valley in Madison County, North Carolina, became the scene of one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War in the southern Appalachians.
Today most travelers pass the highway marker near NC 208 without realizing that thirteen men and boys were marched away from their homes here and shot in a snowy clearing. The killings grew out of a fight over something as basic as salt, but the massacre left a scar on Shelton Laurel and helped give Madison County a new and bitter nickname: “Bloody Madison.”
Salt, war, and a divided mountain county
On paper Madison County belonged to the Confederacy. In practice it was almost evenly split between Democrats who backed the new Southern government and Republicans and Unionists who wanted nothing to do with secession. Those divides often ran along geography as much as politics. Town families in Marshall tended to lean Confederate. Many of the farmers scattered up the side hollers and coves of Shelton Laurel sympathized with the Union or simply wanted to be left alone.
By 1862 the war had already pushed into these mountains in quieter ways. Confederate authorities conscripted mountain men for service, took horses and livestock, and rationed salt through the county seat. Salt was not a luxury. It was the only way to cure pork and beef for the winter. When local Unionists believed they were being cheated out of their allotment, resentment deepened.
In January 1863 a group of perhaps fifty to sixty Unionist men, some of them deserters or soldiers home from the Federal army, rode down from Shelton Laurel into Marshall. They raided the public salt store and looted several buildings, including the home of Colonel Lawrence Allen of the 64th North Carolina Infantry. Allen was away with his regiment. His wife was left to face the raiders while caring for sick children. Later accounts say that the children, already ill, did not recover and died soon afterward, a tragedy that hardened Confederate determination to make an example of Shelton Laurel.
The raid confirmed everything Confederate officers feared about divided loyalty in the highlands. From Knoxville, Brigadier General Harry Heth ordered his subordinates in Madison County to hunt down the culprits but also warned them not to let personal grudges overrun military discipline. The men tasked with carrying out those orders would ignore the second half of that instruction.
Into Shelton Laurel
The job of retaliation fell largely to Lieutenant Colonel James A. Keith of the 64th North Carolina, a Madison County native whose family and neighbors had suffered during earlier Unionist activity. Keith and his men pushed into the Shelton Laurel valley in mid January. What followed was less a regular military operation than a campaign of terror.
Letters written within weeks of the events describe soldiers storming cabins, dragging men from their homes, and interrogating women at gunpoint. In one account, a woman with an infant only a few weeks old was tied to a tree in the snow while her baby was left in a doorway within sight. The soldiers threatened to let them both die if she did not identify the men who had gone to Marshall.
Another report, sent to Governor Zebulon Vance in Raleigh by attorney Augustus S. Merrimon, described old men and boys taken from their houses “without resistance,” marched away as prisoners, and never returned. Merrimon told the governor that at least thirteen prisoners had been shot on Keith’s orders after being made to kneel in a secluded spot.
Families in Shelton Laurel would remember the details in their own way. Later genealogical accounts, drawn from descendants’ testimonies and census records, list many of the dead as Sheltons, including James Shelton and two of his sons, along with other kinsmen and neighbors. The youngest victims were barely teenagers. The oldest were men in their fifties and sixties who posed little threat to anyone.
Thirteen men and boys
After several days of searching the valley, Keith’s men had gathered a mixed group of prisoners – farmers, boys, and suspected deserters – and confined them in a cabin. Two managed to escape into the woods. The remaining thirteen were guarded overnight. On a cold January morning the soldiers marched them out of the shelter of the trees toward a ravine or hollow not far from a small branch of Shelton Laurel Creek.
Newspaper accounts and later oral histories agree on the basic outline of what happened next. The prisoners were ordered to stop, line up, and kneel. One of them, according to tradition, asked for time to pray before the shooting started. There is no record that the request was granted. A volley cut them down. Those who were not killed outright were finished with additional shots.
The bodies were dumped hastily in a shallow trench and covered only lightly with earth. Free ranging hogs found the grave before long. It fell to family and neighbors to reclaim the remains. An older woman remembered in local accounts as “Granny Judy,” an aunt to two of the dead, harnessed an ox team and loaded what she could recover on a sled. With the help of her children she pulled the battered bodies two miles up the valley to a family burial ground on a ridge.
There they were laid to rest in a mass grave that still exists, marked today by long granite stones inscribed with the names of the victims. Standing beside those markers, surrounded by second growth woods and the outlines of older graves, it is hard to forget that this was not a battlefield. It was a farming community where war came uninvited.
Voices from the records
News of the massacre did not stay hidden in the valley. Reports reached Governor Vance in Raleigh within weeks. Vance, himself a western North Carolinian and no stranger to divided loyalties, was appalled. He demanded an investigation and asked Confederate commanders for an accounting of Keith’s conduct.
The surviving documentation is scattered. A letter from private Daniel W. Revis of the 64th North Carolina, written to his wife that February, mentions the regiment’s brutal work in Shelton Laurel and hints at the unease some soldiers felt afterward. In Richmond and Raleigh, Confederate officials wrestled with how to handle an incident that clearly violated the rules of war but involved men who were fighting enemies inside their own communities.
Keith was eventually brought before a Confederate court for his role in the killings. Contemporary and later summaries agree that he was found responsible, at least on paper, but the proceedings dragged on and were overtaken by the collapse of the Confederacy. After the war he was indicted for murder in North Carolina courts yet escaped custody and disappeared, reportedly heading west and changing his name.
Colonel Allen, whose house had been looted in the Marshall raid, was suspended from duty for a time but later returned to service. No one else was ever punished for the executions in Shelton Laurel. The official record ended in delay and evasion. The valley had to carry the memory on its own.
Memory in a lonely valley
For the families who stayed in Shelton Laurel after the war, forgetting was never really an option. The 1870 census shows a sharp rise in households headed by women and in children living with relatives rather than parents, a pattern that fits with what local descendants describe: widows trying to keep farms going and orphans taken in by kin.
Across generations the story traveled in the same coves and lanes where the soldiers once rode. Some descendants remembered exactly who had been on the firing squad and warned their children never to forget the names. Others tended the cemetery on the ridge. In 1968 William and Bud Shelton, descendants of James Shelton, placed new granite markers at the mass grave so that visitors would not have to guess where the dead lay.
Public recognition came more slowly. In the late twentieth century the state of North Carolina approved a roadside marker along the highway through Laurel, a good distance from the actual graves but close enough to catch the eye of people driving through the valley. The marker’s simple wording – noting that thirteen “suspected of Unionism” were killed by Confederate soldiers in early 1863 – hints at the larger web of fear, loyalty, and vengeance that made the massacre possible.
In recent years museums, filmmakers, and local historians have returned to the story using newly accessible letters, military correspondence, and oral histories from Madison County families. A documentary produced for the Rural Heritage Museum in Mars Hill placed the Shelton Laurel massacre within the broader experience of the Civil War in the southern highlands, underscoring how often the war’s worst violence fell on civilians in remote communities rather than organized armies on set-piece battlefields.
Shelton Laurel as an Appalachian story
The Shelton Laurel massacre is a North Carolina story, but it belongs just as much to the wider history of Appalachia. It grew out of a pattern that appears again and again across the mountains during the Civil War: divided loyalties inside the same county, the strain of conscription and shortages on small farms, and the way national conflicts were turned into personal vendettas along narrow creeks and ridgelines.
It also shows how memory in the highlands often lives in two places at once. In official records the massacre survives in scattered letters, court papers, and volumes of the War of the Rebellion that city readers might never think to open. In the valley itself the story is carried instead in family cemeteries, in the names repeated on stones, and in the warning passed down that some things should never be allowed to happen again.
Standing on that ridge above Shelton Laurel today, with the French Broad country stretching away in the distance, it is easy to see why the families who lived here fought so hard to survive outside the control of armies and governors. It is just as easy to understand why, more than a century and a half later, the granite stones and the quiet hillside continue to remind visitors that even in the most remote Appalachian holler, the Civil War was never only about lines on a map. It was about neighbors and kin, and the choices they made when the war finally came home.
Sources & Further Reading
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Vol. 18. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth154628
“Incidents at Shelton-Laurel, N.C.” In Skedaddle: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It. pddoc.com. https://www.pddoc.com/skedaddle/events/shelton-laurel.htm
Merrimon, Augustus S. “Report to Governor Zebulon B. Vance on the Shelton Laurel Killings, February 1863.” In Incidents at Shelton-Laurel, N.C. pddoc.com. https://www.pddoc.com/skedaddle/e-skedaddle/shelton-laurel.pdf
Revis, Daniel W. “Letter to Sarepta Revis, February 10, 1863.” Daniel W. Revis Letters. North Carolina Digital Collections. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p15012coll8/id/598231
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Madison County Atrocity a Measure of the War’s Extremes.” NC DNCR Blog, January 18, 2016. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/01/18/madison-county-atrocity-measure-wars-extremes
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Shelton Laurel Massacre (P-71).” NC DNCR Historical Marker Blog, January 22, 2024. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2024/01/22/shelton-laurel-massacre-p-71
Cockrell, David L. “The Shelton Laurel Massacre.” NCpedia, 2008. https://www.ncpedia.org/shelton-laurel-massacre
“The Shelton Laurel Massacre.” Anchor: Primary Sources for North Carolina History. NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/shelton-laurel-massacre
Kickler, Troy L. “Shelton Laurel Massacre.” North Carolina History Project. https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/shelton-laurel-massacre/
“The Shelton Laurel Massacre.” Civil War in the Southern Highlands: A Human Perspective (exhibit overview). Rural Heritage Museum, Mars Hill University. https://www.mhu.edu/mhu-rural-heritage-museum-civil-war-exhibit/
“The Shelton Laurel Massacre, Madison County.” Madison County Historical and Genealogical Society (Facebook note / local history summary). https://www.facebook.com/MadisonCountyHistorical/posts/10152272738080901
“Shelton Laurel.” Clio: Your Guide to History. May 7, 2015. https://theclio.com/entry/11022
“Shelton Laurel Massacre Roadside Marker, Belva.” Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/508
“Shelton Laurel Massacre (P-71).” Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=254518
Madison County Tourism Development Authority. “Shelton Laurel Massacre Historical Marker.” In Marshall Historical Markers. VisitMadisonCounty.com. https://visitmadisoncounty.com/marshall-historical-markers/
“Shelton Laurel Massacre.” Read the Plaque. https://www.readtheplaque.com/plaque/shelton-laurel-massacre
Banks, John. “A Tragic History.” The Civil War Monitor, March 24, 2025. https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/a-tragic-history/
Gerard, Philip. “Atrocity at Shelton Laurel.” Our State: Celebrating North Carolina, April 29, 2012. https://www.ourstate.com/atrocity-at-shelton-laurel/
Hall, James O. “The Shelton Laurel Massacre: Murder in the North Carolina Mountains.” Blue & Gray Magazine 3, no. 4 (1986). Referenced and discussed in “Documents on the Shelton Laurel Massacre from the North Carolina State Archives,” Renegade South (blog). https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/documents-on-the-shelton-laurel-massacre-from-the-north-carolina-state-archives/
Paludan, Phillip S. Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981. https://archive.org/details/B-001-014-314
Inscoe, John C., and Gordon B. McKinney. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. https://archive.org/details/heartofconfedera0000insc
Barrett, John G. The Civil War in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. https://archive.org/details/civilwarinnorthc0000barr
Wellman, Manly Wade. The Kingdom of Madison: A Southern Mountain Fastness and Its People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z1ntU2N9ze0C
Dykeman, Wilma. The French Broad. New York: Rinehart, 1955. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8516092M/The_French_Broad
Trotter, William R. Bushwhackers!: The Mountains. Winston-Salem, NC: J. F. Blair, 1991. https://books.google.com/books/about/Bushwhackers.html?id=XQJ3AAAAMAAJ
Shelton, Maynard Scott. A Family’s Civil War Struggles: Stories of My Ancestors of Shelton Laurel, North Carolina. Mosheim, TN: Tennessee Publishing House, 2014. https://www.mhu.edu/product/a-familys-civil-war-struggles-maynard-scott-shelton/
“Shelton Laurel Massacre.” North Carolina Highway History Marker Program: Madison County, Marker P-71. Summary and marker text via Civil War Wiki. https://civilwar-history.fandom.com/wiki/Shelton_Laurel_Massacre
United States Census Bureau. 1870 United States Federal Census, Madison County, North Carolina. Digitized images and index via FamilySearch. https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.recordType=Census&q.recordSubType=US%20Census&q.censusYear=1870&q.eventPlace=Madison%2C%20North%20Carolina
Author Note: I first learned about Shelton Laurel while reading mountain Civil War histories that insisted the worst battles were often fought in farmyards instead of formal fields. I hope this piece helps you see that lonely Madison County ridge not just as a tragic site, but as a place where families have carried, questioned, and retold this story for more than 160 years.