Stanley Mattox, Sheriff in 1903, Hanged Two, Bringing An End to Outdoor Public Hangings in Georgia.

Old Charlton County Jail.

1903: The year Henry Ford formed his automobile company and sold his first Ford. Pepsi Cola registered its trademark, and in Charlton County, Sheriff Stanley Mattox would superintend the hanging of two men on gallows built behind the Charlton County jail.

Those two outdoor public hangings in Folkston helped bring an end to what had become public spectacles. They became festive occasions as men and women and children came from far and wide to witness the executions. That same year, the Georgia Legislature abolished public outdoor hangings and ordered them held indoors in future years.

Sheriff Stanley Mattox, who fathered a future Pulitzer Prize winning author, never again offered for public office. He carried out his orders to hang two convicted murderers, just two months apart. Dennis Miller was first to be hanged and just two months later Mattox would superintend the hanging of another murderer, Henry Owens, from the same gallows. The 1903 Charlton Superior Court term saw the conviction of three on murder charges.

Two Folkston doctors, Dr. J. C. Wright and Dr. J. W. Strickland witnessed the two hangings as official witnesses, as ordered by the court.

The Charlton County jail in Folkston was under construction at the time of the hangings.  Sheriff Mattox continued to use the old stockade-jail at Traders Hill to confine prisoners while the new Folkston jail was being built.

Mattox was upset about the two hangings. He was a gentle peace-loving man whose roots ran deep in Charlton County. Public hangings did not fit into his life style. Mattox had witnessed the last hanging at Traders Hill in 1878 of David McClain. Mattox was just 13 at the time of that hanging, but the unpleasant experience left an indelible mark on the future Sheriff. The rope hangman's noose, used in the last two Charlton County hangings was found in the Charlton County Clerk of Court's office, years afterward when that first Charlton County courthouse was destroyed by fire in 1927, charred but intact.

The gallows, built in at the rear of the new Charlton County Courthouse in 1903, were dismantled when the new Charlton County jail opened in 1906. That jail had a built-in gallows that is still in the old jail today. It was never used.

Mattox had come from aristocratic relatives. His father, John McKenzie Mattox, and his mother, Elizabeth Stafford Mattox, moved into their new home near Traders Hill from Tatnall County in 1857, just three years after Charlton County was created. Stanley Mattox's grandfather, John Mattox, fought with the Okefenokee Rifles in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. He was wounded in battle in 1864, and was home in Charlton County, tending his wounds, when the Civil War ended. He served as Charlton County's sixth sheriff, in 1867 and 1868.

Stanley Mattox was born just months after that war ended. When his term as Charlton County Sheriff ended, Mattox pursued a career in naval stores. One of his daughters, Lois Mattox, married a Florida attorney, Oscar Miller of West Palm Beach. She began a brilliant journalism career, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in the early 1930s for a Readers Digest story on the dangers of cigarette smoking. In World War Two, she was an overseas war correspondent covering action of that war. She was named a Roving Editor with Readers Digest Magazine.

Stanley Mattox died in 1941, but during his lifetime, he had become a Charlton County legend. The two hangings Mattox oversaw in 1903 helped set the stage for a halt to outdoors-public hangings in Georgia. Nothing suited Mattox more than that decision. He had tired of the public spectacles that outdoors public hangings had become, from the first he saw while a 13 year old boy at Traders Hill to the two he oversaw on gallows in Folkston in 1903. Stanley Mattox was a gentle man.