This time of year, we never know what we will find when we venture outdoors, even if we go no further than our own yards. I know what to expect from the heirloom plants that grow around my house, but still feel a sense of anticipation, sudden wonder, and enchantment with each approaching spring. I look for the first small blue bloom in a bed of creeping myrtle, my mother planted years ago, next to one place where I “hang out the wash”. Within days, the entire bed of myrtle will be dotted with blue spots.

Underneath the canopy of a majestic black maple, where I have an additional clothesline, daffodils that I planted as a child, catch the morning sun and announce the coming of spring. Once, several years ago, I happened to be under that tree, “hanging out the wash”, when a surprisingly loud creaking sound caught my ear. Puzzled at first, I soon realized it was the sound of sap rising. No doubt this was a familiar sound for our forebears, who tapped the maples for sap, to be boiled down in to maple syrup.

Old growth groves or “stands” of maples were common in our area until much of the land was cleared for cultivation. A close relative of the sugar maple, the black maple can also be tapped for sap to make maple syrup. In the local vernacular, both were historically categorized together as sugar trees. Sugar Hollow was named for its abundance of sugar trees.

For Kelly Maupin, the spring of 1919 must have been one that he never forgot. On the last day of March of that year, a variety of flowering plants were likely in bloom in Maupin’s West LaFollette neighborhood. Early that morning, Maupin was walking along the L&N railroad tracks near his West Ash Street residence, picking up coal that had fallen off of passing trains, when he happened upon a startling discovery. A day later and Maupin might have had a difficult time convincing authorities that he was not playing some sort of April fool’s joke. In a pine thicket, about fifty feet from the tracks, Maupin spotted the mutilated body of a man lying in a pool of his own blood.

It didn't take LaFollette Police Chief J.F. Russell long to come up with a suspect. The victim, John Salas, a Greek restaurateur, was known to take long walks with twenty-one year old Charlie Paul. Salas and Paul had been seen together late the night before. Clothing and shoes, found in Paul's boarding house room, were covered in blood. Paul was arrested where he worked at Harvey LaFollette's Rex #1 mine.

If Salas was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person on March 31, 1919, Paul was at the right place at the right time with the right person on August 31, 1919. Paul, the only person, ever sentenced by a Campbell County court to die in Tennessee's electric chair, escaped to freedom when a mob stormed the Knox County Jail in search of accused killer Maurice Mays. Knox County Sheriff W.T. Cate, sensing a brewing storm, had already loaded Mays on a train for Chattanooga. Paul was reported to have been seen near LaFollette, the next day, before vanishing never to be seen or heard from again –at least publicly.

If Paul is still living, he is now one-hundred-sixteen years old. Of course, that is unlikely. Far more likely it is that he has relatives still in the area who know of his whereabouts in the years following his escape. Two of my own relatives, unrelated to each other, a generation apart, facing imminent arrest and prosecution in unrelated cases, fled the area, but continued to communicate and slip in occasionally to visit with family. Neither was ever apprehended, but one was brought back for burial in the cemetery at Fincastle Methodist Church in 1944.

A pair of Salas’ Greek friends, Vasiles Apostolis and Crist Batsis, came to LaFollette from Knoxville to take care of his burial. A Greek cross, with nearly equal arms, above his name, adorns his grave at a Campbell County cemetery not far from where his body was found on the last day of March in 1919.