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Site of Frankie Silver's Hanging Frankie Silver was a jealous woman, and one night near Christmas of 1832, suspicious that her handsome husband, Charlie, had been seeing another woman, she attacked him with an ax while he slept with their two-year-old daughter in his arms in their cabin in a cove along Toe River. She chopped his body into small pieces and burned them in the fireplace, then told Charlie's family that he had run off with another woman. But Charlie's father was suspicious, and after a futile search for his son, he consulted a soothsayer in Tennessee who told him Charlie had been murdered. A search of the cabin turned up bones and greasy ashes in the fireplace. More bones and ashes were found in a hole near the spring. A smudge of blood was found on the cabin door, along with a big circle of blood beneath the floorboards. An old hound sniffed out Charlie's heart buried under the front step. Frankie was charged with murder and taken to jail in Morganton. She never confessed, but while in jail she wrote a long, mournful song about the episode that was taken as an admission of her guilt. On June 12, 1833, Frankie was hanged from a gallows on Damon's Hill in east Morganton, becoming the first woman executed in North Carolina. Copies of her song, "Frankie Silver's Ballad," were sold to the throngs that came to see her hanging. The song, fifteen verses long, has endured in the mountains. A later version, which changed Charlie's name to Johnny, became nationally popular more than a hundred years after Frankie's death. The site of the hanging, the highest spot in town, is at the corner of Valdese Avenue and White Street, now occupied as a private home.
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