Goat Castle by Karen L. Cox

Author:Karen L. Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

SIDESHOWS

When the Natchez Garden Club held its first pilgrimage in the spring of 1932, locals were stunned by its success. More than four thousand visitors from thirty-eight states made the journey to their little town on the bluffs of the Mississippi River to tour its magnificent mansions and experience the place “where the Old South still lives.”1

Perhaps they should not have been surprised given America’s fascination with the Old South in the 1930s. Even before the Depression hit, Hollywood was making escapist films set in the Deep South, where, very often, the Mississippi River provided a romantic backdrop. Given the allure of the region’s plantation heritage in all forms of popular culture, it is no wonder Americans were drawn to Natchez as the place where this image appeared to come to life.

Plans were already underway to promote the pilgrimage for the coming spring when Jennie Merrill was murdered. Her passing, in many ways, marked the death of the Old South. This alone was a sobering reality for a town so engaged with its antebellum past. Yet it was the publicity surrounding the case, which dominated national headlines for weeks, that gave locals pause. It brought their town the kind of notoriety that both disturbed and embarrassed well-heeled Natchezeans. It was unseemly. And it detracted from the picturesque portrait of the Old South they still clung to.

Yet everything about the case of Jennie Merrill’s murder revealed an Old South in ruins, at least where the planter class was concerned. And the news media milked the story until it ran bone-dry.

Glenwood itself became its own story following the arrest of Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. Its derelict condition, its peculiar residents, and the menagerie of animals that made their home inside its walls shocked locals and outsiders alike and proved an ominous sign of southern decay. Once the respectable abode of Dick’s father, the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, it contained fine furniture and a large library appropriate for such an educated man as Charles Backus Dana. In the decades since his death in 1873, nearly all of it had deteriorated into conditions not fit for human habitation. And yet humans did inhabit it, including the reverend’s son. Now thousands of others were eager see it for themselves.

It was clear early on that the story of Goat Castle and the “forlorn pair” arrested for the murder of Jennie Merrill attracted more than general interest. In the days that followed, public curiosity was further piqued by reports about the home and living conditions. News stories ran the gamut of providing realistic descriptions that defied belief to comparisons with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” Yet none of it was fiction, because the world of the “Wild Man” and the “Goat Woman” was nothing short of a southern gothic drama come to life.

Their home, a rambling two-story antebellum structure with four large chimneys, sat atop a rise on the property that faced a deep bayou overgrown with weeds, vines, spiky palm fronds, and a forest of trees draped in Spanish moss.

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