Hanged Three Times and Lived
Hanged Three Times and Lived
Deputy Sheriff Luke Brannon thwarts a lynching
One of my favorite stories of local history is the heroic exploits of Luke Brannon. He was a deputy sheriff in 1903 when he answered a call to go to Oxford, my college town, where a local constable had been shot during the street fair. He was probably not prepared to walk into the middle of a lynching.
I’ve written about this a couple of different times, but my favorite version is the program I put together for a Miami University lecture that I gave in 2015. I had been doing “Yesterday’s News” programs at the MUH Downtown Center for a few years, and was invited to do a version for a lunchtime lecture series at the main campus.
The text is lifted about ninety percent directly from the reporting on the incident by the Hamilton Sun, a short-lived democratic daily that was Hamilton’s third newspaper for a time. Consequently, some of the language is quite dated (and racist), but it is some of the most exciting reporting I’ve ever encountered. They didn’t use by-lines in those days, so I have no idea who wrote this, but kudos anyway….
The opening and closing paragraphs are from a shorter version of the story that I wrote for a magazine, included for context.
Substack won’t let me publish the whole story, but you can read it on my personal archives.
Hanged Three Times and Lived
The first wave of the Spanish influenza pandemic in October and November of 1918, took the lives of more than 200 Hamilton residents. The most prominent of these deaths was that of Luke Brannon, who at the time was a Butler County Commissioner. He died December 2 after a ten-day struggle when the flu, as was common, developed into pneumonia.
“Perhaps no man was better known throughout Butler County than Luke Brannon,” the Evening Journal reported in its glowing obituary.
Born in Hamilton on December 9, 1859, Brannon’s career in public life began in 1890 when he served as a constable, and earned a reputation for “honesty and fearlessness.” Because of this reputation, when Peter Bisdorf was elected Butler County Sheriff in 1900, he named Luke Brannon his chief deputy.
That was a busy term for the new sheriff and his deputy. After several decades of relative quiet in the county, there was a sudden spike in murders, most of them domestic, including the capture of alleged serial killer Alfred Knapp.
But it was an incident in Oxford that cemented Luke Brannon’s reputation as a fierce enforcer of the law when “the ordinary quiet village,” according to the Hamilton Sun, became the center of chaos when the Fourth Annual Street Fair and Farmer’s Exposition turned riotous, September 30, 1903.
