 WHITESBORO'S BIGGEST STORY In a June 24, 1955 edition of the Whitesboro News-Record, Theo Denton described the biggest story that happened while he was working for the Whitesboro paper. That story was the burning of Negro Abe Wilder in 1900. Wilder killed a white woman near Southmayd and was widely pursued for several days before he was burned at the stake at Dexter. Denton told the story like this: 'That was when we set all our type by hand, and we set type for that edition for three nights and two days. Everybody was armed and scouting the country. About every hour someone would bring us news of what they had heard of him. "He was finally caught in Oklahoma, and the night he was caught people began to pour into Whitesboro, because they thought he would be burned here. They came from everywhere -- from the south, east and west -- and were coming in all the time on trains. It was estimated there were 30,000 people here that night. Main Street and North Union were filled with people until you couldn’t get through the streets. "One of the men that caught him came to town about the time of the burning to give me the story. We finished up the edition and went to press an hour after the man was burned. "People were bringing in boxes and things and were getting ready to burn him here, but the folks at Dexter wanted to do it there, and also we had heard that they might send the militia in to stop the mob, and that may have been one reason they went ahead and burned him there. That's certainly the biggest story that I ever covered."  Whitesboro History Susan Hawkins © 2024 If you find any of Grayson CountyTXGenWeb links inoperable, please send me a message. |