The Guns of Meeting Street

As compelling as fiction, The Guns of Meeting Street reconstructs a series of sensational murders in the 1940s that rocked rural Edgefield County, South Carolina, and riveted the state's attention. Featuring an unlikely cast of antagonists - among them a prominent store owner, a school teacher, and a law enforcement officer who hid in the getaway car while a hired gunman shot his enemy - the acts of revenge resulted in five murders. Another three people were put to death in the electric chair, including the first woman to be electrocuted in South Carolina. With the assistance of descendants of the two families involved, T. Felder Dorn probes a longstanding feud between the Logues and the Timmermans to uncover a chilling story of misplaced revenge, social resentment, and violence. His careful research weaves together the oral history of family members affected by the shooting with court transcripts, affidavits, prisoner confessions, newspaper articles, and coroners' reports to produce a truly gripping account of the events.
While most of the deaths took place between 1940 and 1943, the story has roots that can be traced to killings that occurred in the Meeting Street community in the 1920s that involved Logue family members and their relatives. The story climaxes on January 15, 1943, with three executions, and concludes with the 1960 parole of Joe Frank Logue Jr., the only one of Davis Timmerman's killers to escape capital punishment. Not for the faint of heart, The Guns of Meeting Street details the circumstances and motivations for the killings, the legal wranglings of complex court cases, and the involvement in the proceedings by such leading South Carolinians as governors Richard Manning Jefferies, Olin D. Johnston, and J. Strom Thurmond.