Glen Washington Quotes

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region ; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Yan Tassel's, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.

Those first 33 feet of the lake, high enough to back water upstream about 16 miles—sending it into the side canyons of Wahweap, Antelope, Navajo, and Warm creeks—were proof of a different kind to David Brower, evidence of the heart-wrenching certainty that the canyon soon would be submerged. Brower, executive director of a small, San Francisco-based conservation organization called the Sierra Club, had traveled to Washington, D.C., on the day Glen Canyon’s west diversion tunnel was scheduled to be closed, hoping that he could convince Udall to forestall what he knew someday would be inevitable.

The lynching in 1901 in Erwin, Mississippi, which departs from the pattern of the previously discussed lynchings, illustrates this restructuring. In November 1900, a horse belonging to the young Vincenzo Serio, a native of Cefalù, Sicily, wandered onto the property of the plantation manager G. B. Allen. The incursion devolved into an animated dispute, whereby a convergence of armed men shot and injured Vincenzo. Vincenzo escaped to nearby Greenville, but upon recovering, returned to the township of Glen Allan, some forty miles south on Lake Washington, to rejoin his father Giovanni. On his return, citizens in the community issued an order giving Vincenzo thirty days to leave the village, an order he disregarded.104 During the evening of July 10, 1901, incensed by Vincenzo’s blatant insolence, Allen made no secret of gathering together an armed contingent to finish what he had begun eight months beforehand. On three separate occasions, friends of the Serios attempted to contact Vincenzo, who was staying in neighboring Erwin, to warn him of the impending threat; they were prevented by both force and fear from using the parish telephone.105 Under the impression that the trouble had blown over and not “suspecting danger,” Vincenzo and his father, along with two other Sicilian friends, went to sleep that same night in hammocks hung in the gallery of their home. After midnight, a “volley of rifle and pistol bullets were poured into them.”106 Father and son, Giovanni and Vincenzo, were shot to death, and Salvatore Liberto took a bullet to