“That’s when the fun began.”
The line leapt off the screen as I perused a letter to the Luzerne Union newspaper, written on June 3, 1861. The words came from an Irish immigrant serving as a sergeant in the 8th Pennsylvania Infantry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
What was the scene Sergeant Michael O’Reilly was describing?
The horrific murder of an unnamed African American man at the hands of Pennsylvania soldiers in the early weeks of the Civil War.
I found the letter while researching the Letters from War: 1861 project, a new initiative to highlight the voices of ordinary people caught in the swirl of events as the Civil War began through the letters they wrote to their hometown newspapers in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region. I have read countless letters from this era. I had never read anything like this one.
It started ordinarily enough. Written to Luzerne Union editor Mifflin Hannum, it described young recruits from Wilkes-Barre, PA greasing their rifles and enduring the monotony of army camp life near Chambersburg at a place called Camp Slifer. Then O’Reilly turned to a “fracas” that had taken place in the town on Saturday, June 1 – and the letter became something else entirely.
What followed was a detailed account, punctuated by no fewer than five racial slurs, of the attack on a Black man and his wife in the Chambersburg suburb of Wolfstown by a group of Pennsylvania soldiers. The victim – whom O’Reilly called a “whisky dealer” – shot two of his attackers in the struggle and fled across the Franklin County town with soldiers in pursuit. He was cornered at the home of district attorney George Eyster. The prosecutor was not home, but his wife was, and she helped the man conceal himself in the kitchen chimney. The soldiers told her they only wanted to bring him to the town jail to face charges. She believed them and gave him up.
As they brought him outside, a lieutenant from Pittsburgh shot him at nearly point-blank range. Within moments, he lay dead at the front door of the county’s chief prosecutor – more than twenty wounds in his body from bullets, bayonet thrusts, and blunt force trauma to the head.
O’Reilly moved on without pause after depicting a grisly murder scene. “Yesterday we had a fine time, although it being Sunday,” he wrote next, settling back into the rhythms of Camp Slifer as though nothing had interrupted them.
What stopped me was not only the brutality, although the violence was extraordinary. It was the deliberateness with which O’Reilly wrote this for publication. He signed his name to it and the editor of the Luzerne Union set it in type and ran it in his pages for the Coal Region’s reading public.
This was a letter, sent from one part of Pennsylvania to another, written with the confidence of its welcome; it betrays no shame nor remorse for the events it portrays. Somewhere between Chambersburg and the coal fields of Luzerne County, the murder of a Black man had become a story to share, something that might even get a laugh.
As Pennsylvanians, we have told ourselves a particular story about the United States Army and our state’s servicemembers during the Civil War: that they were, however imperfectly and however slowly, an instrument of liberation – a military force that broke the back of American slavery and made good, at least in part, on the promises of the founding of our nation.
That story is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete. The Pennsylvanians who wore Union blue in the spring of 1861 brought with them every prejudice of the world that made them, and in the chaotic early weeks of the war, before the conflict had clarified into anything approaching a moral cause outside of saving the Union, those prejudices had consequences. As the events of June 1, 1861 show us, those prejudices could have fatal results.
Chambersburg in the spring of 1861 was a staging ground for tens of thousands of Pennsylvania volunteers preparing to move south. “This usually quiet town now presents a very animated and soldier like appearance, as the sound of the drum, the running to and fro of soldiers, and all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war,” wrote one observer that spring.
The seat of Franklin County was also home to a cluster of crude brick and wooden houses known as Wolfstown. This small free Black community had survived slave catchers and the long shadow of the Fugitive Slave Act after its passage in 1850.
The village straddling the Conococheague Creek played a direct role in the event that lit the fuse of the Civil War itself when abolitionist John Brown met Frederick Douglass in a quarry near Wolfstown in August 1859. Brown tried to convince Douglass to join in an attack on the US Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Douglass refused and tried to convince Brown not to move forward with the plan.
The attack took place two months later in October 1859, with many of Brown’s supporters killed and Brown himself taken captive after the attack failed and he was cornered. The abolitionist firebrand was executed by hanging in December 1859.
Wolfstown was a community that had already learned, at considerable cost, how narrow the distance between freedom, slavery, and a violent death could be.
The man at the center of this story was 41-years-old, Virginia-born, a free man who had built a life in a community of free people on the precarious northern border of the slaveholding world. He was killed on the doorstep of the county’s chief prosecutor – mercilessly shot, bayoneted, and beaten – by soldiers of the United States Army. The same army that would, within four years, fight successfully to free four million enslaved people across the South brutally murdered a man and called it justice.
His name was Frank Jones.
This is the story of a lynching and its forgotten legacy.
Wolfstown
West Loudon Street ran west from the center of Chambersburg toward the Conococheague Creek, where a small footbridge crossed the stream. The street continued westward until it met the road heading out of Chambersburg toward the mountains to the west.
There, built along Loudon, Washington, and Water streets stood a cluster of low, one and a half story buildings that residents of Franklin County called Wolfstown.
The man who built the homes was named Nicholas Uglow. He had come to Chambersburg from England in 1818 with little – he started his life in Franklin County as a well digger – but over the following decades he accumulated a modest degree of financial security. He established a brick foundry and acquired farmland. And somewhere in the process of building his own prosperity, he identified an opportunity that his neighbors had overlooked or chosen not to see.
Chambersburg’s small, but growing African American community had no place to live. Uglow built them one: rows of small structures along the bank of the Conococheague, made of saplings and half-baked bricks, and leased them back at whatever the market would bear. It was not charity. Uglow had not arrived in Chambersburg as a philanthropist and he did not leave as one when he died in 1868. His business was conducted at the intersection of need and the willingness to exploit it. Uglow was known for personally making his rounds to collect rent. If his tenants did not pay, he simply threw them out.
The creek that ran beside those buildings carried everything the town above discarded, flowing through Wolfstown as the Conococheague flowed south toward the Potomac River. In summer the smells must have settled over Wolfstown. The neighborhood sat at the literal and figurative downstream of Chambersburg: it received whatever the town above chose to send its way.
The white residents of Chambersburg had their own names for what Wolfstown represented, and they were not shy about using them. The neighborhood had, over the years, accumulated a dubious reputation. What its critics said about Wolfstown reveals more about the people doing the describing than the people being described.
A later history would attribute Wolfstown’s troubles to the idleness of its residents – a diagnosis that managed to identify a real condition while obscuring every cause of it. The community was idle, insofar as it was, because the white people of Chambersburg had made certain it would be. The jobs, the apprenticeships, the schools, the pathways of opportunity, none of these ran through Wolfstown.
In 1854, a group of manumitted slaves from Berkeley County, Virginia arrived in Chambersburg and celebrated their freedom in the streets of the neighborhood and a stop at a “hotel” managed by Frank Jones. This was an occasion worth celebrating with food, music, and marching in Wolfstown.
The Valley Spirit, Chambersburg’s Democratic newspaper, did not see it that way. The paper railed against the arrival of more African Americans in town, invoking the most loaded shorthand available to an American editor of that era: Wolfstown, the Spirit declared, was the “Five Points” of Chambersburg.
In the mid-19th century, wave after wave of the newest Americans and the most marginal ones settled in the New York slum known as Five Points. Irish immigrants fresh off the coffin ships, free Black families pushed to the edges of the city’s economy, the poor and the desperate crowding into its tenements and blind alleys. To call Wolfstown the Five Points of Chambersburg was to reach for that tradition of condemnation and apply it to the people living along the Conococheague.
By 1860, just under a hundred African American residents called Wolfstown home. The census enumerator recorded their occupations – day laborers, blacksmiths, servants, waiters, and porters. These were people who scratched out a living at the western edge of Chambersburg. They had nonetheless built something real in the space Uglow’s transaction had made available: households, churches, a community with its own internal life and its own memory.
What they could not build, in the decade before the Civil War, was security. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made certain of that.
The law had done something that no previous legislation had quite managed. It extended the operational machinery of slavery into states where slavery did not legally exist, and it applied that machinery not only to escaped enslaved people but to any Black person a claimant chose to identify as one.
Federal commissioners deciding these cases received ten dollars for every African American they sent south, and five dollars for every one they set free. There was no right to testify in one’s own defense.
As the historian Eric Foner documents in his book about the Underground Railroad, Gateway to Freedom, slave catchers and kidnappers roamed freely through northern communities, seizing free Black people – often children – and sending them south into bondage. Pennsylvania, Foner notes, was among the states where the law was enforced most effectively.
The law did not distinguish between the formerly enslaved and the never-enslaved. It made life perilous for all Black Americans living north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Chambersburg was exactly 13 miles north of that border.
Slave catchers moved through Franklin County with legal protection. The law compelled any deputized white man, regardless of his own views on human bondage, to assist in the capture of a suspected runaway. Your neighbor could be pressed into service against you. The Underground Railroad moved people through the Cumberland Valley in the other direction, north toward something more reliably free in Canada, and its operators worked under conditions of constant surveillance.
Freedom in Wolfstown in the years before the Civil War was not a status you simply held; it had to be actively maintained against the possibility of its abrupt and legal termination.
It was inside this world, and against this backdrop, that Frank Jones had built his life.
Jones appears in the Chambersburg census for the first time in 1850. He had been born in Virginia around 1820. Whether he was born enslaved is unrecorded. Given the condition of most Black Virginians in 1820, freedom at birth was the less probable circumstance.
By the early 1850s he had established himself in Wolfstown as the operator of a small hotel – one of the low establishments along West Loudon Street where a man could procure a drink and rent a bed. He also worked at some point as an ostler at the Indian Queen Hotel in Chambersburg proper, tending horses at one of the town’s more respectable establishments.
Jones moved between two worlds: the one along the Conococheague at Wolfstown, and the one where white Chambersburg conducted its business at the center of town. Men in his perilous position learned to navigate this environment carefully, making a living and trying not to attract scrutiny. Jones, it turned out, had made himself useful to those committing a crime against his own community.
On the night of August 18, 1856, a Black man named George Anderson was arrested in Chambersburg on a charge of disorderly conduct. He was placed in the town’s overnight holding cell – a small building adjoining the Friendship Engine House on South 2nd Street. Here, detainees were held until they could be brought before a Justice of the Peace in the morning. When the officers arrived to collect their prisoner the following day, the cell was empty.
A letter arrived from Hagerstown a day or two later. A Black man had been brought there by a man named Robert Garns, who alleged he was a fugitive slave and had him placed in the Hagerstown prison. As the Franklin Repository and Transcript reported, parties in Chambersburg who knew the man to be free arranged for his liberation – a Lancaster man named Joseph Ballance traveled to Hagerstown and secured his release. Garns, by then, had disappeared.
Garns reappeared in 1858 and was promptly arrested in Chambersburg. He and several conspirators were charged with kidnapping. Frank Jones was among those accused in acting as an accomplice in the crime.
It is worth being careful about what conclusions to draw from this. Jones was not simply a predator operating in his own community. He was a Virginia-born Black man, quite possibly formerly enslaved, living on the northern edge of the slaveholding world in a decade when federal law had made the practical margin between freedom and bondage dangerously thin.
The Fugitive Slave Act had created a new financial market of sorts in Black bodies north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Some Black men, under sufficient pressure, found ways to operate inside that market.
Jones could not outrun the reputation he had made for himself by involvement in the Garns kidnapping case. By the end of the 1850s Jones was being arrested repeatedly for running a disorderly house and became entangled in legal disputes with neighbors who had not forgotten how he had betrayed their community.
In Wolfstown, his actions likely carried a specific and lasting impact after his conviction. In a close-knit community organized around protecting itself from the many daily threats its residents faced, Jones likely faced scorn or worse.
This legacy lingered long enough that when writing a history of Chambersburg during the Civil War years, a white historian named George O. Seilhammer mentioned Frank Jones and the kidnapping of free Blacks in an article he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1894:
Before dismissing this part of my subject I cannot refrain from speaking of the “kidnappers,” as the men along the border north of Mason and Dixon’s line who made a business of returning runaway slaves were called, before the war.
As the Cumberland Valley and the adjacent mountains were on the line of the once-famous “underground railroad,” it was inevitable that slave-catching should become a business with the class of men who were not overscrupulous in their methods of making money. I knew a score or more of them in my youth.
This business of slave catching was generally done in the night time and without any appeal to the Fugitive Slave laws. Among the blacks themselves there were reputed “stool-pigeons” of the “kidnappers.”
The colored man, Frank Jones… was always said to be one of them.
Frank Jones was 41-years-old. He had survived one of the most dangerous decades Black Americans in the North had ever endured. He had done it through compromises that cost him the trust of the people around him and the comfort of any simple accounting of himself.
In the spring of 1861, tens of thousands of Pennsylvania volunteers poured into Chambersburg, filling the farms and fields outside town with canvas tents and young soldiers. Many of them found their way to Wolfstown. The small establishments along West Loudon Street offered what the army camps did not: hard drink and a few hours away from military discipline. Jones, by some contemporary accounts, opened his doors to them and served them alcohol.
Inside that same building lived his entire world. His wife Sarah and four children, the oldest 14, the youngest not yet 2. Boarders likely shared the home with them to help make ends meet and pay the rent to Nicholas Uglow.
June 1, 1861 was a Saturday. Before it was over, Frank Jones would be dead.
June 1, 1861
The first day of June dawned rainy and gray, with low clouds hanging over Chambersburg and its military encampments.
Sometime that afternoon, a group of soldiers from the 2nd and 6th Pennsylvania left their camps and made their way to Wolfstown.
The men of the 2nd Pennsylvania included some Franklin County recruits who would have known the neighborhood and possibly known its establishments where a man could get a drink if he wanted one badly enough. These soldiers were looking for the Wolfstown as described by a writer later, in the 1920s: “Bad whiskey flowed [in Wolfstown] about as fast as the water of the Conococheague.”
The 6th Pennsylvania had arrived in Chambersburg only three days earlier, on May 28, after weeks of railroad guard duty between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Most of them came from the coal mining towns of Carbon and Schuylkill counties in the eastern part of the state. They knew hard work and hard drinking. They didn’t have much experience interacting with large African American communities.
What exactly drew them to the door of Frank Jones that afternoon depends on which account you believe. In one telling, the soldiers had gone first to a neighboring house where liquor could be had, found it shut up, and blamed Jones for reporting it to the authorities. This made him, in their logic, the man responsible for cutting off their fun afternoon in town.
In another, they came to Jones’s door directly, seeking drink, and found themselves refused entry. The precise sequence does not much matter. What the accounts agree on is what came next.
The soldiers began attacking the house.
Inside were Sarah Jones and the couple’s four children. Jones himself was in the garden out back when his wife called for him. Three days after the events, on June 4, the Semi-Weekly Dispatch of Chambersburg published what remains the most detailed account of what happened when the soldiers forced their way in:
On Saturday afternoon, a party of soldiers went to the house of Frank Jones, a mulatto residing in Wolffstown, a suburb of this place, and wanted admission. They found the door fastened, and were informed by Mrs. Jones that they could not come in, when one of them threw a boulder at her head, which she dodged, and called her husband, who was in the garden transplanting cabbages.
The men attempted to force the door, and fired a shot through the window, while Jones, in order to defend his own house, seized his double-barrelled gun, which was charged with buckshot, and warning them not to force the door, stood with it ready when the door was burst in, and after retreating to the wall, fired at one wounding him in the thigh about six inches above the knee.
A scuffle ensued in which Jones was floored, and while down, his wife begged them not to kill her husband, when one of them struck her a severe blow in the face, others knocked the children about, when Jones recovering his feet, wrested the gun from the soldiers’ hands, and, as they were beating a retreat, fired the contents of the other barrel, which took effect in the leg of another of the soldiers.
Among the wounded was Patrick Pursell of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, a member of Company C, 6th Pennsylvania – one of the Schuylkill County men according to the war-time diary of James K. Helms.
Word traveled fast that two soldiers had been shot by a Black man in Wolfstown. From across Chambersburg, soldiers began racing toward the scene.
As a crowd formed outside his house, calling for its destruction and his death, Frank Jones ran.
He slipped out the back door of his house and headed north, moving along the Conococheague, a crowd forming behind him and growing as it went.
The crowd – mostly Pennsylvania soldiers – filled the air with racial epithets and one repeated demand for the death of the man who had shot two soldiers.
Among those who saw Jones flee was Lieutenant Morgan Bryan of Company A, 7th Pennsylvania Infantry. Bryan was 37-years old, a native of Allegheny City outside Pittsburgh. He called for “six good men” and joined the pursuit, moving through backyards and along the creek as Jones ran north, crossing West Market Street, the road that would one day become Route 30, with the mob still behind him and still howling murder.
Jones knew the geography of Chambersburg well enough to know where he might find help. He turned up Franklin Street, passed the Cedar Grove Cemetery, and ran toward the most substantial house in that part of town: the home of George Eyster, the district attorney for Franklin County, sitting atop what was known as Federal Hill near the modern-day intersection of Franklin and Pleasant streets.
Eyster was not home and his wife answered the door. She looked at the man on her doorstep – no doubt out of breath with a crowd at his heels – and she brought him inside and helped him hide up the kitchen chimney.
The soldiers arrived at the door moments later. They told Mrs. Eyster they only wanted to bring Jones to the jail and assured her he would not be harmed. She took them at their word and told them where he was.
As the Valley Spirit later reported, the soldiers dragged Jones from the chimney, and the paper offered its own assessment of their intent: “This we believe, was the sole intention of the party who first arrested Jones.”
The soldiers brought Jones outside and were moving him down the farm lane in front of the house when Lieutenant Bryan stepped forward. “Stand aside, men,” he said. Then he raised his revolver and fired into Jones at near point-blank range.
The first shot hit Jones in the side. He tried to run and Bryan fired again and again. Other soldiers opened fire.
The fatal shot was fired from above, into the back of a man already dying. When Jones stopped moving, Bryan drew his officer’s sword and repeatedly thrust it into the lifeless body.
In the chaos as soldiers continued firing into Jones, a ricocheting bullet struck a member of the 2nd Pennsylvania.
The Semi-Weekly Dispatch recorded the horrific events:
He was a long time dying while the Lieutenant and the soldiers stood around him and would not permit any one to afford him any relief. A large and excited crowd soon collected at the spot and threats were very freely made to burn the body, quarter it, etc. Several shots, one of which accidentally struck a soldier in the right groin inflicting a severe wound, were fired at the dead body.
George Eyster arrived at the murder scene in his own front yard accompanied by soldiers dispatched by General Robert Patterson. They tried to remove the body and were stopped by one of their own officers. Jones lay where he had fallen, exposed to the crowd and to further mutilation.
Eventually the crowds were dispersed and Jones’s body was moved to the Old Jail in Chambersburg, locked away from the mob.
The following morning Doctors Hamilton and Boyle performed an autopsy before a jury of inquest. Their findings, as reported by the Valley Spirit, were: twenty wounds in all – six bullet wounds, the rest incised and contused. One shot had entered the back, passed through the shoulder blade, torn through both chambers of the heart, and lodged in the breastbone. A sword wound had entered the arm, penetrated the chest, broken a rib, and driven deep into the lung.
The body was dressed and buried two days after the murder. Warrants were issued almost immediately for the arrest of several soldiers, Lieutenant Morgan Bryan’s name prominent among them. The civil authorities of Franklin County announced they intended to pursue justice. Chambersburg’s newspapers, without exception, condemned what had happened.
The soldiers in the camps around Chambersburg felt differently. Their letters and diaries recorded not remorse but indignation. They were enraged that their fellow soldiers had been wounded by a Black man, and shared satisfaction at the outcome. Private James Helms of the 6th Pennsylvania, a Schuylkill County man, wrote in his diary that Jones had been “instantly slaughtered in a most shocking but deserving manner.” In a letter home to the Miners’ Journal of Pottsville, Helms was equally unsparing: “[Jones] was captured, to receive what the citizens say he deserved, death.”
This was the “fracas” that Sergeant Michael O’Reilly of the 8th Pennsylvania wrote up for the Luzerne Union two days later with a hint of glee in his writing.
The case received national headlines, appearing in newspapers from New York to Philadelphia and south into Confederate territory.
Frank Jones had been shot, stabbed, beaten, and left to die on the front lawn of the county’s chief prosecutor in a crime committed by soldiers of the United States Army. Now, that prosecutor was going to seek justice.
Search for Justice
The first person brought up on charges for the murder of Frank Jones was a young soldier named George Hackendorn. His name does not appear in the muster records of any unit stationed around Chambersburg at the time, and not much else is known about him. He went to trial for murder in August 1861 and was acquitted – no witness could place him at the scene with any certainty.
The man most associated with the killing was nowhere to be found. Lieutenant Morgan Bryan deserted the day after the murder, slipping out of Chambersburg undetected. According to writer Brian Stamm, who examined the case in the Journal of Franklin County History in 2024, Bryan likely had help. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Rippey of the 2nd Pennsylvania – Bryan’s superior officer and a fellow Pittsburgher – listed Bryan as “absent with leave” when the unit mustered out in July 1861. It was a bureaucratic fiction that bought Bryan time and distance to allow the feelings about the murder in Chambersburg to cool.
That summer, the Pennsylvania forces left Chambersburg and moved south into Maryland and Virginia. General Robert Patterson’s army failed to pin Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley in late July 1861 while Irvin McDowell’s army marched toward Manassas. The defeat at Bull Run fell hard on Patterson’s reputation and his forces took much of the blame.
The three-month units were disbanded and sent home. Many of the men re-enlisted and would fight on the major battlefields of the next four years. Oliver Rippey did not survive them. He died leading the 61st Pennsylvania at the Battle of Fair Oaks in Virginia on May 31, 1862 – one day before the first anniversary of the murder of Frank Jones.
Two and a half years passed. Confederate cavalry swept into Chambersburg in the fall of 1862 during their invasion of Maryland leading to the Battle of Antietam. Robert E. Lee’s army moved through Franklin County again in June 1863 on the march toward Gettysburg. The town had been occupied, ransacked, and left to recover more than once by the time, in March 1864, Morgan Bryan walked back into Franklin County and surrendered himself for prosecution in the murder of Frank Jones.
Why he returned is not recorded. Whether conscience played any role, or whether he had simply made arrangements for his defense and calculated the odds, the historical record does not say.
Bryan already had a history of interactions with the law. In the 1850s he had operated saloons and pool halls in Allegheny City – the community across the river from Pittsburgh that is now the city’s North Side. A Pittsburgh paper described him in 1853 as “a clever fellow, and knows well how to cater to the public taste,” running an establishment he called The Shades.
In 1858 he was arrested for selling lottery tickets out of the saloon, convicted, and sentenced to a year in the Western State Penitentiary. The harshness of the sentence provoked a public outcry, newspapers took up his cause, and Governor William Packer pardoned him in July 1858 after he had served less than a month in prison. Bryan had already learned, before the war, that a well-connected man in Pennsylvania could expect a certain amount of institutional forgiveness.
Bryan went on trial in Chambersburg in April 1864, nearly three years after the killing. The prosecution was handled by two men: William Stenger and George Eyster – the same George Eyster on whose front lawn Frank Jones had bled to death. The trial lasted three days as the jury considered charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter. On April 13, they returned a verdict of guilty on manslaughter alone.
Bryan was sentenced to two years at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. His friends moved immediately to win his freedom. His defense attorney William McLellan began working the case through the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and the campaign for a pardon found its way to Governor Andrew Curtin.
Bryan spent nine months at Eastern State as prisoner number 4971. He walked out in February 1865 and returned to Pittsburgh, where he resumed his life as a saloon operator.
He died on Pittsburgh’s North Side in May 1902. His obituary noted, briefly, that he had never joined the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, because he considered it too aligned with the Republican Party. In the years after the Civil War, the Republican Party’s closest association, in the minds of men like Bryan, was with civil rights and with the memory of what the war had been fought to accomplish: the abolition of slavery. Bryan had wanted no part of that legacy.
What Remained
The remains of Frank Jones were laid to rest on June 3, 1861, less than two days after his murder.
No record of where he was interred survives. Brian Stamm and the researchers who worked with him believe he was likely buried in the cemetery attached to St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church on South Main Street, a few blocks south of Wolfstown. The cemetery contains both marked and unmarked graves. A portion of it was paved over in the 1980s, the remaining headstones moved to the side of the church.
What became of Sarah Jones and her four children is not known. They do not appear in the 1870 census or any subsequent Franklin County record that I’ve been able to locate. They may have left Chambersburg in the immediate aftermath, fleeing the town where her husband was murdered on the lawn of its chief prosecutor, taking the children somewhere beyond the reach of what had happened there. Or they may have stayed, and met a different fate entirely.
In June 1863, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia swept through Franklin County on its march toward Gettysburg. As historian Ted Alexander documented, Confederate forces moved through Chambersburg seizing Black residents – free and formerly enslaved alike – and driving them south at gunpoint. A local resident named Rachel Cormany recorded what she witnessed in her diary:
O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly and look at such brutal deeds—I saw no men among the contrabands—all women and children. Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along—I sat on the front step as they were driven by just like we would drive cattle. Some laughed and seemed not to care—but nearly all hung their heads.
One woman was pleading wonderfully with her driver for her children— but all the sympathy she received from him was a rough “March along”—at which she would quicken her pace again. It is a query what they want with those little babies—whole families were taken. Of course when the mother was taken she would take her children. I suppose the men left thinking the women and children would not be disturbed.
Another resident, William Heyser, estimated that 250 people were taken from Chambersburg alone. Whether Sarah Jones and her children were among them, there is no record.
Three and a half months after Morgan Bryan was convicted of manslaughter in the Franklin County courthouse, Confederate forces returned to Chambersburg and demanded $500,000 in ransom. When the town could not pay, they put it to the torch. Flames consumed more than 550 buildings across the city, including several of the small homes in Wolfstown. Another disaster had beset the Franklin County seat.
Nicholas Uglow died in 1868. His properties were gradually bought up by residents and other members of Franklin County’s African American community. The cheap construction of the antebellum years did not age well, and as the old homes came down the neighborhood began to change, absorbing new residents and losing its distinct identity.
By the 1930s, a local history noted that little of the original Wolfstown remained – except the name of the bridge over the Conococheague on West Loudon Street, and the memory, among older Chambersburg residents, of Wolfstown as “a certain condition in life”: a shorthand for poverty and living on the margins.
The Site of a Lynching
In May 2026, I traveled to Chambersburg to walk the route Frank Jones had run on the afternoon of June 1, 1861. Much like that spring day 165 years ago, a low bank of clouds hung over the town as rain showers came and went.
The site of Wolfstown on the east bank of the Conococheague is now a shopping center – the Southgate Mall, stretching along Water Street to West Loudon Street. We crossed the old right-of-way of the Cumberland Valley Railroad and approached the neighborhood from the east. Near the creek, I found the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission marker commemorating the August 1859 meeting of John Brown and Frederick Douglass in the stone quarry adjacent to where Wolfstown once stood.
I crossed the Conococheague at the Wolfstown bridge and followed Franklin Street north and uphill toward Route 30.The street follows the same path Jones ran that June afternoon – uphill, turning slightly northwest, the Cedar Grove Cemetery on the east side expanding well beyond what it was in 1861.
At the top of the hill, the ground begins to level out onto what was known as Federal Hill. This is where George Eyster’s house stood. This is where Jones hid in the kitchen chimney. This is where he was dragged outside and shot.
The house itself passed through many hands after the war. A writer reflecting on it in 1886 captured something of its strange afterlife:
The writer has no antipathy toward that spot, has liked it for some reasons for many years, has known it well, perhaps better than nine-tenths of our people. Originally it was, and no doubt is yet, a solidly constructed mansion on a hill reached with difficulty by many, having about five acres of rather thin soil, set in part with unthrifty trees.
It commands an extended and beautiful view, has cold and bleak exposure toward north and west, but sunny and pleasant toward the south. It is healthy and dry notwithstanding the flat and pond-like district southwest from its front, over which the winds from that quarter must pass before they strike the mansion…
I refuse to believe that nothing can prosper there as some have thought and said.last two or three decades. Within that period it has passed first to Geo. Eyster, Esq., then to J. A. Eyster, McClure, Stouffer, Everett, W.G. McClelland, Craig, Shatzer and others not all perhaps but nearly all of whom had a perfected title to it.
There is no curse upon the place.
I have sojourned there often during the era of disturbance and danger in this community, but never by night or by day been met with evil; or affrighted by gnomes or a spirit of another world.
The populous city of the dead alongside was always peaceful and quiet, and laid effectually was the ghost of poor Frank Jones, who 25 years ago was torn from his hiding in the house and ruthlessly slaughtered near the threshold.
The next year, 1887, the mansion became home to the Children’s Aid Society of Franklin County where orphans from around the region found a home.
It served as the Children’s Home until 1976, when it was replaced by a new building just south of the original site. The old house came down in the spring and summer of 1977.
As the building was coming down, all connections to the lynching that had taken place on the front lawn had disappeared and were seemingly lost to history. The final references to the murder of Frank Jones in the newspapers of Chambersburg came in the first decades of the 20th century, when his demise still lingered in the minds of those who had lived through it and even witnessed it.
The historian George Seilhammer, who wrote a history column about Chambersburg in 1894, had been there that afternoon in June 1861. He wrote: “I saw this outrage, but in common with the rest of the townspeople was powerless to prevent it, or even to restrain the drunken soldiers from firing into the poor negro’s body after the man was dead.”
At the top of Federal Hill today, there is grass, a tree line, and the edge of a parking lot. The grounds of the Children’s Aid Society’s current building lie just downhill. The home once stood on a small rise just above Franklin Street facing south toward Wolfstown.
I stood near the spot where Union soldiers took the life of Frank Jones.
Nothing marks the spot today. But this is the site of a lynching – hallowed ground where a man was ruthlessly murdered by Union soldiers in the chaotic first weeks of the Civil War.
I kept thinking about Sarah and the children, about what they had witnessed back in Wolfstown. About the fear and terror they carried out of that house and into whatever came next. I thought about the men who did this – many of them from the same coal towns in Eastern Pennsylvania that I come from and write about. How could they do what they did?
I thought about how this history matters, and how often stories like this are willingly cast aside. About how far we’ve come as a nation from the lynching of Frank Jones, from the slave hunt through Chambersburg by Confederate soldiers, from Jim Crow and segregation – and how we now seem to be driving deliberately back toward the culture from which we emerged, out of spite, self-interest, and a refusal to reckon with our own past.
I am choosing to remember Frank Jones. A complicated man, living in a time of unimaginable difficulty, who tried to defend his family and lost his life at the hands of a vengeful mob.
His life mattered. His story and the story of his community deserves to be told and shared with new generations.
Thank you to Brian Stamm for his research on this topic, published through the Franklin County Historical Society, whose research helped piece this story together, especially around Morgan Bryan’s trial.
And thank you to the numerous people who helped edit and make suggestions on how to share this difficult story.
Explore the Letters from War: 1861 series here
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Thank you for allowing me to read this horrible info. And making the people of today aware of our history. God bless you, Jake
Excellent account of a forgotten horror. Great research, fine writing. This is the historian’s craft. Thank you.