‘The Horrible Tortures’ Child-abuse scandal rocked High Point in 1907

Stories of child abuse rarely appeared in newspapers in the early 20th century, but this headline in The High Point Enterprise was an obvious exception:

“NO PEN NOR LANGUAGE CAN EXPRESS THE AWFULNESS OF THIS CRIME AGAINST INNOCENT AND HELPLESS CHILDHOOD.”

The story, published on Nov. 6, 1907, tells the strange, shocking tale of little Jennie Fields, a 4-year-old at the center of a child-abuse scandal that not only rocked High Point and Thomasville but made headlines across North Carolina.

Jennie was the daughter of Thomas Clarkston Fields and his wife, Carrie, of High Point, but the parents were not the ones charged with child abuse. That distinction belonged to their friends in Thomasville, Hilary Bryant Shoaf and his wife, Daisy, who were accused of brutally beating Jennie when she spent a few weeks visiting them.

The Enterprise reporter actually went to the Fieldses’ home and saw Jennie himself, describing her as “a mass of sores and a physical wreck for the inhuman treatment received. … There is not an inch on the entire body that has not been covered by a bruise, a sore or a scratch.”

Furthermore, he reported, Jennie had a broken arm, mashed toes — as if someone had stomped on them — and a sore on her head at least 4 inches in diameter. Gangrene had also set in, and the little girl was widely expected to die.

“Great God,” he wrote, “could anything be worse than the tortures inflicted upon a helpless being than was done by the Shoafs?”

Neighbors gathered outside the victim’s home and expressed their disgust, with some of the crowd even suggesting the Shoafs should be lynched.

“There was many a man there that would have gladly followed a crowd to a tree and tied up the guilty parties,” The Enterprise wrote, “and they did not hesitate to express their sentiments, either.”

In fact, the sheriff of Davidson County, where the Shoafs were being held, reportedly whisked them away in the middle of the night after rumors surfaced that a posse, intent on exacting vigilante justice, was headed for the Lexington jailhouse with a battering ram and a couple of nooses. He even had a militia on standby to help protect the suspects should the need arise.

Were the Shoafs actually guilty, though? And even if they were, had the child’s injuries been exaggerated for dramatic effect, not just in The Enterprise but in other newspapers, as well?

One account, for example, claimed the Shoafs — under the influence of opium and whiskey — had actually tried to murder Jennie, describing the whole affair as “one of the most blood-curdling stories ever recited.”

Another article, headlined “The Horrible Tortures,” reported that Daisy Shoaf had been seen kicking Jennie out the door of her home, then dragging her back inside by the hair. The same article claimed the husband had nearly pulled Jennie’s nose off in a fit of anger, and that Jennie’s body was covered with pinholes from where the couple had stuck pins in it.

To hear the Shoafs tell it, though, they were completely innocent, telling a reporter from The Dispatch in Lexington that the accusations were “a pack of lies from end to end.”

Jennie’s primary injuries — her broken arm, her wounded head and a badly bruised back — resulted from her falling out of a swing, the couple told The Dispatch during a jailhouse interview. And when that happened, they added, they called Dr. C.A. Julian, a well-known physician in Thomasville, to come examine the child.

Other injuries, the Shoafs said, had simply been exaggerated by the press.

After being moved to the jail in Charlotte, the Shoafs repeated the explanations to newspapermen there, although the husband acknowledged that he had punished Jennie with a switch — a common form of punishment for children in those days — for allowing herself to get overly dirty.

“Switching her was the only thing in God’s kingdom I did to her,” he said.

To his credit, H.B. Shoaf had a solid reputation in Thomasville and at Cramer Furniture Factory, where he was a supervisor over some 200 workers. Daisy’s reputation was not quite as stellar, though she had no known record of violence or cruelty to children.

So what were people to believe? Newspapers had presented two distinctively opposite images of the Shoafs, an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast. But the question remained: Were they Dr. Jekyll, or were they Mr. Hyde?

jtomlin@hpenews.com | 336-888-3579

EDITOR’S NOTE: Part two of “The Horrible Tortures” will be published in Tuesday’s High Point Enterprise.