Several British soldiers were knocking at the door. There were five or six of them, they were hungry and demanding food. The Revolutionary War had finally come to Elbert County, Georgia, but little did the Red Coats know that they were knocking on the door of Nancy Hart, the one local Native American tribes had started calling “Wahatche“, or “War Woman.”
Their demands were met with a smile and hospitality. A turkey was prepared, and the men had several rounds of drinks, all while dropping their guards and piling their weapons against the wall of the small frontier cottage.
While they were drinking, Hart managed to push most of their weapons outside through a hole in the wall of the cabin. Then she jumped into action, brandishing a rifle and demanding their surrender. One of the Brits didn’t take her threats seriously and lunged at her.
Someone should have told him who he was messing with.
Nancy Ann Morgan Hart, War Woman, shot him dead.
She held the others captive until her husband and a few neighbors arrived. Nancy, a devout Patriot of the United States cause, wanted them hanged from a nearby tree.
It sounds unbelievable until you consider that in 1912 construction crews working on the Elberton and Eastern Railroad in the area found evidence that validated the legend.
The workers found skeletons buried neatly in a row. A few of the skeletons’ necks were broken, which suggested they had been hanged. They were determined to have been buried for at least 100 years.
Born around 1735, Nancy was tall (nearly 6ft tall), gangly, had scars from a bout with small pox in her youth, and by some accounts, crosseyed. But she was a fierce frontier woman, who was an impressive shot with a rifle acting as a sniper, cutting down British soldiers as they crossed the Broad River.
Another legend says she dressed as a British soldier to enter military camps and steal valuable information.
Still another story has her discovering a spy peering through a crack in their cabin and splashing boiling water in the intruder’s eyes, leaving him in severe pain before handing him over to the local militia.
George Rockingham Gilmer, the two-time governor of Georgia, knew her personally and claimed that later in life she became a devout Methodist, saying:
“She heard how the wicked might work out their salvation; became a shouting Christian, fought the devil as manfully as she fought the Tories.”
-George Rockingham Gilmer, former two-time governor of Georgia, on Nancy Hart
She was a larger-than-life figure in the history of the state of Georgia, with her name adorning rivers, dams, highways, a county, and a state park.
During the Civil War, a group of women in the town of LaGrange, Georgia, organized an all-female militia and dubbed themselves “The Nancy Harts” in her memory, defending their town while the men were called away to battle.
Years later, after her husband Benjamin Hart died, she moved with her son and his family to Henderson County, Kentucky, where she lived the rest of her days before dying in 1830 at the hardened age of 95.
Check out other stories from history by clicking here.
