Ghosts Walk in Hazel Green

By Hugh Walker

The Village of Hazel Green, Alabama, is only four miles from the Tennessee line. A mile to the east of this village, on a good road, is the famous--or infamous--Jeffries house. Here lived Elizabeth Dale, the beautiful daughter of Adam Dale, first settler of DeKalb County, Tennessee, and founder of the town of Liberty.

Elizabeth Dale was eventually known as Mrs. Gibbons-Flanigan-Jeffries-High-Brown-Routt. The official Alabama Guide Book says she was "a fascinating lady of many marriages."

The huge old frame house stands on an Indian mound overlooking flat cotton fields, its back turned to one road and its side to another. It stands on the site of a log cabin built by Alexander Jeffries, an early settler.

Jeffries married the already twice-married Elizabeth Dale, whose first two husbands died mysteriously. (All that is known of Elizabeth is that she liked horses and expensive clothes.) Jeffries passed on very shortly; the cause of his death was unknown. Elizabeth soon married Mr. High, but again death made her a widow.

Elizabeth's fifth husband was Absolam Brown, who built the big house, He, too, soon died of unknown causes and was quickly buried by candlelight in the family cemetery.

Gossip flew round and round about Elizabeth, but that did not deter her next suitor, Willis Routt. He married her in 1858 and soon followed her earlier husbands to the cemetery.

Elizabeth then converted her home into a tavern for mule drovers. It was located on the old road to Nashville. She became involved in a quarrel with a neighbor, Abner Tate, and persuaded her next suitor, D.H. Bingham, to charge Tate with murder.

Tate published a defense in which he alleged that Mrs. Routt's bridal chamber was "a charnal house" and that "she was a woman around whose marriage couch six grinning skeletons were already hung."

Mrs. Tate retaliated with a suit for $50,000, charging defamation of character. Public opinion rendered the only decision in the case, and Mrs. Routt sold her house and left the state.

Old Adam Dale, who had settled in Dekalb County in 1797, died in Hazel Green in 1851, and presumably he had been living in his daughter's house. The Alabama Guide Book says he is buried in the family plot, but Hale's reliable history of DeKalb County says surviving children moved his body to Columbia, Tennessee, after his wife's death, perhaps leaving his marker at Hazel Green.

Whatever happened on the old mound where Indian fires once burned, Elizabeth Dale made a reputation that survives today. Residents say there are stories that seven men's hats, all belonging to departed husbands, hang in the closet. Where did that seventh hat come from? They don't say.

Transcribed April 10, 2002 by John W. Childress for Pea Ridge Relations from Hugh Walker’s Tennessee Tales, 1970, Aurora Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee.