Historic Knoxville News #13: The Hanging of Mary, a circus elephant

This podcast episode tells the strange and sad story of how an elephant came to be executed in Erwin, TN in 1916 for killing her handler. The reading is an abridgment of an article entitled “The hanging of Mary, a circus elephant,” by Thomas Burton published in Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, volume 37, number 1, March 1971. The full article is available at the McClung Collection.

Take a look at The day they hung the elephant by Charles Edwin Price, and at this version on RootsWeb.

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Knox County Public Library Podcasts by Knox County Public Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. © 2009 Some Rights Reserved.