Capture of John Murrell, Land Pirate

Near this spot, in the winter of eighteen thirty-four, lawmen ran down one of the most notorious criminals of the old Southwest, John Murrell, the so called Great Western Land Pirate. Murrell prowled the Natchez Trace and the rivers, and he made his fortune in the cruelest trade of the era, stealing enslaved people, selling them, then stealing them back to sell again. By his own boast he had taken more than a hundred.

A young man named Virgil Stewart broke the gang from the inside, riding with Murrell for the better part of a year while quietly gathering evidence. Stewart's testimony helped bring Murrell down here near Florence and put him on trial. Convicted of slave stealing, Murrell was sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the Tennessee State Penitentiary, where he served out his time before his death in eighteen forty-four.