Taken by a Tiger: Benjamin Franklin Addison (ca. 1847–1906)
At the bottom of a hill, in the African American section of Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery, stands an ornate metal monument to B. F. Addison. The inscription reads:
Killed By A Desperado
Nov 13, 1906
Aged 56 Years
Gone But Not Forgotten
November 13, 1906 was indeed a tragic day in Asheville history. A stranger in town - some thought to be named Will Harris and believed to be a notorious outlaw from Charlotte, NC - killed five people on a rampage through the downtown near Pack Square. The dead included three citizens and two police officers. Thomas Wolfe revisited the incident in his short story “The Child by Tiger.” The story first appeared in a September 1937 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Wolfe puts racism in Asheville on display and reveals his own loss of childhood innocence in the early discovery of man’s inhumanity to man. Wolfe’s fictional account differs only slightly from the actual event.
Thomas Wolfe recalled “a dingy little grocery store” which was across the street from the apartment house where the shooting began. He knew the neighborhood well. This is where, at age fourteen, he delivered newspapers. It was Ben Addison who operated the grocery store in 1906. On Nov. 14, 1906, the morning after the shootings, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported,
“…the second of Harris’s victims, kept a little grocery store at 53 Eagle Street, for his colored neighbors. Across the street was the woodyard which he operated. He was known as a worthy, respectable man, living in a peaceable manner. He was shot just inside the grocery door.”
Available records reveal little about Benjamin Franklin Addison’s early life or what lead him to be on Eagle Street in Asheville’s “East End.” The street was part of the town’s oldest African American neighborhood described on a map as “Hell’s Half Acre.” Our first clues about Ben’s life came in a Civil War service record. Addison enlisted in the US Army on February 6th, 1865 at Camp Casey in Northern, Virginia for three years. Camp Casey had been organized late in the war as a place where all African American recruits were sent to be trained to fight the Confederacy. Addison signed the enlistment agreement with an “X”. His age was stated as 18, his place of birth as Fredericksburg, VA. The Union Army had taken Fredericksburg in the Summer of 1862. Addison was assigned to Company “A” of the 34th US Colored Infantry. He qualified for a $100 dollar recruitment bounty. After brief training, he joined his unit at Jacksonville, FL where records indicate he spent April through June sick in the camp hospital. He mustered out of service at Jacksonville with the regiment on February 28, 1866. Almost 25 years later he appears near Boston in Middlesex County, Massachusetts on the 1890 Veteran’s Schedule.
In May 1892, B. F. Addison filed for a military pension as an invalid in South Carolina. Four months later he appears in Asheville on a Buncombe County marriage certificate. It documents his marriage at age 45 to Catherine T. Haywood, age 40, on September 7, 1892. The record of the marriage lists Addison from Boston, MA and Haywood from Charleston, SC. His recorded age agrees with his military enlistment. His new wife Catherine is listed in the 1896 Asheville city directory operating a restaurant at 48 N. Main Street. An April 1897 newspaper records Ben Addison was fined twenty dollars in Asheville’s police court for dumping a slop jar out a second-story window from his residence above the restaurant at 48 N. Main Street. The restaurant is described as one that he and his wife conducted called the old Farmer’s Restaurant. Ben and Catherine were part of several property transactions in the city between 1896 and 1900. They purchased parcels on Butterick Street, Davidson Street, and Valley Street, all in Asheville’s East End. Affirming the fact that it was difficult for Blacks to operate a business in Asheville, their restaurant on Main Street was ransacked and closed by the city sanitation department in 1897. Catherine Addison was subsequently awarded fifty dollars for the damages done by the Board of Health sanitation inspectors. They reopened the restaurant on Eagle Street later in 1898. By the 1899 city directory, the couple’s residence had changed to 38 Davidson Street and Ben was also operating a restaurant on Victoria Street just south of the city limits. In 1900, a Criminal Court found Ben guilty of “retailing” in three cases, and judgment suspended on payment of costs. This likely involved selling beer or liquor at his restaurant without a license. In 1900, Catherine was arrested for larceny and receiving stolen goods, but not convicted due to lack of evidence.
Active in the community, B. F. Addison was a member of the Elks Lodge. In 1896 he is listed as an incorporator of the Young Men’s Unity Sporting Social Club. A tribute to his persistence as a businessman, an October 1903 newspaper noted that B. F. Addison, proprietor of a restaurant and store at the corner of Eagle and Davidson Streets, had recently purchased the property and four adjacent houses. The following year, in August 1904, he was said to be erecting a two-story frame building on the corner and was slated to open his new grocery store in a few days. In 1906 he was granted a building permit for a $350 project at 73 Valley Street. It was likely a project that he would not see completed. After his murder in November 1906, the funeral was held at the Mount Zion Baptist Church on Eagle Street. The newspaper noted it was within one hundred yards of the doorway where he had lost his life. The minister noted that Benjamin Addison had “left his family with a small house and an established business as the result of industry and thrift and of the respect in which he was held by both races.” The monument at Ben’s grave incorrectly displayed his age by three years. Perhaps even those closest to him knew little about his early life. The monument, made from zinc, was inexpensively manufactured by the Monumental Bronze Company in Connecticut, considered more affordable than a granite or marble monument.
