They don’t make fighters like John Denton any more. As a rough and tumble battler, he was the fightin’est man who ever threw a punch in these parts. He was a giant of man, strong as an ox and tough as a hickory. He stood six-feet-five and a half, with hands like hams and arms that could wrestle a bull.
A Confederate veteran who had survived the Battle of Bull Run and the Siege of Vicksburg, he came out of Tennessee a hundred and fifty years ago to carve himself a homestead out of the wilderness over on Little Santeetlah Creek.
They say, “He wasn’t a fellow who went looking for trouble but he wasn’t one for running away from it, either. He would fight you fair with his bare fists, but if you ganged up on him he used whatever he could lay his hands on. He was an expert when it came to throwing rocks. He never used a rifle to kill a wild turkey or a pheasant. He used rocks. And he never missed.”
The biggest fight that ever happened here around 1890, when Big John Denton was more than 60 years old. Apparently he licked some twenty men. It started in George Walker’s general store, which stood on the present site of the courthouse square. Before it was over it had moved out onto the store porch and then into the street.
At the time, one of the principal sources of revenue to run Graham County was a poll tax of two dollars payable by all adult male citizens. The story goes, that particular morning, old man Denton had moseyed into George Walker’s store and was leaning up against the counter talking to a bunch of fellows when the sheriff walked in.
The sheriff was name Bob McElroy. He stepped up to old man Denton and demanded in a loud voice that he pay his poll tax. Denton said he had already paid it and that he had a receipt for it at his home. McElroy called him a liar. Old John made a swing and knocked McElroy to the floor with one blow of his right fist.
Old man Denton wore a long beard and he had long hair. He kept it braided in pig tails that came down over his shoulders.
McElroy came up off the floor and in his hand was a Bowie knife. He made a swoop with it and slashed off old man Denton’s beard just below his chin. Old man Denton fumbled behind him for something on the counter to hit McElroy with. He got hold of a cast iron scale weight that was filled with lead in the center. He hit McElroy in the chest with and knocked him out cold.
Some of the other fellows in the store, friends of McElroy’s took up the fight. A couple of them – short, heavy, stout fellows – drew their knives. These fellows came at old man Denton with their knives; they charged him from opposite directions. The old man saw them coming and he stepped right between them, and he grabbed this one by the back of the neck and that one by the back of the neck. He slammed their heads together so hard that he knocked both of them senseless. The knives fell out of their hands.
Others came at the old man and the fight spilled out onto the store’s porch. At one end of the porch was a stack of oak firewood used to heat the store’s potbellied stove. Old man Denton grabbed stick after stick, busting heads like a mad man.
Loud yells for help emptied the old wooden courthouse just across the square and men came running, either to join in the fray or watch John Denton battle, two, three or four men at a time. The courthouse square was unpaved at the time and large number of rocks weighing three or four pounds each were plentiful.
By now, old man Denton had run out of firewood and the fighting had moved into the square. He began picking up rocks and throwing them. Denton threw a rock a John G. Tatham, missing his head by a hair. The rock hit the front of the store with such force that it busted the weather boarding and bounced into the back of old Captain Nathan Green Phillips just where his galluses crossed.
Phillips had been in the crowd of milling men fighting John Denton, shouting “Peace men! Peace men!” and waving his arms in an effort to stop the fighting which was then raging over the prostrate and bloodied heads of several men on the ground. Phillips, who was the justice of the peace, fell to the ground with a major injury to his back. He was unable to rise and had to crawl home on his hands and knees. He was laid up in the bed for weeks.
Old man Denton was still on his feet. And except for the loss of most of his beard he seemed none the worse for the struggle. There is no record of anybody ever bringing charges against him.
For years afterwards, the citizens of Robbinsville and vicinity had a healthy respect for old man John Denton. No Graham County official was ever known to again to try to collect poll tax twice from him.
The old man died in 1913 at the age of 73. They buried him in the Denton cemetery on Little Snowbird beside his wife who was Albertine Williams, a cousin of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.
They lost the mold when they made John Denton….he was quite a man.