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BRISTOL, Tenn. – A vest with a riddled hole in its mid-section hung proudly in the Harr Community home where Dowd Rutherford was born and raised.
“It fascinated us,” Rutherford said of the clothes his grandfather wore when he was shot and killed 101 years ago Christmas Day.
Rutherford’s grandfather, Special Deputy Lee Eldreth, was chasing a suspect on Dec. 25, 1907, when he was mortally wounded by a shotgun blast.
Now, Eldreth is one of nine officers the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office hopes to honor with its new Fallen Officers Memorial, which will be unveiled at 2 p.m. Friday in front of its headquarters on the Blountville Bypass.
The ceremony and a desire by deputies to include family members of all nine fallen officers has brought new attention to something Rutherford and his sister, Ruth Hall, said was never really a big deal in their family. The ceremony also has highlighted a spelling error in their grandfather’s name – one that’s been repeated in newspapers across the country for the past 100 years, and now will be set in stone forever in the memorial.
Every article describing the shooting, including the one that appeared in the Bristol Herald Courier the very next day, spelled Eldreth’s name as “Eldridge.” And that, unfortunately, is the name on the memorial.
“Everybody’s just so fascinated [about this story] because it’s just been so much time,” Hall said Friday afternoon as she sat next to a portrait of her grandfather.
Rutherford said his grandfather ran a small general store in east Sullivan County’s Harr Community at the turn of the century. Eldreth sold groceries, knick-knacks and also ran a post office out of the store, Rutherford said.
Then, on Dec. 25, 1907, Luther Wallace robbed the post office and was last seen heading toward the Virginia-Tennessee state line. Wallace “was under the influence of liquor” at the time of his crime, according to a Dec. 26, 1907, article in the Bristol Herald Courier.
Eldreth joined the Sheriff’s Office that morning, after Deputy Frank White asked him to help track down their suspect. They found Wallace at his home and ended up in a standoff, Rutherford said, remembering the stories he was told as a child.
Wallace was sitting on his front porch and pointed a shotgun at Eldreth and White, Rutherford said. A fence separated the two deputies from their target.
“[Wallace] told them that if they crossed that fence he’d kill them,” Rutherford said, describing the standoff. “Grandad just hand-sprung over it.”
Wallace fired his gun at Eldreth and hit him square in the abdomen, leaving a fist-sized hole just above the vest’s middle button.
Eldreth died from his wounds three hours later.
Hall said her mother, Elizabeth Rutherford, was less than 2 years old when all of this happened. Outside of keeping the jacket, Hall said, her mother never really talked about what happened to her father.
“They never made a big deal about it at all,” she said. Rutherford said he used to have the rest of the clothes Eldreth wore the day he was shot. But he couldn’t find them when interviewed Friday. Like the clothes, most other details of Eldreth’s story have faded into obscurity.
While Hall still has a glass pitcher her grandfather sold at his store, she said the actual building was torn down in the 1970s after it was converted into a church.
Even Eldreth’s grave had to be moved in the 1930s because the plot of land was flooded when the Tennessee Valley Authority built South Holston Lake.
That’s why Rutherford and Hall were caught off guard Wednesday, when the Sheriff’s Office said it was looking for relatives of fallen officers. By the end of the day, Sheriff’s Capt. Keith Elton said he had found relatives of all nine officers except for Eldreth, whose lineage at the time remained a mystery.
“When they said they couldn’t find any of [Eldreth’s] descendants, it was almost funny,” Hall said Friday. Margaret Rutherford, Hall said, was one of four children and had nine kids of her own.
Elton later learned exactly why his search was fruitless: That misspelled name had him searching for the wrong person. Elton said he learned of the dilemma when one of Eldreth’s relatives called the Sheriff’s Office to answer his plea for help.
“It kind of floored me there at first,” Elton said, adding that the name “Special Deputy Lee Eldridge” is the one engraved in the memorial’s stone base.
But after talking to Eldreth’s descendants, Elton said he’s not too worried – because he learned eight out of 10 people had called him Lee Eldridge anyway.
“Everybody called him ‘Eldridge’ ” said Rutherford, who pronounces Eldreth as if it was spelled Eldridge. “[Our first cousin] said everybody’s called us that anyway.”
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