The Story of Fannie Echols

Information for this poem gleaned from the National Park Service web site. Original story by Juliet Galonska. Photo of Judge Parkers Courthouse also taken from the site available here: https://www.nps.gov/fosm/learn/historyculture/first-woman-sentenced-to-hang.htm

The Story of Fannie Echols

Sometime around the year eighteen sixty

A little baby girl was born

Her parents named the child Fannie

A life too soon they’d mourn

While growing up to be an adult

Got involved with a man John Williams

An inevitable violent life the result

Most locals viewed him as a villain

On an occasion in the year eighteen eighty four

Fussing and fighting as they often did

A gun left by a friend from before

Was just lying there on the bed

Neighbors heard the gun fired

She screamed as they all heard her

Bleeding on the floor, John’s life expired

Fannie was arrested for murder

In her testimony to the jury

Saying John had threatened to kill her

She didn’t shoot in all her fury

In self defense she pulled the trigger

The jury was having none of that

As they deliberated her fate

“Guilty”

They said in the box where they sat

The judge to decide her punishment state

It’s capital punishment for capital deeds

For murder it’s hanged with a hangman’s noose

The law of the land in this book is agreed

Taken away in cuffs, not again to be loose

Fannie was the first woman sentenced

To hang in fabled Judge Parkers court

But could that be changed with honest repentance?

An effort was mounted in and out of the Fort

A petition signed with three thousand names

Begging the judge, his decision disputed

To the president it went to change the game

President Arthur declared her sentence commuted

Fannie still spent her life behind Federal bars

At the Detroit House of Corrections

She didn’t hang, her life was sparred

Forced to spend it in introspection

One hundred sixty sentenced by Parker

To hang by the neck until dead

Seventy nine did, on their graves a marker

Eighty one others died in prison instead