"Ann of the Ku Klux Klan" - Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), 29 December 1940

 

"Ann of the Ku Klux Klan" Held the Secret of the Yanceyville Incident Even to Death [photograph not associated with this newspaper article]

By Elizabeth L. Farmer

When several years ago, the magazine section of a newspaper carried these headlines: "Danville Man, 91, May Be Last Survivor of Reconstruction Epic," an aged lady of Halifax County, living peacefully at her countryside home, knew that he was not the last survivor, but kept her story -- a story in which she was the real "Ann of the Ku Klux Klan," as she was once called.

Just 15 days before November 1, which would have been her 100th birthday, Mrs. Ann Lea Graves of Brandon-On-Dan, went quietly into her last sleep. She had outlived the "Danville Man, 91" who was her own brother, Captain John G. Lea, but she had no desire to share in the glamor which surrounded him as organizer and leader of the Klan.

It was true that she had made the hooded white robes that covered the forms of the Klansmen on a certain dark night, when oaths were sealed with a fiery cross, burning late before a morning when tragedy walked the streets of Yanceyville and demanded the life of John Walter Stephens, viewed a public enemy and so-called spy in the service of Governor Holden. As a close companion of her brothers, who were members of the Klan, Ann Lea shared the secrets unrevealed to others and is said to have known who killed Stephens when all others were guessing. Whatever she knew was guarded closely for three-quarters of a century.

Only Girl in Family of Nine

Mrs. Graves, who was 20 years old when the War Between the States began, grew to womanhood at Leahurst, the family estate near Leasburg in Caswell County, N. C. She was the only girl in a family of eight boys, four of whom were in the Confederate Army, two having the rank of captain. They were Captain John G. Lea, Captain Thomas Lea, Dr. Calvin Lea and Sid, Nat, Billie and George Lea, four of the boys having been too young to enlist in the Confederate service.

Shortly after the war ended Ann Lea married Captain William Griffin Graves, an officer in the Confederate Army who died a few years ago in his ninety-second year. When Caswell County was declared by Governor Holden to be in a state of insurrection, after that memorable date, May 21, 1897, 100 Democrats were arrested and imprisoned for a week in Yanceyville courthouse and finally removed to Raleigh for trial. Among these were he husband and brother, Captain Graves and Captain John Lea. Ann Lea Graves, then a young mother with babies, was left at Leahurst without protection save that of two faithful servants, Jeff McGhee and his wife, Liney. The two are said to have slept at night outside the young mother's door with an ax beside them. With that same ax Jeff quelled an uprising of the Negroes about to make a raid on the smokehouse. But Jeff brandishing aloft his ax, left no uncertainty of his threat to "kill the fust nigger to put his foot on dat do' step."

At Brandon live two daughters of Mrs. Graves, Mrs. Irene G. Brandon, owner of the estate, and Miss Mamie Graves. Other children are Mrs. Bettie Lee Powell of Blanch, Mrs. James A. Seegar of Danville, Felix Graves of Mebane and Mrs. George A. Clarke of Vicar's Hill, Lymington, England. Another daughter, Nannie, died in girlhood and a son, Pinkney, was drowned in the waters of the Dan when crossing the river in a boat at Brandon-on-Dan.

In her late nineties, Mrs. Graves, still retaining the lines of early beauty, was keenly alive to all life about her. She played the piano and sang old Southern songs that many a ballad lover would be eager to know. Even to the end of her life she would claim no rendezvous with death and her last spoken words were: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of life. It was life, she said, and not death."

Grandsons in England

Gallantly is that spirit shown in the lives of three grandsons in England: William Graves Clarke, oldest instructor in the Royal Flying Corps; Thomas Graves Clarke, on a destroyer, and George Lea Clarke, a graduate of Cambridge with highest honors, speaking nine languages, and employed abroad in the secret intelligence diplomatic service.

Mrs. Graves was the oldest citizen of Halifax County, the last alumnae of the old Greensboro Female College, now North Carolina College for Women, and the last intimate associate of that band of men in old Yanceyville organized for a desperate need, in times when men seemed to have lost all reason, and protection for the helpless had to be found at any cost.

Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), 29 December 1940.