Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county’s most violent decade—a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents.
llustrated with dozens of photographs, A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of the nation’s most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg’s first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county and the community becomes one of the South’s rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes.
At once a gripping true narrative and richly researched local history, A Carnival of Crime reveals how ambition, corruption, and rapid economic change shaped the region in unexpected ways. The result is a vivid portrait of a community coming of age—where prosperity and violence often advanced side by side, leaving behind stories that still echo more than a century later.
“Betsy Teter has written a fascinating, page-turning account of some of Spartanburg’s most notorious residents during an exceptionally violent and tumultuous decade. Who knew so many characters and scofflaws coexisted in the Upstate of South Carolina in the 1890s? Teter’s accounts of assorted wrongdoing gives great insight into turn-of-the-century Spartanburg, a boomtown that absorbed its fair share of bold and reckless operators. Her thorough research and talented storytelling make A Carnival of Crime a must-read for lovers of true crime and Southern history. These splendid tales of crime are grim, bizarre, heartbreaking and head-scratching—and always very interesting. A masterful account of a dark but exciting chapter in Spartanburg’s history.” —Jason Ryan, author of Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power
“In the 1890s, Spartanburg experienced explosive economic growth as railroads and textile mills transformed the agricultural county into a bustling industrial center. The resulting social and political change generated a collision between Old South notions of honor and New South ideas about middle class respectability. Those shifts plus the ready availability of firearms, sensational media accounts, and the racist rhetoric of Governor Ben Tillman fueled crime and mob violence. Through the lens of ten lurid crimes, Betsy Teter paints a fascinating picture of how rapid modernization altered one small Southern town.” —Melissa Walker, author of All We Knew Was to Farm
“The Old West wasn't the only part of America that was wild in the 1800s. The gripping stories in A Carnival of Crime remind us that times of great progress also can be times of great desperation, that anyone—bootleggers and booksellers, farm wives and mill owners—can find themselves on the wrong side of a gun; and that far too often, either end of a gun is the wrong end.” —Ed Southern, editor of The Devil's Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina
A native of Spartanburg, Betsy Wakefield Teter graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in history and began a journalism career that took her to four newspapers across the Carolinas. She served as business editor and Sunday columnist for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and later co-founded the Hub City Writers Project. In two decades as its executive director, she edited and published more than 80 books, including several important Spartanburg community histories. She is a recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts.