Book review: In "Dromgoole, Twice-Murdered," E.T. Malone unearths the true story behind a legendary Chapel Hill duel.
A little ways east of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill campus, not far from St. Thomas More Catholic Church, is a ridge called Piney Prospect.
The ridge offers a handsome overlook -- reputed to be the beach of a Triassic-era ocean -- and a number of rocky outcrops, one of which is said to be perpetually stained with blood.
This is the site of one of North Carolina's most persistent legends: Peter Dromgoole, a wild and/or love-stricken Chapel Hill student who fought a duel on the site and was never seen again.
The legend was the focus of the Order of Gimghoul, a secret student society rumored to be Chapel Hill's equivalent of Skull and Bones. Nearby stands the Gimghouls' Gothic stone lodge, known as Gimghoul Castle.
Generations of college students have been passing along the legend. (Piney Prospect was, for decades, one of Chapel Hill's foremost dating destinations.) Now, independent scholar E.T. Malone Jr. tries to dig up the truth in "Dromgoole, Twice-Murdered."
The meandering volume might take as its theme the old line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": When legend becomes fact, print the legend. And, while it's primarily aimed at a Chapel Hill audience, a surprising number of threads to this yarn lead back to Wilmington.
Readers with long memories might recall that Malone wrote the "Literary Lantern" column which appeared in this newspaper in the 1980s. He co-wrote "Literary North Carolina" with the late Richard Walser and, among other enterprises, compiled a literary map of the Tar Heel state, noting the hometowns of famous writers.
Combing the available archives and searching collections of family letters in three states, Malone was finally able to pin down the facts.
There really was a Peter Dromgoole, the son of a Virginia planter with strong North Carolina ties. Ironically, Malone found, he was never a UNC student; arriving on campus in January 1833, Dromgoole flunked the entrance exam (heavy, in those days, in Latin and Greek).
He was allowed to stay around as an "irregular" student, working with a tutor toward trying the exam again. During the spring of 1833, however, he apparently fell victim to the freshman curses of card-playing and wild companions.
A Chapel Hill professor, William Hooper (grandson of the former Wilmington lawyer who signed the Declaration of Independence) wrote a letter to Dromgoole's father reporting his bad behavior, which apparently led to a breach. So, in April 1833, Peter Dromgoole left town without a trace.
There was, incidentally, no duel. Legend apparently confused poor Peter with his uncle George Dromgoole, a Virginia congressman who fought a notorious political duel in 1837.
So, what happened to Peter? Malone demonstrates, convincingly, that the young man made his way to Fort Johnston, in what is now Southport, and enlisted in the Army under the assumed name "John Williams." (This was common at the time, Malone notes: Edgar Allan Poe did much the same thing.) He apparently borrowed the name "Williams" from his old Chapel Hill roommate.
Dromgoole/Williams apparently thrived under military discipline; he was promoted to first sergeant before his 21st birthday. Then in 1835, during the Second Seminole War, his company was transferred to St. Augustine, Fla. There, while on guard duty, Sgt. Williams was fatally shot one night by a drunken soldier, He was buried, as "John Williams," in what is now the St. Augustine national cemetery.
People never let facts get in the way of a good story, of course, so Malone has a time tracing how the Dromgoole legend spread, and mutated.
Details are all over the place. The duel took place at midday, or sometimes at midnight; the weapons were pistols or occasionally swords. In early versions, Dromgoole dies and is buried on the site (sometimes under the "Dromgoole Rock"). After around 1900 or so, though, Dromgoole kills his opponent, survives and rides away -- although his ghost occasionally returns.
New characters are added: A sweetheart, sometimes named "Miss Fannie," who either dies of a broken heart (and is buried, guess where), or who visits the duel site every year or every day. Sometimes, there's a rival for Miss Fannie's hand.
The story has inspired a remarkable amount of regional fiction, including the 1977 campus novel, "The Sea-Gift" by Edwin Riley Fuller, set at Chapel Hill. The hero of "Sea-Gift," by the way, is a boy from Wilmington; another character, a Wilmington belle, winds up in a New York City brothel and commits suicide.
There are other ties, too. One of the founders of the Gimghouls, in 1889, was Robert Worth Bingham, a friend of Wilmington student William Rand Kenan Jr., another early Gimghoul. Years later, Bingham would marry Kenan's sister, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, who would die just eight months after their wedding, leaving Bingham a controversial fortune.
"Dromgoole, Twice-Murdered" is a book for antiquarians. Readers must wade through chapters of Dromgoole genealogy and Chapel Hill lore before getting to the meat of the story. Malone's digressions, however, are often fascinating.
For example, Chapel Hill alumnus Thomas Wolfe, in his posthumous book "The Hills Beyond," wrote about a private school in Asheville. Its name (and I am not making this up): Hogwarts.
Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.