In the late 19th century, the turpentine camps of North Florida were rugged, isolated places, carved out of the vast pine forests. Men toiled in the heat, extracting resin from the trees in a demanding and often dangerous industry. It was near one such camp in Fort White, a small town in Columbia County, that the life of a man named Sessom Calhoun came to a violent and sudden end on Saturday, March 25, 1893.
On that day, Mr.
Calhoun, a male whose age was not recorded, was with two other men, John Bell and J. W. Holliday. An encounter with a turpentine worker named Thomas J. Hampton, known as T. J., turned deadly. Hampton, a drifter with a hidden past, opened fire on the three men. Sessom Calhoun and John Bell were shot and killed in the attack. Holliday was wounded but managed to survive the brutal assault, becoming the sole witness to the twin murders.
The shooting immediately triggered a response from local law enforcement. Based on the account of the survivor, suspicion quickly fell upon T. J. Hampton. He was arrested and charged with the murders of Calhoun and Bell. However, before he could be brought to full justice, Hampton managed to escape from custody, vanishing and leaving the community with a sense of unease and unresolved grief. For years, his whereabouts remained a mystery, and the case of the turpentine camp murders grew cold.
The trail did not stay cold forever. In 1901, eight years after the killings, law enforcement located and recaptured Hampton. He was brought back to Columbia County to finally stand trial for the murders of Sessom Calhoun and John Bell. The court proceedings resulted in a conviction on two counts of first-degree murder, and Hampton was sentenced to death by hanging. Given the racial tensions of the Jim Crow South, and the fact that Hampton was an African American man convicted of killing two white men, there were fears of mob violence. To prevent a lynching, Florida Governor William Sherman Jennings took the step of assigning state troopers to protect Hampton until his sentence could be carried out.
On December 2, 1901, Governor Jennings signed the official death warrant. Four days later, on December 6, 1901, Thomas J. Hampton was taken to the gallows in the city of Lake City. In his final moments, while calmly smoking a cigarette, he made a startling confession. He admitted not only to the murders of Sessom Calhoun and John Bell but also to three other killings committed years earlier.
Hampton revealed that his violent path began in 1887 when he murdered a train conductor in Lexington County, South Carolina. After that, he drifted to Georgia, where he claimed to have killed two other people, though he provided no details about their identities. This last-minute confession unmasked him as a serial killer, responsible for at least five deaths between 1887 and 1893. Following his statement, T. J. Hampton was executed, closing the final chapter on his violent spree and bringing a measure of justice for the families of Sessom Calhoun and John Bell.
