Herbert “Hub” Haynes, 52, male, was the night policeman in Clayton, Delaware, when a sweltering August night turned violent at the railroad siding. Shortly after midnight on August 9, 1900, railroad workers reported several men riding a southbound freight in a boxcar. Haynes and other lawmen converged on the train near the Clayton station and surrounded the car. In the crush of the arrest, a struggle broke out; the assailant—described at the time as a tramp and a large man—wrenched Haynes’s service pistol from his belt, pressed it to his abdomen, and fired. Gravely wounded, Haynes was carried home, where physicians labored over him as the town kept vigil. He succumbed to his injuries at about 5:30 a.m. the following morning, August 10, 1900.
The hours between the shooting and his death were fevered ones. Local doctors—Cobb and Ickes of Clayton, with T. C. Moore of Smyrna—were summoned to his bedside, while railroad detectives Ralph Hutchins, J. D. Wright, and George Reed swept the line in search of the gunman. Newspapers reported that Haynes had been struck through the liver and “suffered terribly for 24 hours” before he died. The funeral that followed drew one of the largest crowds the area had seen, a measure of the esteem in which the community held the night watchman, who left behind his wife and three young daughters.
Despite an immediate manhunt across the Delmarva Peninsula and alerts sent down the rail line, no arrest ever materialized. Contemporary accounts and later memorials alike agree that the killer slipped away into the night and was never identified or captured.
