Dale Neal

dneal@citizen-times.com

MARSHALL - Wedged hard between high rock and swift water, the small town of Marshall is “a mile long, sky high and hell deep," as locals like to say. Just a block away from the county courthouse, right by the railroad tracks and the French Broad River, a nondescript white-washed brick building has seen its share of stories.

Built in 1905, Madison’s jail housed prisoners until it was closed as the state's oldest jail in 2012. A flood gauge on one side rises two stories tall, testament to the floods that have washed through town in the past century.

Hoping to increase county coffers, the Madison County Commissioners put the historic property up for sale this spring. After a fierce bidding war between three investment groups, WRS Holding has the highest offer at $99,800. The commissioners must approve the final sale.

The river may rise, the building may change hands, but the history can’t be washed away.

Elymus Yates Ponder, better known to the county as “E.Y.,” kept his office here, serving for a total of 32 years as the high sheriff of Madison County and a charter member of the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association.

Jackie Ball, 77, who worked with Ponder as a county magistrate, and Dennie Goforth, 65, a former deputy and retired Marshall police chief, sat down recently at Ball’s Sandy Bottom Trail Rides off Little Pine Road. Waving a fly swatter on a hot summer day, chugging bottles of water, they reminisced about the old days when E.Y. was on the job.

“I knew E.Y. Ponder all my life,” said Ball, who served as magistrate from 1970-75. “Everybody in Madison County knew and respected E.Y.”

Ponder rarely carried a gun and never cared for the military khaki most lawmen wear on duty. A small man with a shock of white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he favored a coat and tie for work, looking more like a banker than a lawman. And he loved cigars, Ball remembered.

He had served 10 years on the county school board before he decided to run as a Democrat for sheriff, an office held almost exclusively by Republicans. "I thought I'd run and lose and that would be the end of it," he said in a 1985 interview with the Citizen-Times.

Instead, Ponder squeaked into office by 31 votes in 1950. He served as only the second Democrat to hold the Madison office until defeated by Republican Roy Roberts in 1964. He won re-election in 1970 and held the badge until his defeat by Dedrick Brown, a former deputy and Republican, in 1986.

Politics are hard fought in Madison County, but people knew where everybody stood, whether Democrat or Republican, Ball said. "There are good people here."

As the only Democratic magistrate, Ball was Ponder’s favorite. The sheriff would walk across Bailey Branch Road from the jail to the magistrate’s office, now the Good Stuffs building. Ball would ride out with the sheriff to crime scenes and emergency calls.

“If he needed a search warrant, I had a pad of them in my pocket,” Ball said.

With roads winding some 75 miles from Max Patch southeast over to the Yancey County line, Madison was no small place to patrol with only five deputies on Ponder’s force.

“Back then, the crime wasn’t like it is now. There weren’t drugs, just alcohol, maybe some marijuana,” Goforth recalled. "State troopers would bring in DWIs, but most of the inmates jailed overnight faced charged for petty larceny and breaking and entering."

Dinner at the jail

The jail was a gathering place as Ponder’s many friends dropped by, Ball said. “E.Y. was a genius at listening to people, and gathering information. Folks would come down just to shoot the bull with E.Y."

Maggie Riddle was the jailer, cook and dispatcher for the Sheriff’s Department. “She lived there, too,” Goforth said.

To supply Riddle’s kitchen, Ponder would shop for canned goods over in Tennessee at a place called the “Dent & Bent,” Ball said. And he would buy up fresh produce from around the county’s farmers. Ball himself would drop off 30 bushels or so of potatoes from his garden.

The office held a big dining room table, 10 feet long. When Riddle was ready, Ponder would invite his visitors to stay for dinner. “Come on boys, let’s eat.”

And he’d continue the conversation with visiting judges and attorneys and others over soup beans and cornbread, meatloaves and pork chops, fresh vegetables. “Good country cooking,” Goforth said.

But some inmates got tired of the fare. After eating fried kraut for breakfast, boiled cabbage for lunch and sauerkraut for supper, one inmate said he was sick of cabbage.

Goforth recalled only a couple of attempted escapes — boys who busted out the ceiling and went through the roof on occasion, tying bedsheets together to climb down the two-stories. No one got very far.

A way with people

Sometimes as the law, Ponder would be lenient. Ball and Goforth recalled one African-American man brought in from Hot Springs on a vagrancy charge.

“Son, if I were to let you go, would you catch the next train out of town?” Ponder asked.

“Sheriff, if you let me go, I’ll catch the train that just done gone.”

Goforth learned, “you didn’t have to arrest everybody. You could just go out and talk to them.”

When reports came in of a couple fighting again, the high sheriff drove out to their house. The wife wanted to take out commitment papers on her husband who could be violent. “He’s going to fight with you,” she warned the unarmed sheriff.

Ponder thought a moment, then told her to go sit in the car. He went in to talk with the husband and asked if he wanted to take out commitment papers on his wife.

“Let me get my hat. She’s needed those papers for a long time,” the husband said.

The sheriff drove them both down to Broughton Hospital.

“The husband was in for a surprise when the hospital staff kept him,” Ball said.

But Ponder put his foot down when it came to more serious crimes. When Jimmy Rios and William Bray, escapes from an Arkansas jail, shot and killed State Trooper Bobby Coggins on U.S. 209 in Spring Creek, Ponder and his men joined the three-day manhunt.

After their capture, some wanted to jail the accused killers in a more secure prison. Goforth remembers the old sheriff's fiery response. "Hell no," E.Y. said. "They did the crime in Madison County, they’ll do the time here.”

And so Ponder's jail held them until they were tried and convicted in Henderson County and sent away to Central Prison in Raleigh.

Chasing criminals and maintaining the peace gave Ponder a perspective on the persistence of human nature. "I always believed that man is about the same as in the Stone Age with the same habits. There are just more of us now," Ponder said in his 1985 interview.

Marshall moves on

After the old jail closed, the Madison County Sheriff's Office moved into more modern facilities off the U.S. 25 bypass, where most of the major businesses retreated to higher ground decades ago.

Marshall and much of Madison County have changed with the times, as well.

"There are more people moving in with more money,” said Goforth, who retired last year as police chief. That’s to the benefit of downtown Marshall. Once dusty and abandoned furniture showrooms and hardware stores have given way to popular businesses like Zuma Coffee and art galleries.

“If you told me Joel Friedman (of Zuma Coffee) was going to make a living selling coffee, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Goforth said.

There’s talk of turning the jail itself into a bed-and-breakfast, Goforth said, with tourists paying for beds where inmates once slept in locked cells.

After his stint as a magistrate, Ball became head of the Farm Bureau insurance office, but he kept in close contact with his old friend at the jail with its flood gauge on the side of the building.

Ball remembers the high water mark of the 1978 floods, which crested at 13.4 feet. A deputy drove Ball through backcountry, bypassing the flooded roadways close by the river, until they could see the jail across the bridge on Bailey Branch Road.

“And there was E.Y. up to his armpits in the doorway,” Ball said.

Ponder died at age of 91 in 2001, but his legacy still looms large across Madison County.

“We had some laughs, stories that just wouldn’t end. I wanted to record E.Y. stories, write them down or use a tape recorder, but he never would let me,” Ball said.

“Come on back, and we’ll tell you the stories you can’t print,” Ball laughed.

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