The Rise and Fall of Iley Tate

 

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During the Great Depression, there lived in Fayette County a mountain man named Iley Tate who ruled the hill country between Haydentown to the West Virginia line like a feudal lord. Tate, a father of 20, had amassed considerable wealth as a livestock trader, and, because of his influence and steel-cold demeanor, he had a number of local lawmen and politicians in his hip pocket. Like many powerful men in similiar positions, Iley Tate came to think of himself as untouchable; but this was an illusion that came to a shattering end in the fall of 1932.

From Backwoods Brute to Baron

Born in West Virginia in 1864, Iley Sanford Tate was the son of a soldier and grew up in the remote hills of Doddridge County learning the ways and customs of backwoods Appalachia. When he was a boy, Iley, along with his five siblings and his father, Jonathan, and his mother, Selina, moved north, just across the state line, and settled near Fairchance.

Iley Tate eventually bought a farm of his own near Haydentown and gradually accumulated considerable wealth through astute livestock deals. He also operated a country store, which, by virtue of lack of competition, added to his fortune.

"Iley Tate had the craziest looking house I ever saw," reminisced Uniontown newspaper reporter John 'Dad' Albright in 1955. "Every time his wife had a baby he added a room. He used all kinds of materials and colors, the result being that it looked more like a crazy quilt than a house." 

Tate allegedly took seven wives during his life, the last of whom, the former Nettie Belle Miller, he married when she was just 14 (some sources say 16) and he a man of 49. Rumor had it that his first wife, who died under suspicious circumstances, had been poisoned, but this was never proven. Local residents, as well as members of Tate's own large family, were reluctant to criticize the ornery old-timer, however. "Never draw a gun on Iley Tate unless you mean it," was an unwritten law around Georges Township, and this was an adage many of Tate's enemies learned the hard way. One such man was Russell Tasker.

In October of 1885, Tate, then a young man, found himself embroiled in a quarrel with the Taskers, an infamous backwoods family which terrorized Fayette and Somerset Counties as part of the band of bandits and horse thieves known as the "McClellandtown Gang." It seems the problem began when Tate's barbaric treatment of his wife caused her to flee from her home. She found shelter with the Taskers but eventually returned home. A few weeks later, when it was clear that Mrs. Tate was pregnant, Iley pinned the blame on one of the Tasker brothers, and this resulted in an ongoing feud.

One night, Russell and one of his brothers, Decatur Tasker, passed the Tate farm, eager to call Iley out for a fight. Russell hurled a rock through the window, and bragged to his brother, "I'll eat my breakfast in hell if I don't bring him out." Those turned out to be famous last words. Tate, roused from his slumber, appeared at the doorway with a rifle and dropped Tasker with a single shot to the heart. He fled to Westmoreland County, where he remained a fugitive until 1893, when he was captured by County Detective Campbell and Deputy Sheriff Allebaugh. He was tried for the murder in March, 1894, but acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

In 1899, Iley Tate married Mary Brownfield, and it wasn't long before he began a bitter feud with the Brownfield family-- a feud that would continue for 36 years. 

Mary's brother, Thomas, had a reputation for being just as dangerous as Iley; Thomas had served a prison term for killing "Bad Bud" Bradee in 1898 after shooting him in the belly with a revolver. After his release from the penitentiary, Thomas and Iley resumed their feud. In 1903, Tate was riding his horse, unarmed, when he was ambushed by Brownfield. Iley's horse was shot out from under him, and two bullets grazed his body. Iley raced home for his Winchester and went out looking for his brother-in-law, but couldn't find him. 

Several years and a few wives later, Iley Tate's four-year-old son, Henry, was shot and killed while Iley was cleaning his gun. Though Iley testified that the gun had gone off accidentally, the official investigation revealed that the child had been crying for days, much to his father's displeasure. Once again Tate was exonerated. "Pap was hard, everybody feared him," remarked another son, Samuel, after Iley's death in 1932.

"How does it come that no one ever tried to steal any of his goats and sheep?" asked one neighboring farmer. "They seemed pastured out here in the open, with no one to tend them, and the Tate home is seven and a half miles away! No one ever wanted to run away with Iley's stock... Everyone knew it meant sure death if they ever came in that old man's path."

Time evidently did not mellow the menace of Fayette County. Even in his advanced years Iley Tate never shied away from confrontation. Once, while operating his store, four armed bandits attempted a hold-up. When Tate refused to cooperate, one of the bandits fired a shot that gouged his scalp. Enraged, and slightly hindered by the blood streaming into his eyes, Tate grabbed his trusty rifle and and chased the four armed thugs into mountains, firing as he ran. He succeeded in wounding two of them. A short time later, in 1915, Iley suffered a fractured skull in a fistfight with yet another rival.

Though the doctor held little hope for his recovery, Iley pulled through and was soon back to his old ways, though, by this time, he had lost a little spring in his step. From that point forward, Iley fought most of his battles in the courtroom, either suing those who did him wrong or being sued for having done someone else wrong. He focused his efforts on buying and selling cows, sheep and goats, as well as operating his store, and, over time, he became one of the leading merchants of Georges Township. It was widely rumored that Tate had secretly buried over $50,000 over the course of his lifetime, and, after his death, hunting for the "Tate treasure" became a popular pastime in southern Fayette County.

The Disappearance of Iley Tate

In the early 1930s, Tate sold his Haydentown farm to lumber dealer Charles Chipps for a small profit and relocated to Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, just over the state line. On the Wednesday morning of September 14, 1932, Iley and two of his sons, 15-year-old Samuel and 19-year-old George, set out for Haydentown to secure three cows from Charles Chipps, which was the final part of the transaction. Along the way, Iley stopped to mend some fences at a sheep pen which he owned along the road locally known as the "Mud Pike." Samuel and George continued on, and when their father failed to arrive at Haydentown, the Tate brothers notified local law enforcement.

Samuel and George told authorities that they believed their father had been robbed and killed, as Iley-- who distrusted banks (and pretty much everyone and everything else)-- was known to carry a large amount of cash on him at all times, and it was known that he had left Bruceton Mills with $200 in his pocket. Iley had chased off many would-be bandits in his life, and Iley's 30-year-old wife, Nettie, supposed that her husband's age had finally caught up with him.  

A search of the mountains was made, but the first day of searching yielded few clues. Iley's body was discovered on Friday afternoon, when the Tate brothers led the search party to a trail off the main road near the spot where they last saw their father's footprints, at a point where the old Rattlesnake School House once stood. As George and Samuel sat silently on a large boulder, apparently disinterested in the search, the party dragged Iley's corpse from the underbrush. It was evident that Iley had been shot at close range with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, before his skull was smashed with a heavy object.

A Nefarious Plot

In the morning, it became clear why the Tate brothers had appeared so disinterested while their father's bloodied body was pulled from the brush. On Saturday, Samuel Tate broke down in the county detective's office in Uniontown and told Detective Jack Hann that he and his two brothers, George and 20-year-old John, had plotted to "put the old man out of the way" in order to gain possession of his property. According to Samuel, the mastermind of this nefarious plot was his own stepmother, Nettie Belle Tate.

The plot was quite simple; knowing their father would be going over the Mud Pike to transact business, the Tate brothers had hidden a rifle in a shanty near Iley's sheep-pen. When Iley stopped at the pen, George was to retrieve the rifle, conceal it under his coat, and then walk down the road to ambush his father. Then they would rob him of the $200, splitting it amongst themselves and their stepmother.
"Ma and George and John and me talked about doing away with him," Samuel stated at the police station after his arrest. "We figured on getting the properties and splitting the money from the land deal. George got eighty dollars, since he did the killing. Ma got forty dollars, and John and me got sixty dollars."

Unfortunately for the George Tate, his father proved to be harder to kill than even he had imagined. Though his lungs, heart, intestines and liver had been pierced by buckshot, Iley was still breathing, and George knew that meant he was still dangerous. Perhaps remembering his dead little brother, Henry, George also knew that "Pap" wouldn't think twice about shooting him, too. George searched the ground for a large rock, then brought it crashing down onto his wounded father's head-- not once, but twice.

After killing his father, George, who later confessed, pocketed the $200 before dragging the body fifty feet off the road and into the underbrush. He then hid the shotgun behind a watering trough. The following day, while the search was taking place, the Tate brothers retrieved the murder weapon and took it to the home of Sam Bronnich in Haydentown, where it was later recovered by state police.

Even though John, George and Samuel Tate essentially told the same story to investigators, District Attorney Wade K. Newell was reluctant to bring charges against Iley's widow, Nettie. "In all probability, it will not be necessary to question Mrs. Tate," said Newell, who admitted that Mrs. Tate had taken part in a previous attempt to murder her husband, but that this earlier plot had not been carried out. 

"There is also considerable doubt in my mind that Tate was as brutal as he had been painted," added Newell.

The Funeral

On Sunday afternoon, September 18, 1932, a funeral service for Iley Tate was held in a small church in Haydentown, with Reverend Long officiating. Seated in the front pew in a black sateen dress was the 37-year-old widow, Nettie, who was nine months pregnant, while eight of her children-- seven daughters and one son-- filled the rest of the pew. John, George and Samuel, locked up in the Uniontown city jail, were not permitted to attend. One newspaper, the Uniontown Herald, wrote:
At no time did she (Nettie) show emotion. Absolute lack of passion and sorrow was evident except for one fleeting moment when she suddenly leaned down and placed a kiss on the mouth of her slain husband as he lay before her in his last long sleep.

Nettie returned home to Bruceton Mills immediately after the funeral. Heeding the advice of her attorney, Edward D. Brown, she declined to make any statements about the killing, or her alleged involvement in it. After the service, Iley S. Tate was laid to rest at Maple Grove Cemetery in Fairchance. He was buried alongside a brother, Phando (who went by his middle name, Jacob), in a plot that was donated by another brother, Perry (whose birth name was William). 

Perry Tate, for the record, was every bit as controversial as his infamous brother; one year after his brother was murdered, Perry, now 64 years of age, would be charged with the rape of an 11-year-old girl, Dorothy Mae Clark (he was later acquitted). This wasn't the first time he had faced such an accusation, however; in 1930, Perry was charged with a statutory offense by the father of 11-year-old Mary Jennings. Perry also carried on the decades-long Tate-Brownfield feud while still finding the time and energy to make new enemies. In 1936, after a member of the Higginbotham family testified against a Tate family member in a cattle theft case, Perry responded by shooting up the Higginbotham home.

Son is Born as Trial Opens

On September 22, formal charges were filed against the Tate brothers by District Attorney Newell. After a hearing  before a magistrate in Fairchance, the three brothers were remanded to the Fayette County Jail without bail. With Iley dead and his three eldest sons behind bars, it wasn't long before enemies of the Tate family and other bandits began plundering. On September 28 it was reported that Iley Tate's entire herd of goats had been stolen within three days of his death, along with many of his sheep. Meanwhile, treasure hunters dug holes all over the four properties Tate had owned, in search of the fortune that Iley had supposedly buried.

At 5:15 on the morning of September 30, Nettie Belle Tate gave birth to a healthy, eight-pound son in the ramshackle cabin near Bruceton Mills. He was named Robert Stanton Tate. Three weeks later, Nettie and the newborn, accompanied by a neighbor, Erma Jeffries, made a trip to Uniontown to visit George, John and Samuel in jail. Afterwards, she visited her attorney and discussed the upcoming murder trial, which was slated to begin in December.

When the Fayette County grand jury convened in November, the bill against John Tate, whose role in the murder plot seemed minimal, was ignored. He was, however, indicted on a charge of receiving stolen property. As expected, George and Samuel were both indicted for the murder of Iley Tate. On December 4, the Tate brothers entered a plea of guilty, and the trial got under way on December 19 with Judge S. John Morrow presiding. Hundreds of mountaineers and backwoods farmers journeyed to Uniontown on foot to hear the highly-anticipated testimony. If they had made the arduous journey hoping to hear salacious details, they would not be disappointed.

A Barbaric Backwoods Bluebeard

The witnesses who took the stand shattered District Attorney Newell's assertion that Iley Sanford Tate wasn't as bad as people claimed. Tate's niece testified that she "didn't blame the boys one bit" for murdering their father. Another witness was a neighbor, G.H. Kiersted, who likened Tate to a famous folkloric wife killer (it was rumored that Tate had poisoned one of his four wives), before accusing him of a heinous sex crime.

"He was a second Bluebeard. That's what I called him," testified Kiersted. "There was a little girl in the Iley Tate household they called Roddy. No one knew much about her. I'd seen here there many times when I went to Haydentown to trade with Tate. Iley was the cause of this girl's death. He defiled her when she was not more than 11 or 12 years old." Samuel Emme, a resident of Haydentown, also took the stand and corroborated Kiersted's story about Roddy, as did another neighbor, Norval Cunningham.
Nettie Belle Tate also testified. She stated that, after their wedding, Iley had forced her to enter her age in the family Bible at ten years older than she actually was, as to minimize the tremendous age gap between them. According to Nettie, she wasn't 100% certain of her own age.

"When I was a small girl, my mother, Adaline Show Miller, accepted a job as a housekeeper for Tate, and we moved from Leisenring to Haydentown," explained Nettie. Shortly after their arrival, Mrs. Miller discovered that she was pregnant. "She told me that Tate was the father. She died during childbirth." After Adaline's death, Nettie became the object of Iley's desire. When asked how many wives Iley had taken, Nettie couldn't be certain. There had only been two legal wives-- herself and Mary Brownfield. The others had been common law wives, though Nettie could neither confirm nor deny the long-standing rumors that one of the wives had been poisoned, and another traded to a neighbor for a cow and a rifle.

Nettie also told the court that Iley routinely whipped his children, as well as Nettie herself, with a 'blacksnake whip with a four-foot rawhide cracker', among other things. "He beat me different times with sticks and stovewood and treated the boys mighty mean," she said. But not even Iley's daughters were not spared from the abuse; Nettie recalled that her husband had used the whip on their eldest daughter, Katherine, for spilling coffee. He had even struck their daughter Edna, then just two years old, at the dinner table, causing her to run away. Gripped by terror, the toddler happened to defecate on the kitchen floor.

"This made Iley even worse than ever," testified Nettie. "He ordered Edna to eat it up. When she refused, he stuck her face into it."

The case was closed on December 20 without any of the Tate brothers being called to the stand, though all three were present during the proceedings. Judge Morrow, expressing a desire to carefully study the transcript of the testimony, stated that he would not be ready to pass sentence until after Christmas. As was the case in that era, it was up to the judge to determine the degree of guilt.

In the meantime, Justice of the Peace William J. Ruble auctioned off Tate's personal effects, with the proceeds going to his widow to defray the cost of the funeral. Perry Tate and Jess Sutton were appointed as appraisers. Though the two men were unable to find the thousands of dollars Iley was believed to have buried around his property in two-gallon metal ice cream containers, one such container was discovered under the floor of a shanty on Iley's goat farm. It turned out to be empty, however. 

The appraisal also disclosed a sizable stockpile of weapons which had belonged to the malevolent mountaineer. Between Tate's properties in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, more than 50 firearms were counted. These, along with other personal effects, were auctioned off on December 23, 1932. Records of the auction show that the lowest priced item was a .22 caliber rifle which sold for ten cents. The leather cap Tate had been wearing at the time of his murder fetched seventy-five cents. One of his favorite rifles was sold to Mrs. Eleanor Kennedy for $15. Rainey Means bought a double-barreled shotgun for $15, while the Smith & Wesson revolver which Tate used to keep under his pillow was sold to Perry Tate for $2. Two other guns were purchased by Charles Rhodes of Haydentown for $27.50.

 

Judge Passes Sentence, Stepmom Marries the Enemy

On Friday morning, December 30, 1932, Judge Morrow fixed George Tate's degree of guilt as first degree, as judges were permitted to do at the time, and sentenced him to life imprisonment at Western Penitentiary. "As we view the evidence," stated Judge Morrow, "it admits no other conclusion than George is guilty of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing of his father by lying in wait for him and shooting him." 

Morrow, however, showed leniency toward Samuel Tate, now 16 years of age, finding him guilty of murder in the second degree but sentencing him to the Pennsylvania Industrial School at Huntingdon, where he remained until he reached the age of 18. John Tate, who plead guilty to receiving stolen property, was sentenced to three years probation.

In the spring of 1935, a furor was created by the unlikely marriage of Iley Tate's widow to the patriarch of the rival Brownfield clan. Nettie Bell Tate and 68-year John Brownfield were married on April 26 in a private ceremony at the county courthouse. Interestingly, this union made Brownfield a stepfather to 24 children-- a dozen he had inherited from his previous marriage, and a dozen fathered by Iley Tate-- but a biological father of none.

"I got married because I was terribly tired of the name of Tate," explained Nettie to newspaper reporters. "I have lived at the Brownfield home for the last month and have seen more peace and contentment than in all my twenty-two years of married life with Iley Tate."

 

George Tate only served seven and a half years of his sentence before he was granted parole on July 13, 1940. He moved in with his mother and John Brownfield-- whom he robbed in 1943. His parole was revoked and George was sent back to prison to finish serving not only the remainder of his life sentence, but an extra 1 to 5 years which Judge W. Russell Carr tacked on for the robbery.

In 1941, Samuel Tate was accused of sexually assaulting his sister's seven-year-old daughter, and charged with incestuous fornication, adultery, and statutory rape. Charges were eventually dropped. He passed away in 1972 at the age of 54.

Nettie Bell Tate Brownfield died in 1962 at the age of 66, leaving behind 50 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

Taken in 1947 after 12 happy years of marriage

Other Infamous Members of the Tate Clan

The story of Iley's life and death was known far and wide, but other members of the Tate family managed to achieve notoriety as well. These include:

Lewis Edward Tate (1899-1952) 

July 21, 1939: Iley Tate's nephew, Lewis Edward "Ed" Tate (son of Henry Lewis Tate) was arrested and charged with incest and statutory rape after impregnating his 15-year-old daughter, Leona. During the police investigation, his wife, Clara Chipps Tate, admitted that Lewis often strapped her to the bed, naked, and beat her with a whip.

May 27, 1952: Lewis Edward Tate commits suicide by hanging himself in his Fayette County Jail cell, after being arrested for raping and impregnating yet another daughter, 15-year-old Lucy Marie. According to police reports, the sexual relationship began when Lucy was 13.

Edith Tate Fowler (1927-1962) and Clyde Fowler (1904-1979)

November 15, 1962: Edith, a daughter of Iley Tate, died at age 35 from a shotgun wound to the abdomen after being shot by her 19-year-old son, Edgar Fowler, at their home near Davidson Mine. Fowler, who was said to be of "borderline intelligence" and heavily intoxicated at the time of the shooting, had spent several years in reform school for robbery and larceny. He plead guilty and was convicted of second degree murder. On July 17th, 1963, he was sentenced to 10-20 years at Western State Penitentiary.

Edith's husband, Clyde Fowler, was institutionalized at the time of her death. In 1961, he was sent to Somerset State Hospital after being charged with incest, indecent assault, statutory rape, and related charges stemming from an inappropriate relationship with his 16-year-old daughter, Mary. Charges against him were dropped in 1963, and he died of natural causes in 1979, the age of 74.

 

Oliver A. Tate (1916-1962)

Jan. 4, 1962: Oliver Tate ("Buck"), age 46, son of Perry Tate and nephew of Iley Tate, was fatally shot between the eyes by his 16-year-old nephew, Randolph Lewis, at his home in Fairchance. Lewis, who was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, claimed that he killed Tate after being forced to perform an "unnatural act" on him.

Charles Cline and Mary Tate Dice

 May 3, 1951: Fifteen-year-old Charles Cline, whose aunt was Iley Tate's daughter, Mary Tate Dice, shot his cousin, Charles Dailey, in the chest with a shotgun. Dailey was killed instantly, and Cline was apprehended in the underbrush on the property of his uncle, Thomas Dice. Cline was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 9 to 20 years at Western Penitentiary.

During the murder trial, Mary Tate Dice testified and admitted that she had been in a long-standing incestuous relationship with Charles. She was arrested and charged with adultery and corruption of a minor. She was convicted and sentenced to the Women's Industrial School in Muncy. She was paroled in 1953.

Charles Cline

 

So what was it about the Tate family that made them behave more like savages than civilized members of society? Were their misdeeds merely the result on generations of incest and inbreeding? Lack of formal education? Was it a genetic taint passed down through generations? That wouldn't explain why so many descendants of Iley Tate went on to lead lawful, productive lives. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Tate mentioned in an unsavory light by newspapers since the early 1960s. 

No, it seems that the wild and rowdy days of the Tate family are long in the past, leaving only stories of shotguns, kissing cousins, moonshine and family feuds-- things that have never been in short supply in the remote and sparsely-populated backwoods and mountain hollows of Pennsylvania. 

Sources/Further Reading:

Pittston Evening Gazette, Oct. 19, 1885.
Connellsville Weekly Courier, Aug. 2, 1889.
Uniontown Weekly Herald, Nov. 18, 1893.
Pittsburgh Press, March 7, 1894.
Connellsville Weekly Courier, July 8, 1898.
Wilkes-Barre Times, Nov. 11, 1903.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Feb. 28, 1930.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Sept. 16, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Sept. 17, 1932.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 18, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Sept. 23, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Sept. 28, 1932.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Sept. 23, 1932.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Oct. 3, 1932.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Oct. 20, 1932.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Dec. 5, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Dec. 16, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Dec. 19, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Dec. 20, 1932.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Dec. 21, 1932.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Dec. 27, 1932.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Dec. 30, 1932.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Dec. 31, 1932.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Nov. 23, 1933.
Connellsville Daily Courier, June 26, 1936.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Sept. 7, 1943.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Oct. 2, 1943.