“Mountain” Tom Clark Historic Site

Thomas Marion (Mountain Tom) Clark was a notorious and prolific criminal who terrorized Alabama during and immediately following the American Civil War.  He led a gang of outlaws and bushwhackers known as the “Clifton Shebang” or “Bugger Gang.”  They wreaked havoc throughout northern Alabama and southern Tennessee until their capture and execution in 1872.

After failing to make a go of it in both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War, Clark joined a gang of military deserters who formed the “Shebang.”  Deciding to find their fortunes on the wrong side of the law, they committed a number of violent crimes in and around Muscle Shoals, Alabama, including the murders of three people at the Wilson Plantation in 1865.  In 1872, the authorities, acting on tips, apprehended Clark and two companions while they dined in Waterloo, Alabama.

Clark confessed to at least 19 murders, including that of a child.  The three men were held at the Lauderdale County Jail in Florence while awaiting punishment.  On September 4, 1872, an impatient lynch mob decided to take matters into their own hands and broke into the jail, removing the three men.   They took them to a lot at the corner of Pine and Tombigbee Streets and hanged them by their necks from a sycamore tree until dead.

Because townspeople objected to burying the outlaws in consecrated cemetery ground, three freshly dug graves had been prepared in a nearby field.  However, according to legend, the mob had different plans for Clark.  Someone recalled him boasting, “No man will ever run over Tom Clark,” so they promptly dug a grave in the road and buried him in the center of East Tennessee Street next to the cemetery.  (East Tennessee is also known as US-72 / Florence Boulevard.) 

Although likely apocryphal based on historical research and contemporaneous newspaper reports, the tale of Tom Clark’s road burial is part of Alabama lore.  Outside the cemetery boundary wall is a historic marker telling Clark’s story at the approximate spot of his purported internment.  As design and fate would have it, the spot is subject to heavy traffic, day and night.