LIVING HISTORY
21
Ada Coats Williams was a teacher and writer best known for “Along these Waters,” a series of outdoor dramas celebrating the achievements of
early St. Lucie settlers, when she reluctantly became historian to the Ashley Gang legend. An interview with one of the deputies helped reveal
what happened on the Sebastian River Bridge Nov. 1, 1924. “I wanted to write about the good people here,” she says. “I didn’t want to be known
for writing about the Ashleys.”
Of her secret deputy, Williams wrote: “He did not credit
Sheriff Merritt with any of the shooting. He also did not
apologize for his act. He made good a threat to John Ashley,
and said that John had promised to kill all of them if he had
a chance.”
“It was them or us at that point,” Williams quotes the
deputy as telling her.
The deputy then scooped John Ashley’s eye out of his head
to give to Sheriff Bob Baker, who once threatened John
Ashley that he’d wear it as a watch fob. The deputy eventually
had to give it back so that it could be buried with
Ashley. “He said if he’d have known that he’d have crushed
it under his heel,” Williams recalls the deputy telling her.
INFORMANT’S IDENTITY
In my review of the available evidence, I have concluded
that the deputy who shot John Ashley and was Williams’
informant was Elmer Padgett.
Why Padgett?
Padgett was one of the deputies who raided the Ashley
still where patriarch Joe Ashley was killed. His life had been
threatened by the Ashley Gang, as evidenced by a quote
from Baker in which he told Stuart Hix, author of the 1928
“The Notorious Ashley Gang,” that gang members “had
planned to come into the courthouse to kill me and my
deputies, Elmer Padgett and Henry Stubbs.”
Padgett was one of the lawmen on the Sebastian Bridge
the night of the shooting Nov. 1, 1924. Padgett, who died in
1964 at the age of 56, also was cited in footnotes of Williams’
book as having been interviewed by her in 1958.
Williams solved another mystery in her book. How did the
lawmen know that the Ashley Gang would be heading north
on Dixie Highway that night? Williams said the deputy was
told about the trip by John Ashley’s longtime girlfriend,
Laura Upthegrove. Widely referred to as “The Queen of the
Everglades.” Upthegrove apparently was upset that John
was heading north to hide out without her.
SCANT EVIDENCE
There remains today little corroborating evidence for what
the deputy told Williams. Our search for primary source
information yielded few clues.
While the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department (St.
Lucie’s jurisdiction extended to Sebastian in 1924) has no
surviving record of the Ashley Gang or their deaths on the
Sebastian Bridge, it has two Thompson sub-machine guns in
its armory, purported to belong to the Ashley Gang.
A search of the St. Lucie County Circuit Clerk’s Office also
yielded no official transcripts. Newspaper clippings are all
that remain:
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