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Writer's pictureLauren Higgs

The Patricidal Pages — Part One

Updated: Oct 9, 2022



"I'll kill you if I ever get up," gasped Leroy Page, laying on the ground. In his late 60s, Leroy found himself on the losing end of a battle with his son Fabius. That's right. Fabius. Fabius stood above his father, holding a tree limb over his head, ready to strike again.


...but hang on. We've gotten ahead of ourselves. You don't know who any of these people are.


Let's start at the beginning, shall we?


Leroy Page was the descendant of a long line of Pages. We won't bore you with all the details, but suffice to say that the Pages came to Virginia in the early 1600s and were quite wealthy. John Page II was a close personal friend of Thomas Jefferson.


BFFs, John Page II & Thomas Jefferson


Leroy Page's grandfather, Obadiah Page, Sr., came to North Carolina in the late 1700s when he was still a boy.


In 1860, Obadiah Sr. and son Obadiah Jr. were living in a small township in North Carolina called Cedar Fork, where they had amassed sizable fortunes in land and slaves.


By 1870, both Obadiah, Sr. and Jr. would be dead, and their slaves given their freedom.


Obadiah, Jr., Leroy's father, had a reputation for cruelty. His wife Elizabeth Atkins, mother of his seven children, petitioned the court for divorce in 1856. The accusations she leveled against her husband included kicking her in the stomach, whipping her with a cowhide, and nearly blinding her with a punch to the eye. More than once she had become bedridden as a consequence of her husband's violence. At one point, when she briefly left him, he simply replaced her with another woman.


All of this context should help make you feel not so bad when he gets murdered. Because he's gonna get murdered.


Obadiah's abuse wasn't limited to his wife, either. In January of 1866, Obadiah's eldest daughter Frances ran away with a man to nearby Durham, North Carolina, trying to escape her father's abuse. He put a notice in the paper that she had left.


The Daily Progress [Raleigh, NC], 20 Jan 1866


Five days after his daughter ran away, Obadiah came home drunk and began to hit his wife. His 16-year-old son Alonzo,¹ Leroy's older brother, intervened, telling his father that if he hit his mother again, he would shoot him. The local paper had a fairly detailed write-up of the events that followed.


The above story ran in several North Carolina papers, but was originally published in The Raleigh Sentinel on 25 January 1866. For the benefit of the modern reader, "much excited with spiritous liquors" means "drunk," and "unkind" means "abusive."


Yes, you read that correctly. Obadiah's teenage kid done had enough of his drunk daddy and shot him. Dead. Alonzo never stood trial, as he high-tailed it for Texas, where he spent the remainder of his days. He died in Waxahachie in 1916, sadly, from a self-inflicted gunshot.


"But where does the tree limb come in?" you ask. Yes, yes, we know. You came here to read about someone being beaten to death by a tree limb. See, the story above was only the first time a Page son committed patricide. There was a second occurrence, involving the afore-mentioned tree limb, and also... a watermelon.


Want to know what happened?


Notes

¹ The son who shot and killed Obadiah Page, Jr.'s real name was Leonidas Lafayette Page. The papers all refer to him as "Alonzo," but it's unclear if that was his nickname or a mistake.


Sources

"A Most Distressing Occurrence," The New Berne Times [New Bern, NC], 25 Jan 1866.

"John Page (planter)", Wikipedia, accessed 27 Aug 2022.

"Leroy H. Page Killed By Son with a Cudgel," The Charlotte Observer [Charlotte, NC], 26 Aug 1926.

Schweninger, Loren. "To the Honorable: Divorce, Alimony, Slavery and the Law in Antebellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 84 (April 2009) 127-179.

"Son on Trial for Slaying of Father,"The News and Observer [Raleigh, NC], 9 Dec 1926.

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