Butts County GaArchives News.....J. M. Morris, a Prominent Farmer, Shoots Himself October 17, 1898
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Don Bankston http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00024.html#0005864 November 18, 2006, 11:51 am

Jackson Argus – Butts County October 17, 1898
News reached the city Wednesday afternoon of the suicide of James M. Morris of 
Towaliga district, and caused much concern among the people here who knew 
Morris to be a clever and a good hearted citizen.  It was hoped that the alarm 
was false, but later advices confirmed the story.

Wednesday afternoon Morris and his family, consisting of wife and two boys, 
were picking cotton.  About three o’clock Morris told his wife that he believed 
he would go to Jackson, a distance of about six miles from his home.

“I will go to the house,” he said  “and if I decide not to go I will come back 
and go to picking cotton.”

He had been gone only a short time when two gun reports, about one minute 
apart, rang out.  Immediately Mrs. Morris went home and on the front veranda 
found her husband laying on a pile of cotton with the whole top of his head 
blown away and a double barreled shot gun between his legs.  From the 
surroundings it is surmised that the first discharge went through the veranda 
roof, and that Morris then held the muzzle of the gun between his eyes and 
pulled the trigger.

Power burns on the fingers give color to this theory.  A piece of the skull as 
large as the palm of the hand was found some six feet away and brains and 
pieces of the head were found scattered about over the house and yard for ten 
feet round.  It was  a ghastly picture which confronted the wife who fell 
across the prostrate form where she was found by W. D. Compton, the first one 
of the neighbors to arrive.

The coroner was notified and reached the place late in the afternoon and held 
an inquest with the following result:

We the jury finds from the evidence before us that J. M. Morris came to his 
death by shot from double-barreled gun in his own hands.

R. M. Fletcher, Foreman, - D. N. Carmichael, W. D. Compton, J. W. Fletcher, R. 
B. Harkness, P. R. Watkins.

The suicide is a mystery in so far as concerns the motive back of it.  There is 
some evidence that Mr. Morris’s mind was in a very unsettled state and the most 
generally accepted theory is that in a fit of temporary insanity the rash act 
was committed.  He had just come in possession of a home by sale of lands 
belonging to the Collins estate and it was thought that he had every reason for 
happiness and congratulations, but in the human breast there surges troubles 
unseen by the world, and so it was in this case.

Jackson Argus – Butts County
Week of October 17, 1898


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