HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: 'The Horrible Tortures' - Scandalous child-abuse case of 1907 finally went to court

Jimmy Tomlin, The High Point Enterprise, N.C.
·3 min read

May 30—EDITOR'S NOTE — This is the second story in a two-part High Point Confidential series. Part one of "The Horrible Tortures" was published Saturday and can be found online at hpenews.com.

HIGH POINT

For several weeks in November 1907, the child-abuse scandal that had rocked High Point and Thomasville was all people could talk about.

H.B. and Daisy Shoaf, of Thomasville, had been accused of cruelly beating 4-year-old Jennie Fields, the daughter of their friends, T.C. and Carrie Fields, of High Point. The beatings were said to have occurred while Jennie was visiting the Shoafs.

Newspapers, including The High Point Enterprise, had a field day writing about the scandalous charges — and they didn't hold back in pointing their ink-stained fingers at the Shoafs.

Innocent until proven guilty? Ha!

"Great God," The Enterprise wrote, "could anything be worse than the tortures inflicted upon a helpless being than was done by the Shoafs?"

The Davie Record, in Mocksville, chimed in, "We don't remember to have ever read as damnable and brutal treatment received by any one in heathen lands as that received by the little 4-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. T.C. Fields, of High Point, by two human devils."

Yes, the writer called the Shoafs "human devils" — and this was before they went to trial. He also implied that T.C. Fields should've killed the Shoafs the minute he saw Jennie's injuries.

So much for objective reporting.

Several papers also suggested that Daisy Shoaf was a "dope fiend" whose violent rage was fueled by drugs. A few published a photo of her, along with photos of Jennie and her parents. For her part, Daisy vehemently denied being a dope fiend, just as she and her husband had denied any guilt in the infliction of Jennie's injuries.

As the weeks passed, little Jennie — once expected to die from her injuries — gradually improved. Once it became obvious the child was not going to die, the Shoafs were released on bonds of $500 each until their case came up for trial in Davidson County in February 1908.

And once again, as the trial date neared, newspapers across the state weighed in on the inflammatory accusations. The Charlotte News described the case as "one of the most interesting and sensational cases that has been tried in North Carolina in years," and it would've been difficult to argue with that claim.

Alas, the trial was repeatedly postponed and, according to one newspaper account, "put off from one court to another." By the time the case finally was tried in March 1909 — more than a year later — public and media interest in the case had died down significantly. Almost no newspapers reported that the case was coming up for trial, and only a handful reported the outcome.

For the record, H.B. Shoaf was convicted of beating Jennie, but his wife was acquitted. He was sentenced to four months of hard labor on the roads.

And what became of little Jennie? We don't know a lot, but online records indicate she completed high school, she became a nursing aide, and she was married twice. She also lived to the ripe old age of 94, dying of hypertension in 1998. She lies buried at a cemetery in Winston-Salem.

And we can only hope and pray that by the time she died, she had long since forgotten this early, scandal-plagued chapter of her life.

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579