Loyalist soldiers demanded she cook for them. She did but...then she killed two of them, held the rest at gunpoint and had them hanged from a tree in her yard.
Nancy Hart was a tough-as-nails frontier woman in the Broad River Valley of Georgia. The Cherokee called her Wahatche. "War Woman."
One day, six Loyalists rode up to her cabin, hunting a Patriot who'd just passed through. They shot her last turkey and ordered her to cook it for them. She generously poured them wine and played the gracious hostess.
While they drank glass after glass, she quietly slipped their muskets through a gap in the log wall to her daughter outside. By the time they noticed, she had a loaded gun in her hands.
One man lunged. She shot him dead.
A second moved. She dropped him too.
The rest froze until the neighbors came. Her husband wanted to shoot the prisoners, but Nancy thought hanging was what they deserved.
For over a century it was told as frontier legend, only half-believed. Then in 1912, railroad workers dug up a neat row of six skeletons. Some of the necks were broken.
Now we know the legend of Nancy Hart is true.
London is healing.
This depressing post-war block in Kensington was torn down and replaced with a neo-Georgian terrace, similar to what stood there before it was hit by an aerial bomb.
The post-war blight had previously been designated a Grade II listed building in 2007, on the basis of its "simple but forceful expression of the Modernist principles of form and function."
Fortunately, this was later revoked citing a "procedural error."
What we have now is a beautiful, white-stucco-fronted townhouse, complete with porticoes and balconies just like its neighbours. Life restored to the otherwise intact square.