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Tis the season when many are rocking around the Christmas tree, children are finishing lists to Santa, and parents are seeing green from the amounts of money spent to bring a little holiday cheer. Stockings hang from mantels, presents sit beautifully wrapped, lights glisten from homes and businesses, and people are ordering last-minute surprises with the hope that they will arrive before the big day. Christmas is a magical time filled with lasting memories and family get-togethers.
For others, the Christmas season is a struggle that can lead many to the brink of anger. Unfortunately, one family from North Carolina would not live to see another joyous holiday season together, and the motives of their deaths would become shrouded in mystery.
The Lawson family of Stokes County was like other typical families living in the roaring 1920s and into the start of the Great Depression. Times were lean during those days, with not much food to go around. Charles Lawson worked as a tobacco farmer in the region with his wife and seven children. The family was more fortunate than others when they saved enough to purchase their farm in 1927 near Germantown on Brook Cove Road.
A few weeks before Christmas in 1929, Charles Lawson loaded the family, drove them to Winston-Salem to purchase new clothing, and even had them partake in a family portrait. Something seemed odd, considering the financially challenging times. On Christmas morning of 1929, the Lawson family woke early like other families to tend to farm duties. The oldest daughter, Marie, baked a cake with raisins while the oldest son, Arthur, headed into town to purchase ammunition for hunting.
During this time, Charles Lawson killed his wife, Fannie, thirty-seven at the time, and six of his children before he walked into nearby woods and shot himself. Arthur Lawson survived due to being gone at the time, but would meet an untimely death from an automobile accident in 1945.
The family was laid to rest in a mass grave in Germantown. Several motives have floated around for what led a man like Charles Lawson to murder his family. One suggests he suffered from a head injury from an accident that occurred several years earlier. However, another motive suggests a family rumor that Charles Lawson had gotten his daughter, Marie, pregnant. Instead of coming clean to his wife and family, Lawson murdered them to hide the secret.
Some believe the apparitions of the Lawson Family still haunt the Madison Dry Goods Store. The old store was a funeral home that prepared the victims of the murders.
The Christmas Day Massacre is one of North Carolina’s most famous true-crime cases.
Written By: John G. Clark Jr.