Less than a day after a local woman called down fire from God upon him, a cold-blooded bandit king took his last drink from a clear spring in Lawrence County, leaving his name behind as his only memorial.

In southwestern Lawrence County, near the old health resort community of Wayland Springs, and not far from the Wayne County line, a little tributary bursts from the earth and flows through the woods in relative tranquility. This little branch is known as Gipson’s Spring, and despite its calm demeanor, it has a tumultuous and violent history.

In the latter months of 1864, the Civil War was still in full swing in Middle Tennessee. Confederate soldiers poured through Lawrence County in those months on their way to General John B. Hood’s ill-fated gamble to liberate the city of Nashville, and the people who lived in this area continued to fend for themselves in the vacuum of law and order created by the constant movement of the two warring armies.

Lawrence and Wayne Counties were a haven for bushwhackers during the Civil War. A bushwhacker, unlike a regular soldier, had questionable allegiances and fought in unconventional ways. By war’s end, most of the gangs of bushwhackers roaming through western Lawrence County had given up all pretense of fighting for a cause and openly made war on the inhabitants, stealing and killing at their pleasure and for their own benefit.

One such gang was lead by a cruel and heartless man named Frans Gipson, who had the misfortune to meet with an old Christian soldier and accomplished prayer warrior named Judith Pettus in the last days of 1864.

That day, Gipson’s gang raided Mrs. Pettus’s home near West Point. No doubt terrified as these strange men looted her home, Judith’s three-year-old granddaughter Alice Pettus began to cry. Gipson, enraged at little Alice’s wailing, told her that if she didn’t hush, he would sling her head against the wall and bash her brains out.

Judith was incensed at such talk. She looked Gipson in the eye, no doubt moving protectively between him and Alice, and said threateningly, “I can’t reward you for speaking to a little child like that, but there is a Higher Power who can.”

We don’t know what Gipson said to that. But we do know that, according to local lore as preserved by Imogene Hagan, the next day, Gipson and his men stopped at the spring that today bears his name.

As Gipson lay at the spring to take a drink, he was killed by one of his own men. Although the reason for Gipson’s murder has been lost to us, the place where he died is named for him to this day.

And we can only speculate as to whether or not he remembered Judith Pettus’s prophetic threat to him as he breathed his last in that tranquil little spring.