The city of Ethridge may be a quiet place today, but more than eighty years ago this month, it saw one of the most exciting peacetime gunfights in Lawrence County’s history.

It all began with an armed robbery, in broad daylight.

On March 12, 1935, at just past 2:30 in the afternoon, two men walked into the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Ethridge, pulled the shades closed, and drew guns on the cashier. Within minutes, the criminals had absconded with over $2,000 in cash from the bank’s cash drawer.

Harold Kellogg was the only cashier at the bank that afternoon. His coworker, Cleve Massey, was nearby helping O.I. North prepare his income taxes. Mr. North was the owner of the North Funeral Home, which survives today as the Neal Funeral Home on North Military Street in Lawrenceburg.

The postmaster of Ethridge, Harry Cunningham, saw the pair enter the bank and rushed to fetch Massey at Mr. North’s home. After he raised the alarm that the bank was being robbed, Cunningham and Massey went to a nearby store and grabbed two firearms while the thieves leapt into a waiting green Chevrolet sedan, attended by two more bandits.

Cunningham, armed with a shotgun, and Massey, armed with a .32 pistol, opened fire on the getaway car as it sped eastward, toward the Jackson Highway. They were joined by Eugene Cunningham, the father of the postmaster, who opened fire on the vehicle with his own weapon. One of the men scored a hit, shattering the back glass of the car and wounding one of the robbers, who visibly slumped over. Cunningham and Massey also believed that they had punctured at least one of the vehicle’s tires. The criminals returned fire, but did not injure anyone.

Tom Fite, a postal clerk at the Ethridge post office, approached the car during the robbery to get a good look at it. The driver pulled his gun on Fite and held him hostage inside the car until the other bandits had fled the bank.

Although deputies gave chase, the robbers gave them the slip. The car was abandoned at Rattlesnake Falls and discovered the next day. As it turned out, the car had been stolen in Kentucky and was outfitted with Mississippi plates.

Unfortunately for them, the robbers did not learn their lesson at Ethridge. Two of them were captured when they tried to conduct a similar daylight robbery in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The other two were captured on the same day almost a year later, one in Reno, Nevada and one in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. The four men were all tried and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for their role in the Ethridge bank robbery. None of the robbers, as it turned out, were locals.