A little over 130 years ago in a small rural North Carolina town in Wilkes County, a young girl of meager means left home to meet her fiancé in the woods. She had hidden her special dress under her house clothes and had packed her belongings in a trundle bag, ready for her new life. She sat in the woods and waited for her beloved, and someone met her there--someone who hated her enough to kill her and drag her to a small grave that the person had dug the evening before. A few months later, her fiancé was captured and tried for the crime. After one appeal, he was condemned for her murder and hanged.

The story of Tom Dula and his unfortunate fiancée Laura Foster made the headlines in 1866, from as far away as New York. The Civil War had ended and the Reconstruction of the South had begun, but not without bitter feelings on both sides. So a murder of a poor, uneducated girl by an equally poor boy sparked a legend in the South and a headline story in the North. Some time after Tom Dula was executed, someone wrote a ballad, put it to music, and the legend of Tom Dula was born.