In 1895, a whiskey shop called the “Gray Goose” - set up two or three years earlier by John Franklin - sat five miles north of Warrior, on the L&N line, in Blount County. The location wasn’t an accident: Warrior enforced a five-mile dry radius, and the Gray Goose sat just outside it, selling to Warrior residents and their suburbs who couldn’t legally buy closer to home. Business was steady “at all times of the week and Sundays.”
On a Sunday in early March, William Howard, a butcher from the Warrior suburb of Mabetown, was among a group at the saloon when the barkeeper refused to serve him more without payment. A dispute broke out; Franklin knocked Howard down and ran him off the property. Minutes later Howard came back at Franklin, who shot him in the stomach with a pistol. Howard died within ten minutes, leaving a widow and five children. Franklin, who had a family of his own, was arrested; the paper itself couldn’t say whether it would be ruled murder or justifiable homicide.
“Five miles north of Warrior, on the line of the L&N, in Blount County” describes almost exactly where Reid’s Gap sits - the same stretch of track this whole history keeps returning to. There’s no name on record tying the Gray Goose to Reid’s Gap specifically, but the geography leaves few other candidates.