Mack Elliott lived in the Stoney Creek section of Carter County, Tennessee, in a house built of concrete blocks and stucco, considered one of the nicest houses in the area. In the spring of 1929 he was working as an auto mechanic in Elizabethton while he was out on strike from his job as a mechanic at the Glanzstoff plant, a textile mill.
On this day that year, while Mack was at a union meeting in Elizabethton, his house exploded with enough force to shatter windows in his neighborhood and destroy a chimney a quarter-mile away. The concrete blocks were in ruins, wood and bits of furniture scattered about the property. Mrs. Elliott and the children had been at Mack’s father’s house when the blast occurred and were safe. A rooster and the family’s dog were rescued safely from the ruins of the house.
Evidence showed that the explosion was caused by someone setting off a sizable amount of nitroglycerin in the house.
A neighbor reported seeing an unknown car in the area several times, including the night of the bombing.
At the time there were strikes going on in textile mills across the Southeast with reports of conflict between strikers and strikebreaking workers and these sort of incidents were common. In fact, Mack Elliott had been involved in an incident the month before in which someone tossed a lit stick of dynamite into his car while he was driving home. He managed to put the fuse out and took that dynamite to the sheriff’s office for investigation.
In June a resident of the Buzzard’s Roost community in Carter County, James A. Bice, was arrested in connection with the blast. Bice had confessed that he had taken part in setting the blast that destroyed Elliott’s home on Stony Creek. He was later acquitted of the charge after a trial in which he contended he had been forced to sign that confession.
By this time, however, an agreement ending the strike and bringing striking workers back into the plant was in place and it appears that no further action was taken in the matter of the bombing.
Mack Elliott was killed in a head-on automobile crash in Ohio in January, 1931, while on his way to his home in Pennsylvania, where he had moved after the bombing of his home in Tennessee.
