The most infamous crime in nineteenth-century Georgia occurred in Bibb County, about twelve miles west of Macon, in the early morning hours of August 6, 1887, when Tom Woolfolk (pronounced WUHL-fork) murdered nine members of his family with an ax.
Background ~
Thomas G. Woolfolk was born on June 18, 1860, in Bibb County, to Susan Moore and Richard F. Woolfolk in the farmhouse on his father’s large cotton plantation, the same house where the murders occurred twenty-seven years later. His mother, who was from Athens, in Clarke County, married Richard Woolfolk in 1854, the year he graduated from the University of Georgia. Tom was the third child and only son of his parents.
