- On November 25th, 1846, an axe-swinging icon was born.
- Carry Nation, known as "Hatchet Granny," infamously smashed bars with an axe in the name of Jesus.
If your family members criticized your drinking habits this holiday weekend, well, at least they didn't come after you with an axe (hopefully).
That's exactly what one infamous temperance movement leader, nicknamed "Hatchet Granny," did to break up drinking establishments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Caroline Nation — also known as "Carry" or "Carrie" — born on this day in Kentucky in 1846, had an unstable childhood spent moving from state to state with a financially troubled father and mentally ill mother, according to the History Channel.
So when she met Charles Gloyd, an educated former Union Army doctor, she was thrilled at the opportunity for a new life, Fran Grace wrote in the biography, "Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life."
Despite her parents' concerns about Gloyd's drinking habits, Nation married him in 1867, but she quickly realized her mistake; Gloyd was drunk at their wedding and much of the time thereafter, according to the History Channel.
Within a year, Nation became pregnant and moved back in with her parents. Six months after her first child was born, Gloyd died from complications related to alcoholism, according to Grace's biography.
With this traumatic experience in her early adulthood, Nation's hatred of alcohol was born.
After entering into another unhappy marriage to David Nation in 1874, Nation became more and more religious, even claiming to have visions from God calling her to fight the scourge of drunkenness, according to The History Channel.
She started a chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and soon began raising hell in local bars.
By 1900, she was storming into saloons clad in all black — armed with an axe and sometimes accompanied by fellow temperance advocates — screaming "Smash, smash! For the love of Jesus, smash!," according to Deborah G. Felder's book "A Century of Women: The Most Influential Events in 20th Century Women's History."
While singing hymns and reading out from the Bible, she'd hack away at saloon property and destroy liquor bottles with her pewter axe, according to Felder's book.
"I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer," Nation wrote in her autobiography, about one particular hatcheting endeavor in Kiowa, Kansas.
"I threw over the slot machine…and got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beers flew in every direction and I was completely saturated," she continued.
Soon, saloonkeepers were putting up signs outside their bars that read "All Nations Welcome But Carry," and selling intentionally disgusting cocktails called Carry Nations, Felder wrote in her book. Nation was often physically beaten during her rampages, and was arrested about 30 times, according to Felder.
But Nation was steadfast in her crusade. She even started selling decorative hatchet pins to fund her cause, once writing in a letter to a friend, "People are eager to get the little hatchet as a souvenir," according to Grace's biography.
Through her "hatchetation" spectacles, as she called them, Nation earned herself the well-deserved nickname "Hatchet Granny," and was frequently written about in newspapers and depicted in political cartoons.
Nation never saw her dream of temperance go into effect; she died in 1911, nine years before Prohibition went into effect.
Her gravestone reads: "Carry A. Nation. Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition. 'She Hath Done What She Could,'" according to Felder.