
Sally Swanger was a resident of Cold Mountain, North Carolina during the 1860s. The wife of Esco Swanger, she was the mother of two young men who served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War before deserting. The Confederate Home Guard officer Raymond Teague visited her home in 1864 and shot her husband dead before torturing her to lure her sons out, upon which he shot them both dead. Sally was rendered mute from the trauma, and she was rescued and taken in by her friends Ada Monroe and Ruby Thewes, with whom she lived at the Black Cove farm after the war's end.