Vaughn Echols “Eccles” Grant was sheriff at the time the Prohibition Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. Prohibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was mandated by the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was repealed Dec. 5, 1933.
During the two-year period of Grant’s service as sheriff, 214 moonshine stills were destroyed. As a result, he lost the election in 1922 to James Hamilton Ballenger.
Grant was then appointed as a U.S. Treasury Department Revenue Officer (prohibition agent). He headed the squad in charge of “dry” enforcement for a seven-county area in Western North Carolina.
On July 24, 1925, in Henderson County, Grant shot and killed Adam O. Ballenger during a “gun battle” when Grant was attempting to make an arrest. Adam Ballenger and his father, Milton Cruscoe Ballenger, lived in Spartanburg County, S.C., near the line with Polk County, North Carolina. Friends of Ballenger succeeded in having Grant indicted for manslaughter, according to several newspaper reports. The case was scheduled to be heard in federal court in Asheville.
Grant was killed June 1, 1926, before the scheduled court date, during a six-mile vehicle pursuit of suspected blockaders (moonshiners) in Henderson County.
The car in which Grant was driving and Will Owens was a passenger was passing the suspects’ car when the fatal shot was fired. Owens realized that something had gone wrong with Grant when he failed to control the car and fell over against him. Skidding along, with its wheels on the side of the right of the bank of the road going south, the car Grant was driving, a Nash roadster, struck two telephone posts and shattered them both at their bases.
Owens survived the crash and managed to handcuff the two back-seat passengers of the whiskey runners’ car. The two front-seat occupants fled into the woods.
Grant died from a revolver shot to the head, according to the autopsy report.
On being brought to the jail in Hendersonville, the two suspects arrested by Owens stated that William D. “Button” Bennison was the person who shot Grant. According to newspaper articles at the time, federal officials stated that Grant was killed for revenge by the ex-convict and gunman ring leader of a well organized gang of blockaders.
W.D. Bennison was a “pal and partner” of Adam Ballenger, who was killed by Grant in 1925, according to newspaper reports. Bennison had been arrested three times by prohibition agents. On one charge he had served a year in the Atlanta penitentiary. He was arrested again in 1925 and served five months in jail.
After the shooting on the night of June 1, 1926, two bloodhounds led a posse of 100 heavily armed men to the home of Wilkie Lockaby in the “Catshead” section of Henderson County near Crab Creek. Lockaby was the other passenger in the suspects’ car and had fled the scene with Bennison.
Lockaby was arrested by deputy Garren. Bennison fled the home. He was caught a short distance away and placed in the Buncombe County Jail. In 1930, Bennison was a prisoner in the state penitentiary in Raleigh. He was released sometime between 1930 and 1934. On Oct. 16, 1934, he died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident in Henderson County.