The Land: What the Buzzards Knew

Green Swamp East Tract, May 1918

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Isham Stewart was fifty-eight years old and had spent most of his life alone. He raised horses and cattle somewhere in the deep interior of what is now the Green Swamp East Tract — a one-room cabin off Tanic Road, at least fifteen miles from the nearest town of Richland by the roads of that time, which were not much more than ruts through palmetto scrub. He had been a bachelor until late in life, when he married a woman named Sarah — called Sallie — who was fifteen years his senior and had children from a previous marriage. They had no children together. What brought two people that old to homesteading that deep in the swamp is not recorded. The record is thin on the Stewarts before May of 1918, which is when the record gets very thick very fast.

Isham had recently withdrawn all his money from the bank. He didn't trust it there — the economy of 1918 was the kind that made a man want his savings where he could see them. He brought the cash home to the cabin. Sallie's family knew about it. Word moved the way it moves in small communities: not announced, just known.

Sallie's grandson was a young man named Josh Browning. His friend was John Tucker. At some point in the days before May 9th, the two of them were seen together at a train depot, talking. Witnesses later placed them on the road that led toward the Stewarts' homestead. Tucker would claim he never spoke to Browning that day and had spent it working in the woods. Nobody believed him, but nobody could prove otherwise either. What the record does show is that on the evening of May 9th, the two men were at the cabin. According to Josh Browning's own later testimony, they ate supper with the old couple and stayed the night. The cabin had two beds, a table, three or four chairs. That was the whole of it.

Sometime around nine o'clock, when the Stewarts had gone to bed, Tucker got up and picked up an axe — or so Browning would later testify. No one else was there to say otherwise.

The bodies were not discovered for about a week.

It was H.G. Browning — Josh's uncle — who found them, when he came by to return a horse he believed belonged to Isham. He knew something was wrong before he got to the door. The buzzards were on the roof. George Browning, Sallie's son, described what he found inside: his mother on the floor, her left hand and leg nearly severed, her head caved in. Beside her was an empty money box in a pool of dried blood. Isham was still in the bed. The coroner's report said both had been killed with an axe. The sheriff's report differs on one detail — it says the bodies were found rolled in their mattresses and buried just outside the cabin — and the two accounts have never been fully reconciled. What everyone agrees on is the empty money box.

The sheriff didn't have to look far. During the week after the murders, before the bodies were found, Josh Browning had gone to St. Petersburg. One of Tucker's relatives had been seen with $121 she said Tucker gave her. And Browning's own mother, when questioned, told investigators that her son had asked her — before any of this — whether his stepgrandfather had really taken the money out of the bank.

When the inquest was called, Josh Browning drove up in a brand new car. His father and uncle were arrested on the spot, on suspicion, because nobody yet believed the son had come by a new automobile honestly. They were released. Josh and Tucker were eventually taken into custody, tried twice each — four trials in all, with testimony that shifted and contradicted itself in the way that testimony does when everyone in the room knows more than they're saying. Both men were convicted. They were each sentenced to twenty years, ten for each murder.

Josh Browning escaped from prison not long after. A fellow inmate he broke out with was killed in a shootout with law enforcement. Browning ran. According to the stories that came down through the area afterward — and here the record gives way to legend, which is worth noting — he went back into the swamp. He had hidden the money somewhere out there, or so the story goes, and he went back for it. He lived in the Green Swamp for ten years before he gave himself up.

When he was returned to prison, his attorneys discovered that he had never been advised of his constitutional rights and had never been asked whether he wanted counsel appointed. His guilty plea was withdrawn on those grounds. Josh Browning was released from prison in December 1938 — more than twenty years after the night he and Tucker ate supper with the old couple and stayed over.

The money's whereabouts depend on who's telling the story. Some say Browning gave it to his father before he fled, and that his father's new truck was bought with it. Some say it's still out there in the swamp, buried where no one will find it. John Tucker served his time, got out, and died in 1951. His grave is in the old Tuckertown Cemetery, where the oldest stones date from the 1850s. The record on Josh Browning after 1938 goes quiet.

Isham and Sarah Stewart are buried beside what used to be their cabin, in a small fenced plot a few yards from where they were found. For a long time the marker was handmade and barely legible, and the date on it was wrong. In 2006, a water management district employee and a local man who had been hunting the area for years hiked in together on a July morning to place a proper marker. It's about eight miles down Cumpressco Grade Road from State Road 471, then on foot from there. The cabin still stands — one wall gone, a tree stump fashioned into a seat near where the old stove was, cattle fencing rusting in the brush. An orange tree grows nearby with no reason to be there.

The land around it looks almost exactly as it did in May of 1918. That's not by accident. The Green Swamp was preserved precisely because it was too wet and too remote for anyone to do much with it. The Stewarts chose it, or it chose them, for the same reason. Fifteen miles from Richland in 1918 was a long way from anything.

It was also a long way from anyone who might hear.

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Sources: Southwest Florida Water Management District, WaterMatters Magazine, Sept.–Oct. 2006; AbandonedFL.com, "Stewart Homestead," citing Browning trial testimony; Find a Grave, memorial for Isham Stewart (ID 25119368), Sumter County, Florida; ClickOrlando / WKMG, "A creepy shack in this Florida swamp hides a gruesome past," Dec. 5, 2024, citing historian David Bulit; Skunk Ape Events, "Murder Cabin," citing Sumter County sheriff's report and Tuckertown Cemetery records.