Long before true-crime podcasts, Mobile had its own sensational murder case — one still remembered nearly two centuries later through a single live oak tree growing behind the old Church Street Graveyard downtown. The story, drawn from local historical accounts including Virginia Greer’s 1985 book “Mobile — Talk About a Town!,” centers on the death of a young man named Nathaniel Frost and the trial of his closest friend, Charles R.S. Boyington.
According to the historical record, the two men were well known around downtown Mobile in the spring of 1834. Frost, described as frail and often ill, and Boyington, an unemployed journeyman printer, poet and gambler, were roommates and constant companions. On Saturday, May 10, 1834, the two were last seen together walking toward the graveyard woods near what is now Church Street.
A Child’s Account and a Body in the Woods
A young girl later told two men in town that she had seen a tall man and a short man fighting near a large chinquapin tree behind the graveyard, and that the taller of the two had fallen, bloodied, to the ground. The next morning, Frost’s body was discovered in the woods near that tree. Boyington had already left Mobile by boat up the Alabama River. He was tracked down, arrested and returned to the city to face accusations that he killed his friend over money owed to creditors.
Boyington maintained his innocence throughout his imprisonment. He was allowed visits from his fiancée, Rose de Fleur, the daughter of a French refugee count, and correspondence with his mother in Connecticut. Some of his letters and poetry were published locally at the time in The Mobile Mercantile Advertiser, and he was later described by contemporaries as a literary talent. A Presbyterian minister, the Rev. William T. Hamilton, spent long hours counseling him in jail, according to historical accounts of the case.
Trial and Sentence
At trial, prosecutors argued that Boyington killed Frost for the roughly $95 found in his possession, an amount he reportedly never accounted for. The girl who told the story of the fight in the woods was considered too young for her account to carry weight in court, leaving the case built largely on circumstantial evidence. On November 29, 1834, six months after Frost’s death, a jury convicted Boyington of murder. He was sentenced to hang the following February.
Local histories and Mobile folklore have long carried the story forward from there: Boyington reportedly declared to the end that he was innocent, and said that if his claim was true, an oak tree would one day grow from his grave as proof. Years after his execution, a tree did take root at the burial site — and the live oak that stands there today, still known as the Boyington Oak, has been tied to the legend ever since, drawing history buffs, ghost-story enthusiasts and curious visitors to the wooded area near the old graveyard.
Nearly 200 years later, the case remains one of Mobile’s most enduring pieces of local lore, blending a documented 19th-century criminal trial with a legend that has outlived every person involved in it.