That execution was not open to the public, but afterward, Sheriff T. S. Holland allowed any of the “hundreds of people” who had descended on Forsyth the day of the hanging to view the dead body. Until 1924, Georgia law provided for hanging in the county where the capital crime occurred. Such executions were evidently rare in Monroe County, however, for when Matthews was hanged, the Advertiser noted that it was only the second since 1865. [In 1904, Smith Brooks, having once escaped a lynch mob, was hanged here.] The state legislature in 1924 abolished hanging and instituted the electric chair, then located at the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville.