Unicoi County, Tennessee, where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town's children) assembled in the Clinchfield Railroad yard. The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial derrick between four o'clock and five o'clock that afternoon. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks. A veterinarian examined Mary after the hanging and determined that she had a severely infected tooth in the precise spot where Red Eldridge had prodded her. The authenticity of a widely distributed (and heavily retouched) photo of her death was disputed years later by Argosy magazine. References in popular media Mark Medoff's dramatic version of the story entitled Big Mary was first produced by Great Valley High School in Pennsylvania in 1989 and was published by Dramatists Play Service in 1990. George Brant's play Elephant's Graveyard tells the story of Mary's execution through the circus members and the residents of Erwin, first produced by the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and was published by Samuel French, Inc. in 2010. Writer Caleb Lewis wrote a play about Mary and the events that led to her execution entitled Clinchfield. The play premiered at Flinders University on July 22, 2009. Singer songwriter Chuck Brodsky wrote a song entitled "Mary the Elephant". Writer Sharyn McCrumb referred to the hanging of Mary in a few of her Ballad novels. In "She Walks These Hills", a radio DJ uses the example of 'hanging the elephant' as a warning, begging people not to use vigilante justice against an escaped convict. In the first chapter of "The Devil Amongst the Lawyers", an elderly reporter brags to a cub reporter about the power of the press, insisting that the circus owner was forced to hang the elephant as a result of his inflammatory newspaper articles. Dana Adam Shapiro told the story of Mary in his book "You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce". In the short story anthology McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Glen David Gold's story "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter" tells a fictionalized version of Mary's story. Jodi Picoult mentions Mary in her novel Leaving Time, published on October 14, 2014.