The soldiers demanded that Hart cook them one of her turkeys, and she agreed to feed them. As they entered the cabin, they placed their guns by the door before sitting at her table to eat. As they were drinking and eating, she pushed their guns outside through a hole in the wall of the cabin. After the soldiers had been drinking a sufficient time, she grabbed one of the remaining guns and ordered the men to stay still. One ignored her threat, so she shot and killed him. Another made a move toward the weapons, and she killed him as well. She held the remaining Tories captive until her husband and neighbors arrived. According to legend, her husband wanted to shoot the soldiers outright, but she demanded that they be hanged, which was accomplished from a nearby tree. The various versions of this story provide different details. But in 1912 construction crews working on the Elberton and Eastern Railroad in the area found evidence that seemed to validate the legend. While grading a railroad site less than a mile from the old Hart Cabin, the workers found five or six skeletons buried neatly in a row. A few of the skeletons' necks were broken, which suggested they had been hanged. They were determined to have been buried for at least 100 years. In her 1925 county history, Cook published a version based on an 1825 newspaper article. McIntosh quoted two such stories in a 1940 history of Elbert County. Other stories Mrs. Louisa H. Kendall was the niece of John Hart, the son whom Nancy lived with in later life. Kendall wrote a letter in 1872 recalling some of the stories her uncle had heard from his mother. According to this letter, once when Nancy was taking a bag of grain to the mill, a band of Tories forced her off her horse and threw the grain to the ground. Undaunted, Hart picked up the heavy bag and walked the rest of the way to the mill. Nancy Hart was said to have acted as a sniper, killing Tories as they came across the Broad River. McIntosh quotes a Mr. Snead, who was also related to the Harts. He said that one time during the war, Nancy was cooking lye soap in her cabin when her daughter discovered a spy looking through a crack in the wall. Hart threw