A white picket fence encloses a tombstone-like granite marker, "Last Mob Lynching In Texas," and the historic telephone pole that served as the gallows. This is not out in the boondocks, but on a downtown street corner in the county seat of Eastland.

The lynching happened on the night of November 19, 1929, when an angry mob broke into the nearby jail, dragged out the infamous Santa Claus bank robber, and hanged him. The jail, now a local museum, still displays the hanging rope.

 Neatly coiled in a wood-framed, glass-fronted display case, the lynching rope is a prize exhibit in the Eastland County Law Enforcement Museum, formerly a local jail.