by Randy McNutt
“Now, I think we’re finally going to grow,” he said, “and it’s not because of marriage. We’ve got another bridge and a $10 million high school to serve four townships. We were going to call it Southern Brown High School, but somebody noticed that the kids would be running around with SB on their jackets.”
In the squires’ time, townships were powerful local governments that controlled the schools, taxed, built roads, and kept the peace. There were no real “squires,” but local people used the term endearingly to refer to their justices of the peace—influential country magistrates elected by the townships. They not only married people, but served as court officers and worked with township constables to prevent breaches of the law.
Shelton did all these things—and more. He was born in 1776 in Stafford County, Virginia, and migrated to Brown County, Ohio, as a young man. Shortly after his appointment as township justice of the peace in 1822, he determined that marrying couples could be a lucrative sideline to politics. From then on, the good squire concentrated on matrimony. He’d marry anybody who could pay—and do it with or without a license. Beasley was worse. He falsely told grooms he could face a long prison sentence for marrying couples without a license, but, for a fee commensurate to the risk, he’d cooperate. The squire invested his considerable earnings in gold and bank notes.
As word of easy marriage spread in the 1820s, Shelton married couples from all over the South and from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, New York, and other states. Thousands flocked to Aberdeen. Each morning, Shelton followed a ritual: He’d walk down to the wharf to watch for steamboats bringing other happy—and sometimes desperate—couples. Shelton used to say, “The early squire gets the wedding.” He preferred payment in cash, of course, usually twenty dollars, but, if that wasn’t possible, he’d take a pocketknife or anything he considered valuable. Twenty dollars was a large fee in those days, but Shelton knew his customers had few options. If they were poor, he’d accept payment in pork, potatoes, apples, turnips, and other vegetables to stock a large produce house that he operated as another sideline.
He was an entrepreneurial wedding machine. He even married slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. He accepted whatever payment they could offer. “In thousands of cases, the squires didn’t bother to record the marriages,” said Dorothy Helton, a member of Brown County’s genealogical and historical societies. “They married couples under the table, you might say. Other times, the squires intended to file marriage certificates in the courthouse, but they didn’t go over to Georgetown, the county seat, too often. When they finally went, they forgot to take the certificates. Most of the ‘lost marriages’ involved Kentuckians, who came to Aberdeen to avoid an 1800s Kentucky law requiring couples to produce a bondsman—usually a family member with cattle or some other form of security—to assure the marriage’s longevity. The funny thing is, Ohio at one time made people wait three days before they could marry. That’s why during World War II a lot of Ohioans went to Kentucky to be married fast.”
The squires’ casual attitude and forgetfulness have caused much trouble across the river ever since the 1800s. “Some families wonder if their ancestors ever did bother to marry,” said Molly Kendall of the Mason County Museum in Maysville. “In my own family, the squires married a number of people, so I can tell you from experience that this is a tough genealogical pursuit. Shelton turned in some of his marriages to the courthouse, but Beasley didn’t bother much. He was so eager to marry people, though, that he’d row out into the middle of the river, if necessary, and marry them right there in rowboats.”
Oddly enough, few villagers complained about his multiple business practices. He operated by popular demand. Years of ignoring the law finally caused trouble, however, when the Civil War ended in 1865. Seeking pensions for themselves and their children, widows of veterans applied to the state of Kentucky, only to be told that their marriages were invalid and their children illegitimate. After thousands of widows complained, Molly Kendall told me, the Kentucky legislature was forced to recognize marriages performed in Aberdeen before the war. Despite the criticism, Shelton did not slow down. In fact, after the controversy his marriage business increased. More eager couples arrived in Aberdeen, many wearing fancy clothes and riding in carriages. Some married while sitting on horses, in case they needed to make a quick escape.
By the time Shelton died on February 15, 1870, it was apparent that Aberdeen’s business of matrimony had become too big—and necessary—to be stopped cold. Shelton estimated, conservatively, that he had married ten thousand to fifteen thousand couples in forty-seven years. This amazes me. I am also amazed that the man lived to brag about it—and to be ninety-six years old! But his death did not stop Aberdeen. Beasley, who served as justice of the peace from 1870 to 1892, was even more prolific. He refused to accept alternate payment plans (no credit cards then). His business card read: “No money, no marry.” He also interpreted the marriage laws more liberally than Shelton, if that was possible. To Beasley, marrying couples was a business, regardless of the circumstances. His son, Thomas, took over as pilot of a riverboat, the aptly named Gretna Green, which ran up and down the Ohio picking up eloping couples.
When Squire Beasley left town on business every so often, some local rascal would bet his drinking companions that he could convince a gullible couple that he was the one and only Squire Massie Beasley. Over the years, hundreds of couples left Aberdeen under the assumption that they were married. Probably Beasley himself couldn’t determine if he had actually married them. After performing so many marriages, some without licenses, he was as ignorant of couples’ names as he was of the fakers. But he honestly believed he was performing a valuable service to society. In his lackadaisical way, Beasley defied church and state, but always with a smile.
Enraged parents in Maysville were powerless to stop him, as they had been Shelton. Dorothy Richardson, a Maysville resident and a writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 1890s, determined that illegal marriages ran through three generations of families. “The question naturally arises as to why these men were never prosecuted, and why the people of the town stood by and suffered their laws to be ignored,” she wrote in a newspaper story in 1897. “The apparently perplexing query is readily explained by the old adage, ‘A kind heart covers a multitude of sins.’ A more popular man than either of these rollicking, careless old squires never trod the earth, and if they made money easily and in a questionable way, they in turn spent it just as freely among their neighbors. The only people who ever said harm of Massie Beasley, or who ever tried to do him serious injury, were the local members of the clerical profession on both sides of the river, who openly denounced him from their pulpits. But in spite of all their preaching and teaching against him, when any members of their congregations wanted to get married, it was often Massie Beasley, and not the minister, who was favored with the job.”
Beasley’s only known competitor was a preacher who called the squire “this evil crying in our midst.” Most eloping couples ignored the preacher, so he quit his church to enter the marriage business full time. Pressed by the competition, Beasley had to temporarily decrease his rates. His agents actually bragged that Squire Beasley was the only official authorized to marry without benefit of marriage license. The preacher, in exasperation, gave up and left town.
“When an agitated and breathless couple came hurrying down to the ferry,” Richardson wrote, “with an infuriated father or guardian following close at their heels, it was Massie Beasley who calmed their fears by the assurance that he would see them safely over, and that he would not give their followers an opportunity of boarding the boat. And he was always true to his promise. Nor were any threats or prayers on the part of gesticulating parties in pursuit strong enough to deter him from his purpose of landing his passengers on the borders of the land of promise.”
If the pursuers followed in skiffs, the Beasleys were prepared. When the Gretna Green whistle blew six times, everybody in
Aberdeen ran to the wharf to gather around the squire to offer protection. Beasley usually watched the river through a powerful spyglass, which he carried at all times in his coat pocket. In such emergencies, he shouted his brief ceremony to the eloping couple as they docked and ran from the boat, with irate family in pursuit.
Most couples, especially those whose parents opposed their wedding, eloped at night. They didn’t have to worry, for the Aberdeen marriage machine worked around the clock. The Gretna Green was so busy at night, in fact, that Beasley’s dock supervisor earned additional income by renting skiffs to desperate people who couldn’t fit into the boat. Townspeople helped by assisting with the marriages, sewing wedding clothes, furnishing special wedding items, and rowing boats across the river. The town’s boys held the reins of wedding party horses. The local printer called his newspaper the Gretna Green and promoted the squire’s cause at every opportunity.
Steamboat elopements brought Aberdeen many of its large, fancy weddings. Every few days large coaches rolled into town, pulled by teams of expensive horses. The people of Aberdeen left their workstations and homes to watch the bride and her bridesmaids. For those customers, Beasley reserved much respect, offering the bride his arm and walking her to the doorway of his home. But they paid for the honor—$150 for an elaborate wedding. Sometimes, groups of ten couples married at the same time.
Unfortunately for Beasley’s neighbors, all was not quiet on the marriage front. They complained when grooms on horseback fired pistols to waken the squire at night. One time, a young Kentucky man and his future bride rode for days to get to Aberdeen. “There had been a feud between the families for generations,” Richardson wrote, “and the father of the bride vowed that he would kill the lover rather than permit him to marry his daughter. The pursuers were so near that the noise of their horses’ hooves could be heard distinctly when the Squire poked his head out of his window in answer to a volley of shots.… The Squire was then in his seventy-eighth year and was too stiff in the joints to dress himself quickly, so he appeared before the excited couple wrapped in a long quilt and shod only in his socks. The Squire mumbled over a hasty marriage ritual at the conclusion of which the new husband flung him a well-stuffed wallet and dashed away toward the hills … just as their pursuers came up the street to find they had been foiled.”
Another time, a young man paid somebody ten dollars to row him and his girl across the Ohio to Aberdeen. Her father, who was close behind, hired another skiff for twenty dollars. In the middle of the Ohio, the young man stood up in the boat, waved his hat in the air in jubilation, and promptly fell overboard. The father plucked his daughter from her boat.
Such events continued until Beasley’s death. His body was barely cold when several greedy men, assuming that tradition would continue, started marrying couples in Aberdeen. But the state decided to enforce its marriage-certificate rules, and the Brown County sheriff chased away the offenders.
Jesse Ellis, Beasley’s deputy, became the next justice of the peace, but he didn’t try to continue the marriage racket. He had kept the previous squire’s files, Molly Kendall said, but nobody knew what they contained. In 1992, fired destroyed them and the home of an Ellis descendant. Dorothy Richardson wrote that she reviewed the surviving files briefly in 1897 and concluded they were a potential hotbed of campaign scandals. Apparently Shelton and Beasley kept enough names—Richardson counted five current and thirty-four former congressmen, even former senators and a retired foreign minister, among the grooms, not to mention the squires’ exorbitant fees charged for over seventy years.
No wonder Squire Massie Beasley died with a smile on his face.
13
The King of Ashville
The past of Pickaway County—and the past of small-town America—is hidden in a little building at 34 Long Street in Ashville. That’s the address of the Ohio Small Town Museum, a tribute to every old town in an unofficial network of rural communities that ruled America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Ashville is a good place for such a museum because the town could have ended up like Confederate Crossroads or Hole-in-the-Ground or any other Ohio ghost town. But it didn’t; it had geography going for it as well as town spirit and luck. People refused to let their town die. Founded in 1882 on Walnut Creek, off the Scioto River, Ashville got a late start. It was just another slow-growing community in rural central Ohio until suburban Columbus started spilling over into neighboring counties in the 1980s. Suddenly little Ashville received a second look from people who didn’t mind driving forty-five minutes to jobs in the city. As a new commuter town, Ashville has advantages: nearness to U.S. Route 23, State Route 316, and the Rickenbacker International Airport, southeast of Columbus.
Yet Ashville does not aspire to be a city filled with chain stores and the typical suburban life. That’s why the town appeals to people. It is small enough (population about 2,500) to lack the sophistication and panache of the larger communities, yet it is conveniently located. Even the town’s Web site is like a letter from home. It features the logo of Ashville’s old-fashioned traffic signal—locally made, one of the nation’s first, and an icon known by everyone in town. When I found the Web site in 2004, it featured tributes to three local soldiers: Sergeant Joel McDaniel, crew chief on a Black Hawk helicopter; Staff Sergeant Michael R. Gloyd, instructor for crew chiefs at the New River Air Station in Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Second Lieutenant John Reber Scott, a pilot-training candidate in Oklahoma. Mayor Chuck Wise wrote his homey “A Word from the Mayor” column, and town resident Rose Jamison wrote her regular “Ashville News.” Like the town, the Web site reflects a friendliness and pleasantness.
Driving around the tree-lined side streets, I felt at home. I remembered Oxford historian Andrew Cayton’s line about Ohio: “Place somehow molds human beings as much as human beings mold place.”
I found the Ohio Small Town Museum, a time machine of rural life, in a small building. Older volunteers remember many of the events depicted in their displays, and they enjoy talking about the years when small towns were big deals in America.
Visitors can relive American history through the Ashville visits of General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the supreme commander in Europe during World War I; Ohio governor James Cox, the Democrats’ 1920 presidential candidate from Dayton and founder of the Cox newspaper chain; and Williams Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ champion of free silver and a presidential nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Other exhibits feature Ashville’s connections—both strong and tenuous—to nationally famous people who may have visited briefly, drove near the town, or actually lived near it. They include Billy Carter, Tecumseh, Elvis Presley, actress Sally Kellerman, Roy Rogers (locals maintain that Roy was fired from his job at the town’s canning factory when he was caught playing guitar on company time), and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner (a museum guide claimed that the Boss once served at the area’s old Air Force base).
Down another aisle are display cases containing personal items owned by a local dwarf who played a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz and puppets made by Vivian Michael, one of the earliest puppeteers to use hand-moving rods in traditional hand-in-body puppets.
“The museum has never been what I’d call an attraction museum,” volunteer Bob Hines said. “We didn’t start the thing to bring in tourists. It’s a museum for the local people. After we were up and running, though, we found that people were coming into town just to visit the museum. They enjoy it because our history is universal. It the story of every small town.”
Hines assembles the displays and operates the museum with several cocurators, including Jack Lemmon (“I’m not the actor; he had the hair and the moves and I had neither”), Charlie Morrison, Annabelle Ward-Hines, and Charles Cordle.
“We started our museum to reconnect people to our community and its past,” Hines said. “We recognized that in order to have a vital community, people that live here must have a strong sense of community, and one of the ways t
o do that is to reinforce local pride. That is what our museum is all about. We are recapturing and honoring past achievements of a rural community. We are preserving artifacts that are the physical manifestations of these achievements. We are using these items to challenge our children to follow their own dreams. We do not want old buildings to just be objects for vandalism; we want kids to know what older buildings represent and why they exist. We want them to honor and respect the past. We want them to be excited by national and world history when they learn about their connections to that history.”
In the nation’s first 125 years, rural towns—including and especially Ohio’s—dominated national politics and economics. Life was not idyllic then. It was harsh, lonely, and filled with physical labor. Ohio had remarkably self-sufficient towns, supported by local pride that bordered on boosterism. After World War I, however, the towns changed. People started losing their faith in what was possible for them to achieve.
Ohio had its solid small towns and also places so tiny that they could hardly be considered towns: Bacon, Bagdad, Cacklers Corners, Candy Town, Confederate Crossroads, Deep Cut, Halfway House, Happy Hollow, Hardscrabble (the name tells it all), Henpeck (it makes some sort of statement about early Buckeye matrimony), Hole-in-the-Ground, Lick Town (it should have been next to Dogtown), Mysticville, Needful, Nice, Pattytown, Pincher, Pointopolis, Scrub, Skulltown, Slick, Smarts Spur (ouch), Sodom (surprisingly, Victorian Ohio had at least two Sodoms), Spunky Puddle, Striptown (why wasn’t it next to Sodom?), Sweet Wine, Rag Town, Rowdy Ville, Wahoo, Whiskeyville, White Woman’s Town (so politically incorrect), Zeal, and Zebra.
They popped up and vanished when people realized they had moved to nowhere. Yet rural Ohio is an intriguing place filled with whimsy, drama, humor, pristine countryside, the world’s largest Amish population, small college towns—even forgotten towns named Wally and Beaver. (I’m still looking for Ward and June.)