by Randy McNutt
In a town where time is elusive, history is what you make it. To Verna, it seems only a short time ago that her late husband, Harry, the former postmaster, was putting on his colorful uniform and preparing for another concert with the local brass band. A photograph of him in uniform sits on her television, and the thought of him is always on her mind. When he died in 1968, she took over as the town’s postmaster. She likes the work, and, besides, it’s a job. Work has always been easy to find in Bentonville, but not a job.
Harry spent most of his life driving a huckster wagon through the farm country and working in the town cemetery. Then he got the post office. Other than farmers and self-employed businesspeople, few residents have had the luxury of a job in Bentonville. They work in West Union, about five miles to the north; in Portsmouth, twenty-five miles to the east; and in Cincinnati, about sixty-five miles to the west. The unemployed—roughly 20 percent of the county’s twenty-five thousand people when I was there—have little hope of finding a job in neighboring small towns. Not enough business is there, either.
On this afternoon, Verna’s son Jim returned home early from his job in a West Union funeral home to do some planting. The funeral home gives him additional income when he’s not farming, and he feels fortunate. He knows that in 1982 Harriet was laid off from her job at the old Hercules trouser factory in the village of Manchester, where she had worked for twenty-two years. She was lucky to find a job as a cafeteria worker in the county school system.
A lack of jobs has caused many young people to leave Bentonville. Verna said she is fortunate that three of her five children—Jim, Harriet, and Linda Sue, a schoolteacher—decided to stay in town.
“Harriet is now the second oldest Bentonville-born resident,” Jim said proudly.
“Oh, Jim!” Harriet said, trying to get him to stop talking.
“No, really, I’m third oldest,” he said. “If Nate Pence were to die, Harriet would be first.”
Of all the jobs in town, the most prestigious was that of teacher at the Bentonville Elementary School. Everyone respected the teachers for doing a good job despite a low budget. The original inscription on the yellow brick school building—Bentonville Rural School—reminded many people of the day when life was less complex, even in this relaxed town.
Linda Sue was Bentonville’s only reading teacher, instructing all eight grades in the school that she attended as a child. “My friend, Ethel Beam, always told me that if I wanted to be a teacher, she would retire and let me have her job,” she said. “I owe it all to Ethel, really. She got me a job as a teacher’s aide and then she retired so I could teach.”
When the yellow brick school closed in the spring of 1989, Linda Sue was transferred. Knowing how much it meant to Bentonville, she was sad to see the old school close, but at least she kept her job. Many of her childhood friends had grown up and left town but she never seriously considered following their paths. “I guess I stayed because I used to be a bashful momma’s kid. I don’t know, I just stayed. One reason, I suppose, is that I wanted to go to college and I didn’t have the money. I stayed home and worked and went to night school. It took years to finish, but I made it.”
To Linda Sue, Bentonville is more than a few old houses and businesses. It is where she has lived. It is Aunt Jessie, a kindly old woman who befriended local children; the post office; and the old Bentonville Fair at harvest time. She would like to see the town grow, of course, but that doesn’t seem likely. Besides, growth might mean complexity. “Years ago the town considered it,” she said of inviting development, “but then we decided that some people would get mad because everybody would have to have bathrooms. There are still a few residents who don’t have inside bathrooms. And, oh, yes, we’d have to get a mayor, too.”
Near Bentonville, Sherman O. Beam, senior member of the Anti-Horse Thief Society, sat in the parlor of his white farmhouse, trying to remember the last time a horse was stolen in Adams County. “I do not recall when the last horse was taken,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think there was ever but one or two horses stolen since I can remember, and that goes back a ways.”
At eighty-three, Beam was tall and silky-voiced. His distinct pronunciation came, no doubt, from teaching more than forty years in the classrooms of small country towns. Sherman Beam had an old history teacher’s sharp recall of dates and events, but he couldn’t even remember the first time he attended a meeting of the society. “I’d say it was around nineteen hundred and twenty,” he said, shuffling through the memories. “In those days, my parents and grandparents were in it, as were many of my other relatives, the Beams and the Roushes.” He stopped talking and lovingly ran his long, thin fingers across the group’s faded incorporation papers, signed by his great-grandfather, William Roush, and Beam’s uncle, Frank Roush, in 1880.
The theft of horses was the most common major crime in Adams County and all across Ohio from the late 1700s until the mid-to-late-1800s. To counteract it, nearly every county or town in Ohio organized its own anti–horse thief group. “The country was infested with horse thieves,” the editor of A History of Warren County, Ohio wrote in 1882.
The unsettled condition of the country made the recovery of stolen horses very difficult. The horse-stealing proclivity of the Indians was one of the chief causes of the hatred of the early settlers toward the red men; but, after all depredations by the Indians had ceased, the farmers continued to suffer much from horse thieves, who were believed to be often organized into gangs. The great value of the horse and the difficulty of recovering one when run away, caused the pioneer to look with malignant hatred upon the horse thief. The early legislatures were composed almost entirely of farmers, and they endeavored to break up this kind of larceny by laws inflicting severe penalties—corporal punishment, fines, imprisonment, and even mutilation.
As early as 1809, the Ohio General Assembly set punishment for stealing horses. On the first offense, the thief was ordered whipped with no more than one hundred and no less than fifty stripes on his naked back. On succeeding offenses, the thief received no more than two hundred and no less than one hundred lashes. On the third offense, the thief received a tougher penalty—both ears were cropped, he was sent to prison for two years, fined no more than a thousand dollars, and ordered to return the horses he stole or repay the owner in cash. After one conviction, a horse thief could no longer hold public office, serve on a jury, or even give testimony in a court case. Fortunately, the ear-cropping penalty was used seldom if at all (potential horse thieves received the message).
Like many other rural counties in Ohio, Warren County formed its own anti–horse thief group, the Horse Rangers, described as “among the most noted orders.” It was organized in 1849; by the time the county history was written four decades later, the group still had 164 rangers on patrol. “More than twenty horses have been stolen from its members,” the editor wrote, “but, by its quick work and detective force, they have never lost a horse, and, in most cases, have captured the thieves. Sometimes the expenses of recovering a stolen horse would amount to $500 (which is always borne by the company) when the horse stolen probably was not worth fifty dollars.”
Of all the other anti–horse thief societies that operated around the state and nation, most no longer exist. But one still patrols the wealthy Hamilton County city of Indian Hill, which organized the Indian Hill Horse Rangers in 1903 to “discourage horse thieves, chicken thieves, and other pilferers of farm and home property.” The volunteers patrolled forty square miles, on foot or on horseback. By 1910, the group’s charter was changed, granting broader powers. Not long after, the force—now the Indian Hill Rangers—became the local police. Meanwhile, a Kansas group, the Anti-Horse Thief Association, operated chapters in Ohio and in seven other states to help protect residents from gangs of horse thieves and thugs who threatened anyone who crossed their paths. The group developed a large network of sources and allied groups, which were called upon to help after a horse was stolen from one of the group’s thirty thou
sand members. In 1906, the group wrote: “An individual could not spend $50 to $100 to recover a $25 horse and capture the thief. The A.T.H.A. would, because of the effect it would have in the future. Thieves have learned these facts and do less stealing from our members, hence the preventative protection … [but] the A.H.T.A. is in no sense a vigilance committee, and the organization has never found it necessary to adopt the mysterious methods of [the] ‘Regulators’ and ‘White Caps’ or kindred organizations. Its deeds are done in the broad open light of the day.”
Other groups took more drastic measures to correct horse thievery. In Butler County in 1805, the pioneer Jeremiah Butterfield’s area near the Great Miami River became so infested with horse thieves and other unsavory people that he took action. A nineteenth-century editor observed: “There was no law that could be carried into execution effectually but lynch-law, which was resorted to successfully.”
In the 1800s, one of the worst names a man could be called was a horse thief. Naturally, Ohio farmers dubbed John Hunt Morgan, the raiding Confederate general, the King of the Horse Thieves. Morgan’s cavalry stole an estimated two thousand horses on its long journey across Ohio. In Mercer County in western Ohio, a man named Marvin Kuhn became known widely as the number one horse thief in the region. Then Fred Hutt was elected county sheriff. Hutt killed Kuhn in a gunfight, and his death nearly stopped the theft of horses in that area. As late as 1890, citizens of Springdale in Hamilton County incorporated as the Springdale Mutual Protective Company, to catch horse thieves and other felons. In 1885, the Ohio legislature granted such groups the authority to pursue and arrest, without a warrant, anybody believed to be guilty of stealing a horse. Local historians don’t know how many thieves the group caught. In the passion of the moment, when they were charging around the countryside looking for horse thieves, members of the Mutual Protective Company forgot all about civil liberties.
No wonder. The public backed this cavalier attitude. In Marion County in 1842, commissioners built a two-story stone jail. According to the author of a 1907 county history, the “principal occupants of this jail were horse thieves, who in an early day did quite a thriving business throughout Ohio. The prisoners frequently escaped by picking their way out through the wall.”
In the Hocking Hills region, another band of horse thieves (and bootleggers, robbers, and murderers) lived in the sandstone Rock House, a cave with a tunnel type of corridor that ran up a 150-foot cliff. The thieves gave the place its nickname: Robbers’ Roost.
Before 1820 in southern Fairfield County, near Lancaster, a group of particularly successful thieves met regularly in a rural area called Sleepy Hollow. They stole horses in the region until a brave prosecuting attorney hired a private detective and formed a posse to catch the gang. The posse discovered the gang’s ten members one night, meeting in a house in the country. The posse captured most of them, and a jury sent them to prison.
How seriously did people take horse thievery? On May 11, 1893, the Williamstown Courier, just across the Ohio River in Grant County, Kentucky, reported succinctly: “Lynching: mob lynches Jim Collins (alias Clark), horse thief, at Sherman last Wednesday, within 300 yards of the spot where he was born.”
Period.
The railroad and the telegraph helped end horse stealing by allowing better detection of criminals and recovery of stolen horses. But before the railroads came into widespread use in Ohio, farmers decided to search for thieves on their own. The Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society was formed in March 1853, to operate as a vigilante group. A few years later it incorporated, making it official and legitimate. By the 1920s, when horses were losing to gas-powered vehicles their importance in the rural community, area farmers started losing interest in the society. “There weren’t many horses being stolen by then,” Beam said. “And horses were beginning to fade out of farm work, so there wasn’t much left for us to do. Earlier, though, when horses were stolen, the society would put off its members, called the Riders, into the countryside to inquire if anyone had seen the stolen horses or the thieves. Trustees appointed a captain to lead the group. If the horses were found, the member who located them was rewarded with ten dollars. That was a lot of money then.”
By the mid-1920s, Bentonville had an anti–horse thief society and no horse thieves. “I guess we scared them off pretty good,” Beam said. “The group had quite a bit of money, too, so it bought the first set of electric lights for Bentonville, and a movie outfit for the school. We also organized annual dinners for the society, and we’d eat, eat, eat. There just wasn’t much left for us to do.” Membership began to rise again in the mid-1950s, when the centennial of the society revived interest. The group’s yearly banquet became the biggest and most popular event in town. The number of guests almost equaled Bentonville’s population. In 1961, the society thought it was time to erect its monument in the middle of Bentonville. In 2001, the Ohio Bicentennial Commission and the society erected a historical marker on Ohio 41 to commemorate the group. Someday, the group might move the monument to that spot, too. “Oh, but that will take some years to do, because we take our time around here doing things,” Harriet said. “We move at our own pace.”
Nowadays, the group is a novelty. From all over the nation, people write to ask for membership. She obliges them by sending membership cards. The group boasts of several hundred card-carrying horse–thief catchers. Group officers purchase cards, plaques, key rings, bumper stickers, and fancy certificates for fellow members.
“We don’t do much now, except to get together to eat,” Sherman Beam said. “A hundred years ago, they’d give you a necktie party if they caught you stealing a horse. But we haven’t had any horses stolen lately. Come to think of it, we haven’t had much of anything happen lately.”
He smiled mischievously, then winked.
And I wondered.
Back in “downtown” Bentonville, I parked on the main street and looked at the nineteenth-century buildings. I watched Leo Tumbleson walk slowly from Devore’s to meet Nathaniel Pence—the oldest person in town—across the street. Nate stood as straight as a cornstalk in August, his arms folded tightly across his chest. He looked up toward a ruddy sky, his eyes shaded by a green-gold cap pushed far down on his forehead. Leo, a retired farmer, spoke reverently of Pence, as if to imply that Nate were some local guru or the sole survivor of an ancient race. At sixty-seven, Leo had lived within two miles of town most of his life. But his friend had done better. Nate had lived in town. That is the distinction. And Nate, a retired carpenter, wasn’t shy about his tenure: “I’m the oldest person living in this town who was born here. I’m seventy-three. There used to be a lot of Pences here, but there ain’t anymore.”
Leo and Nate see change in a seemingly changeless place. Take the long, wooden house up the street, for example. To most people, it must look the same as it has for years. But to Leo and Nate, it becomes more historic every year. “Old George Clinger hauled that house up here by oxen,” Leo said. “It sat on the Ohio River as a wharf boat in the early 1900s. George used four teams of mules to get ahold of it.”
Nate nodded, to approve. His house is dubiously historic itself. In the late 1860s, a drunk with a lustful agenda visited a seventeen-year-old girl who lived there, and she chopped his head off with an ax. The killing is now a part of Bentonville folklore. Some people just come by to stare at the house.
Leo said he prefers history that he remembers personally. He knew, for instance, that Bentonville’s high point—the accumulation of nearly a dozen businesses—occurred in the 1920s, only to waste away in the Depression. “A hotel sat where I live,” he said, “and there was a restaurant with it, too. One day I was walkin’ to school, and Mrs. Brooks, the owner, called to me from the porch and said she had some new candy. That night the place burned. I remember the kids were all a-carryin’ off things. But I can’t remember what day of the week it was.”
“Tuesday,” Nate said matter-of-factly.
“Oh, all right!” Leo said.
/> Nate is known for his ability to recall dates and events, and he further demonstrated his process to Leo: “There was five stores left by then. The flour mill had went out in ’27. At the hotel, they was heatin’ water to shave with and the stove blowed ’em all up.”
“Doggone right, Nathaniel!”
By the 1920s, Bentonville had progressed from having a one-room school to a two-story wooden school that stood where the empty Bentonville Elementary is today. In those days, young Nate was a real stinker.
“Every time me and another boy would come to school,” he said, “we’d have skunk on us.” He drew a line down his body. “You see, trappin’ was the only way we could make any extra money. So one day me and ol’ Elwood Scott looked at our traps before we went to school, and when we got there the superintendent sent us home because we smelled. We got tired of that happenin’ all the time. Heck, we had to trap. So the next time we went to school, we pooshed a stink bag under the big potbellied stove and taped it up underneath. Pretty soon, it smelled. Whew! That’s the last time they ever sent us home, by gosh.”
“Remember old Joe?” Leo asked.
“Old Joe was a rooster that belonged to Bill Naylor,” Nate said. “Bill would talk to that rooster and make it crow. One night, some boys had a chicken roast and invited Old Joe. Bill came along later to do some fiddlin’ and at the roast he kept sayin’, ‘Boy, that’s the best chicken I ever ate.’ Three days later, Bill was still goin’ around town sayin’, ‘I wonder whatever happened to my Old Joe?’”