Richmond History-Law and Order of the Olden Days
Part One–One Hundred Fifty Years of Crime and Crime Prevention:1800-1950
- By Joy Lewis –
The township of Pittstown was organized in 1796, only seven years after the first settles arrived. Approximately one hundred families lived in the area that today encompasses Livonia, Richmond, and Canadice. When the eligible voters – they were all men over the age of twenty-one – met in the spring of the year at the tavern in Allen’s Hill, they elected Lemuel Chipman Town Supervisor. Six other men were chosen as councilmen. These seven men set about the task of bringing law and order to the frontier.
By 1830 the towns of Livonia and Canadice had been separately established, leaving Richmond, in name and boundaries, as we know it today. Though the geography is recognizable, the governance of two hundred years ago would be quite unfamiliar.
The principle peace officer in every township was the Justice of the Peace; Richmond had two Justices. The JP was responsible for rendering judgment in civil cases, such as default of debt or trespass. Court was held once a month at the home of the Justice. Judgment was rendered, a fine assessed, and the fine was taxed. The successful suitor was responsible for collecting the fine from the other party; the tax was paid to the court. Early justices included Philip Reed, Noah Ashley, Joel Roberts, Wickes Smith, and Philip Short.
Constables—there were four appointed annually in the years prior to the Civil War—supported the Justices by serving written notice to those who were to appear in court. If a man summoned to court could not read, the constable read the notice to him in the presence of at least two witnesses, then the constable and the witnesses all signed the summons. It was the constable who kept order on court days and who collected the tax to be paid on the fine. Jacob Wimble, Cyrus Wells, Joshua Philips, Chauncey Ward, Thomas Briggs, and George Thayer all served as Richmond Constables in the 1820s.
Other offices designed to aid in civil order included the fence viewer, the pound master, the path master, and the keeper of weights and measures. These men were appointed by the Town Board to serve a year’s term. The fence viewer visited properties in his area to inspect a farmer’s fence. The owner of an improperly maintained fence was instructed to make repairs or face a stiff fine. Each school district (there were ten in Richmond) had a fence viewer. The pound master was authorized to round up wandering livestock and impound the stray beasts in his enclosed yard. The owner was notified and obliged to pay a fine to the pound master in order to retrieve his animal. The path master was in charge of road maintenance. Not that he did the work by himself; it was his responsibility to see that each land owner whose property bordered a pathway did the grading and ditching needed to sustain the road.
At the county level there was a sheriff and a jail, both established at the county seat in Canandaigua. Two Richmond men were early Ontario County Sheriffs: Nathaniel Allen (served 1815-1819) and Joseph Garlinghouse (served 1825-1831).
There were in the olden-days crimes which we would recognize: robberies, assaults, public drunkenness, murder. But there were some activities which were deemed to be criminal then, which are not today. During the 1850s it was illegal to help a fugitive slave escape. There were many in Richmond who ignored this unjust law, as the Underground Railroad was quite active in town.
In 1864 Richmond voters decided to outlaw the buying, selling, or drinking of spirituous liquors in town. And, since it was illegal for women to vote, this was the men’s idea. Temperance was an important social movement of the time. Many believed that the abuse of intoxicating beverages was largely responsible for crime and contributed to the neglect of family duty. A Geneva newspaper headline in 1906 screamed, “Another Murder Charged up to Whiskey.”
Although there was a large block of responsible men in Richmond who endorsed the Temperance Pledge, there was an equally large group who bemoaned the loss of easy access to booze. An enterprising coterie of youths improvised their own Temperance Pledge: “Recognizing the evils of drunkenness and resolved to check its alarming increase, we do solemnly pledge ourselves not to get drunk, except on Christmas, at Sheep Shearing, Independence Day, and Muster Day.”
Fifteen distilleries had been in operation in Richmond when the law went into effect; three or four of them went “underground.” Though Richmond was officially “dry” for eighty years, not all her citizens were temperate. If an intoxicating beverage were wanted, many there were who knew where to find one. Burton Deuel, in his memoir Reminiscences, tells a number of tales of illegal imbibing.
“Years ago,” Burton wrote, “Lester Washburn was taken to court for selling hard cider and booze. When the excise man served him a warrant, he said, ‘I understand you’ve been selling hard cider.’ ‘Humph!’ was Lester’s reply. ‘I’ve never sold any hard cider in my life.’ Which was true – he always gave it away.”
Burton wrote about Irishman Pat Sullivan, an itinerant farm hand who lived in Honeoye a hundred years ago. In the summer of 1911 Pat went home to Ireland to see his mother. He planned to return to America in April of 1912 and had a ticket on the Titanic. But the night before, he got drunk and missed the boat. Pat took the next ship leaving for America and showed up in Honeoye a few weeks later. There he ran into a friend who said, “I thought you went down with the Titanic.” Burton recounted Pat’s reply: “‘I got too much whiskey and I missed the boat. Sure and begorrah, I’ll never give up that whiskey that saved me life as long as I live.’ And he never did.”
It was illegal in the 1800s to commit adultery. It did, however, occur. A newspaper story of August 14, 1880 reported: “A very disgraceful affair occurred in the town of Richmond a few days ago. One Henry Randolph, colored, had been hunting, and on his return caught a well-to-do nursery man, named A. Randolph Pennell, and his wife in improper intimacy. The outraged husband leveled his gun at the destroyer of his happiness and fired, the charge by mistake taking effect in his wife’s leg. Afterwards he gave the man a severe pounding with the stock of his gun. The affair has created considerable excitement in the neighborhood of its occurrence, and very properly the people generally sympathize with the outraged [husband].” The husband, by the way, was not charged with wrong-doing. Nor did he bring an accusation against Mr. Pennell in court; the beating was deemed sufficient.
Abortion was illegal throughout the land in the early years of the twentieth century, during the time when Dr. Harold Trott was practicing in Hemlock. In 1944 Dr. Trott wrote a memoir called Campus Shadows in which he discussed his experience with abortion. When he first came to town he met an old doctor in a nearby town who was going through a spell of illness and Dr. Trott offered to handle his referrals. He was, however, unprepared for who turned up.
He writes: “I found awaiting me an attractive young lady accompanied by a man of about forty…The man introduced himself in a patronizing way, [then said], ‘This young lady is my stenographer. She’s in the family way and we’d like you to fix her up.’ …They were from Buffalo. Moreover, they were in a hurry…I told these people that I thought there had been a slight misunderstanding as to just what type of cases [the old doctor] had in mind…Within the next week I turned away seven more [such] surgical patients.”
Occasionally one of Dr. Trott’s female patients would come to him and be worried about an unexpected pregnancy. The doctor followed the advice of an older man whose practice he admired, and would send the-mother-to-be home with a bottle of sugar pills, telling her, “Now, you just let me do the worrying for you. Take one of these pills each morning and evening with plenty of water and come back and see me in two weeks.” In most cases when the woman returned her worries had evaporated. Dr. Trott did say that a few women needed another two-week round of “worry-free days,” but inevitably there came the day when “these same mothers wouldn’t sell one of [those children] for all the money in the Treasury.” His mentor spoke of a particular young man in town, “Sixteen years ago I did the worrying for that boy’s mother…This year he was valedictorian of his high school.”
Part Two features some notorious crimes that took place locally, beginning with a kidnapping in 1826 that shocked the nation, and ending with another heinous kidnapping in 1949.
