The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
ABOUT 1837 · CENTRE TOWNSHIP GROUND — THE COUNTY FRAME THIS PLACE ANSWERED TO
The first crime Chapman names as a county first was a mint: "About the year 1837 there lived south of this city, in Centre township, on the farm now occupied by James Dice, an old man, James Odle. He was apparently a harmless, simple old man, who did very little farming." A neighbor's suspicion — too many well-dressed men around so humble a place — brought the officers, and the county's first counterfeiting establishment came into the record entire: Odle, his son-in-law Foskit, Van Amburgh, Cummins, Dixon, Clark "and others were arrested, brought to town and confined in the old log jail" — the jail the commissioners had ordered built six years before, now holding its most famous prisoners. A search of the premises produced "the dies and press for making bogus dollars, a quantity of copper, and fifteen pounds of arsenic; also a few pieces of the base coin ready for the dies." The arsenic was the whitener: the gang's dollars were copper, melted in a crucible and whitened with arsenic to pass for silver.
The disposition is as complete as the detection, and Chapman prints it whole. Offered his freedom for the state's evidence, Odle turned: he told the officers where some 250 finished pieces lay buried under a tree, and the dies, press and coin were carried before the grand jury, where "old Odle showed how the milling and stamping was done, and explained the mystery of the arsenic" — and "the grand jurors each took one of the pieces as a memento of the first counterfeiting in this county." The remaining prisoners, remanded to the log jail for trial, "boasted that they would not stay there any longer than it suited them, and made their escape in broad daylight. The citizens turned out to hunt them, but they all escaped except Van Amburgh, who was too feeble to travel fast. He was not tried on account of some informality in the indictment." No member of the gang was ever convicted in the record Chapman prints: the informer went free by bargain, the able-bodied went free by escape, and the one man recaptured went free on a defective indictment. The case is seated in Centre Township and belongs to the county's frame rather than to this ground — it stands here because it is the fullest surviving picture of the enforcement machine the designated place answered to in its first decade: a log jail that could not hold its prisoners, a grand jury that took souvenirs, and a prosecution that ended in a drafting error. (The arsenic had an afterlife of its own: most was sold to a druggist, but a few pounds left in the courthouse garret were carried off years later by boys who mistook it for chalk; Chapman records that two of Mrs. Eliza Owen's daughters ate of it and, "with proper attention," lived.)
Sources: Chapman (1880), "A Counterfeiting Reminiscence," read first-hand and quoted from the text (the year "about 1837" and the Centre Township seat are Chapman's own; the accomplice printed "Cumnius" in the imperfectly preserved text is rendered Cummins here). The log jail's order: the Commissioners' Record of November 1831, as carried in the first-law article above.