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1837–1880 · the small change of enforcement
Below the association, the township's formal law was a justice of the peace in every generation and, once, a pump. Israel Rush, the first Justice of the Peace, died in 1837. Henry H. Clark, the prairie holder, was elected Justice of the Peace in his turn "and refused to serve" — the record's only refusal, and a measure of the office's burdens. James McCollum, the Terre Coupee grocer, held the justiceship with the postmastership for a decade. The township's constable function ran substantially through the association's riders, commissioned as constables by state law for its purposes. And the township's one recorded act of collective disorder is the war-years ducking of George W. Woods, who resisted the quota tax and was "put under a pump spout and pumped water upon him to a damaging extent" by "some roughs" until, the chapter says, he never "rebelled" again — told whole in the wars file, and carried here as what it also was: an assault the community's own history prints as comedy, unprosecuted in any record reached. No prosecution, inquest or conviction of the nineteenth century is attributed to this ground by any record this build has read beyond these items; the township's criminal docket, so far as the reached record shows, is the association's book of recovered horses.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 765–766, 775, 780 (Rush; the Woods affair; Clark; McCollum).