BRINKHAVEN — I love finding things by accident. I was searching this week for information about something else when I stumbled across an interesting case from 1932 where an 84-year-old Brinkhaven farmer and his 60-year-old son were accused of threatening murder with a shotgun and a corn cutter.
Emanuel Dial was the elderly farmer, and it appears that he and his son John had entered an agreement with three men named Dallas Reed, Earl Leech, and Clyde Martin, that if the three men helped the Dials tend to their crops, they would be given a place to live as borders and one-fourth of the harvest at the end of the season.
The elder Dial swore before Justice J. K. Snyder that the three boarders did nothing to help tend the crops until harvest time, when they showed up to work, expecting to receive their portion.
The article in the Coshocton Tribune states that Dial “thought they were unfair.” An argument followed that allegedly escalated to the threats of violence.
Based on my further research, I’d guess the sharecroppers didn’t know whom they were dealing with. This same Emanuel Dial was acquitted in 1877 on a charge of murder!
Details are sketchy, but it appears that the 1877 case involved an altercation between Dial and a man named George or Henry Constantine, and it resulted in Dial allegedly kicking Constantine to death in the village of Rochester, near the present-day site of Cavallo, on the Mohican River.
Further details about the incident are sparse, but when Dial finally came to trial in November of 1877, he was found not guilty of the second-degree murder charge, suggesting that it was a fight that simply got way out of control.
However, it does establish Dial as dangerous man to cross, even at an advanced age. He must have been one feisty person. He outlived two wives, the aforementioned son John, and was embroiled in a lawsuit with one of his daughters when he finally died in 1938 at the age of 90.
Dallas Reed was born in Buckeye City (now Danville) in 1886 and worked on his parents’ farm in his early adulthood, before going to Brinkhaven to work for Dial. By the time he filled out a draft card in 1942, Reed was still living in Brinkhaven, and listed himself as unemployed.
Earl Leach (as he spelled his name on his draft card) was originally from Coshocton, and was just one year younger than Reed. By the 1940 census, Leach was living in Brinkhaven but working at a casting mill in Mount Vernon. He told the census taker that he never went past third grade in school, not an uncommon thing in those days.
Clyde Uhler Martin was the youngest of the three men, born in Millersburg in 1893. His draft card describes him as a carpenter, so he may not have been an enthusiastic sharecropper, anyway. Martin was the last of the three to pass away, though sources differ. One online source says he died in 1970, while another gives a date as recent as 1983.
What would these three men — two of whom had already married their wives in the 1920s — have been doing working for Emanuel Dial in 1932? My guess would be that the Great Depression had hit these men hard, booting them out of their jobs and, very possibly, their homes.
However tough times have been lately (and two years of pandemic followed by inflation are a fair definition of tough times), the Great Depression of the early 1930s was brutal. Many men were drifting, looking for work, and these three ended up on Dial’s farm.
The men moved on after their case against Dial (which apparently did not go anywhere). At the time of his death six years later, Emanuel Dial had three surviving children, 14 grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren.
And, one suspects, he probably didn’t get along with any of them.
