History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a History Knox column that's published each Saturday reflecting on the community's history.
MOUNT VERNON — One can imagine the shock the Mount Vernon city marshal and his posse got when they went to investigate a murder on Newark Road, south of town, and met the victim walking out of his farm field.
In fact, Isaac Sperry wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t looking too good, either.
The event, reported in the Mount Vernon Republican, took place on June 3, 1875.
Sperry was a successful farmer who had been born in Knox County in 1819. He had married Louisa Letts, the granddaughter of a Revolutionary War minuteman, Nehemiah Letts. But Sperry separated from her later, marrying a woman from Illinois.
Perhaps the separation shows that he had a temper, because it apparently fueled this story.
When the marshal — whose name wasn’t given in the article — encountered Sperry, he had apparently just gotten up from where he had been knocked down in one of his fields.
He was trying to make it to his house, but was badly wounded. Sperry explained to the marshal that he had been working in the field with two hired men, but that a disagreement had developed.
The argument quickly escalated to shouting, then violence, as one of the men, named McNeal, attacked Sperry with the hoe he had been using to weed the crops in the field.
This hoe strike knocked Sperry down to the ground, where his assailant proceeded to kick his side, repeatedly. McNeal and the other farmhand fled the field, believing that Sperry was dead.
The report does not account for the whereabouts of the assailant, but it was apparently the other farmhand who ran into town and alerted the authorities to the attack.
Sperry’s farm was on Newark Road, today Ohio 13, on the south side of Mount Vernon.
In those days, it was out in the country, but his property was on both sides of the road where you can today find Lannings Foods and the Jeldwen Factory. Where Glen Road comes in from the east was the southern edge of Sperry’s farm.
He also owned some property further south on Newark Road, but the 1896 county atlas shows a house on the larger, northern property.
No mention was found of this case in the competing Democratic Banner, and by the following week, the Republican had apparently lost interest as well, so there’s no follow up to tell us whether McNeal was ever arrested or prosecuted.
Sperry’s wounds were considerable, but he recovered from them to live more than two further decades, passing away in 1898.