History Knox
Local historian Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on Knox County's past.
MOUNT VERNON — Have you ever had to live with pigeons?
I once rented an apartment where pigeons moved into the eaves under the roof and discovered that the birds make a nonstop goofy chattering all day long, and a good portion of the night, too.
A few days of that can drive you to the edge of insanity.
That’s when I finally understood why so many people regard pigeons as a serious nuisance, even beyond the issue of them relieving themselves everywhere, especially on every statue that can be found in a town.
Mount Vernon residents must have felt that way in 1913, because an article in a June issue of the Democratic Banner notes that many residents had recently been shooting pigeons.
That, in itself, would not necessarily have been a problem, though we certainly hope the shooters were only using BB guns inside the city limits. The problem which arose was that sometimes a pigeon was not just a pigeon.
Homing pigeons are birds that have been selectively bred for endurance and ability to find their way home from a great distance.
At a casual glance, a homing pigeon may look much like any other pigeon, the only notable differences being that they tend to be a little more muscular, and have often been bred to have shinier feathers.
But these are not obvious markers, and the clearest evidence is often that the birds are banded by owners to identify and keep track of them.
It turns out that Mount Vernon had a very active pigeon club in the early 1900s, and they were particularly active in 1913.
On June 8 of that year, the club members ventured to Greenfield, Indiana, and released their birds to find their ways back to Mount Vernon. That’s a distance of 211 miles. The six club members released 22 birds, all of whom navigated back home.
Leon Barry’s birds included both the first-place and last-place finishers. As an aside, it is interesting to note that Leon Barry was one of Mount Vernon’s population of people born in Belgium who came here to work as glass blowers.
As you might surmise, the problem which soon arose is that sometimes locals ended up shooting homing pigeons in their attempts to thin out the number of bird nuisances.
This was a serious problem for the pigeon club, because some of the members were so devoted to the selection and breeding of birds, that their finest specimens were valued at $100, and that’s in 1913 currency!
Adjusted for inflation, that is a value of $3,313.18 in today’s money. That’s basically a bank account with wings.
Concurrent with their latest event, the pigeon club announced that, henceforth, it would be prosecuting the intentional shootings of any of its birds. The club offered a $10 reward to the public for any information that would result in the successful prosecution of shooters (the equivalent of over $300 today).
The newspaper cheerfully advocated for the club, calling the shooters “miscreants,” and proclaiming: “The members of the club are justly indignant over the shooting of the birds, and have taken steps to prosecute the guilty under the law, which imposes a large fine for such misconduct.”
Further evidence of how seriously these pigeon fanciers took their sport was that one of them claimed a record just a couple weeks later, when a few club members traveled all the way to St. Louis, Missouri, to release their birds, and one, owned by Louis Boucher, flew from St. Louis to Mount Vernon (468 miles) in only 9 hours and 17 minutes.
Today, Google tells us it would take 7 hours and 10 minutes for a human being to drive that route.
Interestingly, Boucher was another Belgium-born person who worked as a material handler in the glass factories.
The threats may ultimately have done their job, for no further incidents were reported the rest of the year. Incidentally, A law was passed in the Ohio Statehouse that fall which protected (for a time) all the birds of the dove family, which includes pigeons (originally known as rock doves).
While the law focused on protecting mourning doves — which were in danger at the time of going extinct (as the passenger pigeon was about to) — restrictions were later dropped regarding pigeons, which continue to proliferate.
Reached for comment, the statues of Mount Vernon reportedly said that they were very much in favor of people shooting pigeons.