Here are some sidelights of the 1879 Fredericktown temperance attack

FREDERICKTOWN — Almost five years ago, I wrote about the Fredericktown temperance attack.

It happened on Oct. 25, 1879, when 13 local women, frustrated by their husbands’ habitual drunkenness, decided to stop the flow of liquor by force. The ladies, inspired by the (in)famous anti-alcohol crusader Carrie Nation, stormed into Fredericktown’s two bars — Kelley’s and O’Connor’s — wielding hatchets.

They chopped up the bar and poured out and broke bottles of alcohol, as was quite dramatically illustrated in the National Police Gazette, which circulated a story of the event all across the United States.

For a while, the feisty females of Fredericktown were famous, even though it would still take them nearly a decade to pass laws to make Fredericktown a dry community.

I recently found some sidelights from that tumultuous day which were reported in the Mount Vernon Republican News.

The paper noted that “one of our well-known citizens” (without naming him) volunteered to help the women with their destruction of the saloons. His ulterior motive was, however, spotted by a few other local residents who saw the man smuggle out a few bottles of ale, which he buried out behind the Oddfellows’ Hall.

They further reported that the gentleman returned to excavate the bottles after sundown and had himself quite the picnic.

Two lads attempted to take advantage of the chaos by entering one of the taverns while the ladies were chopping it up. The youths actually set up an efficient looting system: One boy went around back and stood beneath a window while the other boy fed him bottles through the window.

The two took their rather impressive haul and transported it to the back of Herdman’s blacksmith shop, where they hid it. At this point, however, the hatchet women discovered what the boys had been up to, and followed them with their last load of loot, and demolished every bottle.

A small black boy grabbed a bottle in the midst of all the chaos, and took off running with it down Main Street. Various people tried to catch him, but he eluded everyone until he tripped over a rock and came crashing down, his bottle shattering to pieces.

Another would-be looter found his bottle of ale chopped to pieces by one of the temperance women as he held it! It’s very lucky for him that her aim was true.

The paper had quite a grand time telling these stories, then backpedaled to sanctimoniously justify what the women had done because of the rough conditions of their lives and families.

Indeed, the paper pretty much had to endorse the anti-alcohol vigilantes because they were always trying to portray the opposing editor of the Democratic Banner, Lecky Harper, as an alcoholic.

For instance, in an earlier issue from that month, they reported that Harper had boasted of the number of people who attended a Democratic function in Mount Vernon. The Republican News scoffed at that number, suggesting that Harper’s vision may have been multiplied by seeing the crowd through numerous bottles of beer.

In another article on the same page as the humorous reports, the paper did a serious interview with one of the attackers, and even got her permission to name her in the article.

When the reporter approached the Fox home, a small frame house on the south side of Fredericktown on the corner of Fifth and Pleasant Streets, Mrs. Charles Fox was scrubbing laundry on a washboard, and she was very wary at first about how the newspaper might portray her.

But the reporter’s serious tone won her over, and she finally shared the difficulties of her life: She stated that her husband is a carriage painter and capable of earning a good and comfortable livelihood for himself and family, but that since he has been drinking be has not only been a curse to her and her home, but to the whole neighborhood.

He has been out of employment entirely for nearly two months and spent the greater part of his time at the low groggery, now so completely cleaned out, and was frequently brought home and placed on the ground near the house, all helping to make her once peaceful and happy home a hell upon earth.

She has two grown-up sons who are respectable and whom the mother would like to see men among men, and her only object in entering into a conspiracy was to save a lost husband whom she still clings to.

Mrs. Fox then boldly goes on to name her co-conspirators in the raid: Mrs. Strong, Mrs. Herdman, Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Royce, Mrs. Brentlinger, Mrs. Lockheart, Mrs. Harry, Mrs. Hartman, Miss Lockheart, and the three Misses Harry.

Her confidence in openly naming her cohorts was not ill-placed. Public sentiment was with the ladies, and the county prosecutor declined to file charges against them.

A little poking around in genealogical sites informs us that the husband was Charles P. Fox, born in France in 1819, who later came to the U.S. and settled in Ohio. He married Mary Ann Hillier in 1846, and they lived in Fredericktown the rest of their lives, though he was away for a time to serve in the Civil War.

His alcoholism may have been the result of attempts to self-medicate the post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his service. One hopes that Mr. Fox finally stabilized and that the couple found happiness.

Whatever the case, Mary Ann remained with him until he died in 1904, and she followed just a few months later.