KNOX COUNTY — Mary Applegate’s relatives were used to hearing from her on a regular basis, either by letter or by a personal visit.
Ohio’s roads and postal system weren’t great in 1835, but one could normally get through one way or the other, most of the time. When Mary dropped suddenly silent in late May of that year, her relatives became alarmed.
They called upon Isaac Applegate, but he and his adult sons, David and Albert, weren’t very helpful.
They said that early on the morning of May 23, Mary had left the house to “hant the cows,” (presumably local dialect for ‘hunt the cows,’ which must have been allowed to roam the pasture at night), and they hadn’t seen her since.
Not that they had been looking.
Nor had they alerted any authorities to the woman being missing.
She was Isaac’s wife and David and Albert’s stepmother, but the three had remained silent. It was when Mary’s relatives talked to the neighbors that alarm went to dread.
One neighbor informed them that, according to Mary, her stepson David had made violent threats against her.
According to a report in the Mount Vernon Journal, this neighbor even said that before Mary disappeared, she spoke to the neighbor about her fear that “she shan’t be there” much longer because of David’s threats.
Once Mary’s relatives got the authorities involved, Isaac, David, and Albert were arrested.
They denied that any murder had occurred, and suggested that Mary may have returned to her family in Springfield, Ohio.
Her local relatives made the trip in person to Springfield, only to find that they hadn’t heard from her or seen her there, either. After further questioning, Isaac was released, but murder charges were filed against David and Albert Applegate.
Isaac Applegate had been born in Elizabeth, Penn., in 1773, to a family that had moved to the frontier from New Jersey and Maryland.
His first wife, Bathsheba Job, had been the mother of his children. They had moved out onto the frontier of early Knox County in the mid-1820s. David was born in 1812 and his brother Albert four years after that. They were two of five children.
David must have been devastated by the death of his mother, Bathsheba,in 1828. He was around 16 years old at the time, and Albert only 12.
It may well be that they harbored considerable resentment against their father’s new wife, Mary, who came along at some later point.
If so, it appears that in time, Isaac either agreed with or indulgently tolerated his sons’ hatred of Mary, for he certainly did nothing to stop David’s increasing threats against his stepmother, nor did he try to assuage her fears.
After her disappearance and the filing of murder charges against David and Albert, the case apparently stalled, for further information is lacking.
A body was missing in the case, despite searches of the Applegate farm, which sat in Pleasant Township on the road between Mount Vernon and Martinsburg, today Ohio 586.
Local authorities wanted a body, in order to prove that Mary Applegate had in fact been murdered, but nothing was found. They posted a reward of $150 dollars, equivalent to almost $4,500 today.
And then? And then the period sources dry up.
Documents show that Isaac Applegate continued to live in Pleasant Township. The 1840 census – though it doesn’t list people by name – indicates that one male, aged 60 to 69, lived on the farm.
The only other listed residents are two females, one in her teens, the other in her twenties. This would appear to be the two youngest children, Emoline and Elizabeth.
If the birth dates on current genealogy websites are correct, though, Elizabeth was born in 1828, just a few months after Bathsheba died.
That certainly makes the researcher pause.
What might have been going on that resulted in Isaac’s fathering of a child with another woman before his first wife even died, followed by the first wife dying before the new baby is born?
What was the nature of the first wife’s death? Was Mary the mother of Elizabeth? How did Isaac meet Mary? How did she come to be in or near Mount Vernon, when she was from Springfield, near Dayton? Did Isaac have not one, but two wives who departed mysteriously?
We may never know. The genealogy family trees I found online don’t even record Mary – and thus I haven’t been able to find her maiden name – though the newspaper report makes it quite clear that she was Isaac Applegate’s wife.
Then she disappeared. Isaac lived in Pleasant Township until his death in 1845.
A census report suggests that after Mary’s disappearance, David returned to Pennsylvania. He did not return to Knox County until his father died. He may have taken over the property briefly, but he later appears to have returned to Pennsylvania.
About Albert, I was able to find nothing at all. By the time of the 1871 property atlas, no Applegates are anywhere to be found in Pleasant Township.
The closest we can get to the location is what was carried in the original report in the Mount Vernon Journal. That actual paper does not apparently survive, but a telegraph wire service brought the story to the Huron Reflector, which republished the story on June 16, 1835.
The story identifies the Applegate farm as standing on the Martinsburg Road, two-and-a-half miles from Mount Vernon.
Measured from the center of town, that would place the farm somewhere between the Glen Road intersection and the Mount Vernon Country Club, which is today within the community’s actual city limits.
Eerily, the Ohio 586/Glen Road intersection is very close to the location where little Eddie Berger’s body was found, frozen to death, in 1876, as chronicled in the 2021 History Knox column “The lonely death of shy Eddie Berger.”
Was a forgotten murder victim’s body (or the remains thereof) also buried somewhere around that location? It’s possible. While it’s not impossible that Mary actually fled and turned up later somewhere else, it seems unlikely.
With the ominous threats lurking around her, and the lack of any later information about her, the evidence does not encourage that line of thought.
Mary Applegate’s disappearance remains one of the oldest and coldest of unsolved mysteries of Knox County.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is part of what will be an occasional series looking into some of Knox County’s past unsolved mysteries.
I have received a reader request to explore a much more recent cold case, the unsolved murder of Chuck Boucher, who was shot and killed on Dec. 19, 1988, in Mount Vernon.
If anyone has any leads regarding the Boucher case, please contact Mark Jordan at the email address Mark@Bardfood.com so we can begin the process of researching that case.
