A Chicken Thief’s Confession

 

A Chicken Thief’s Confession             by Alan Borer

           

Otterbein University President W. G. Clippinger was astonished at the letter that came across is desk in the late summer of 1913.  It read:

Enclosed please find four dollars.  Some time ago, a ‘bunch’ of your students, and I was one of the number, stole several of your chickens for a mid-night roast.  I am ashamed of the action and wish to make things right.

            Clippinger replied:

Your letter . . . enclosing four dollars in payment for your feast is received. . . . I hardly know how to express my appreciation.  I did value the chickens and I value the payment of them but I value much more highly your manly confession.[i]

            As an educator, Clippinger understood that a guilty conscience was often a more effective tool than the many demerits he had at his disposal.  Confession is good for the soul, and here was a confession unsolicited!

            Before the modern age, many rural and small town homeowners kept a few chickens.  In an era before routine delivery service of food, the home grown chicken became a cultural centerpiece of Sunday dinners, holiday meals, and celebrations.  To steal a family’s chickens was a powerful slap in the face of a culture in which the food supply was less predictable than now.  Westerville residents might have agreed with this statement:

Long ago, raising barn fowl was critical to the existence of millions of families. . . To steal someone’s chickens was to steal from a family’s daily sustenance.  While the theft of other items might prove just as hurtful, a stigma was attached to those arrested as chicken thieves, who became known as the low-down, dirtiest of crooks. [ii]

            The theft, cooking, and eating of a college president’s chickens was risky.  I have no idea if Clippinger reported the theft, or if in fact the chickens had any sentimental value beyond their food value.  The motives of the thieves are also unclear.  Were they robbing the president as a way to bug him personally, or diminish his status as a symbol of Otterbein College?  Or were they just hungry youth who knew where to find insufficiently guarded chickens?

            Whatever the reason for this theft, Walter Clippinger was far too skillful a teacher to make a federal case of this.  He pardoned the student, and freely readmitted him to Otterbein.  Whether he ever treated them to chicken dinner is unrecorded.

 

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[i] Otterbein University Archives, Presidents Papers.

[ii] https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2014/04/chicken-theives-historys-low-down-dirty-crooks/

Buying Swamp, Selling Farms – Florien Giauque

 

  

            Ask any real estate salesperson what the three best attributes that makes land valuable, and the answer will be “location, location, location.”  Location is important but, to an experienced salesman, other factors come into play.  If a salesman has a vision of what the land could be used for, then find an audience for it, he can sell it, if he has patience.  Even if the land was the desolate Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, it just took time.  Just ask Florien Giauque.

            The Black Swamp, famous as a bar to settlement, was a wetland stretching south-north from the Blanchard River to the Maumee, and east-west roughly from Fremont to Fort Wayne, Indiana.  With the water table at or near the surface, the heavily wooded area was flooded much of the year.  Thousands of years of autumn leaf falls enriched the soil with thick, sticky muck.  Not only were roads impassable, the area developed a bad reputation for banditry.  Outlaws were notorious for using the area as an impassable hiding place.

            Eventually, the swampland was logged by timber dealers.  Stave and hoop factories replaced the hardwood forests in swamp towns like Deshler, Holgate, and North Baltimore.  By the time the lumber craze was over, the land was unshaded and flat as a pancake, a “grand cattail and frog farm” was the saying.  The federal government, which still held title to the land, sold most of it to speculators and corporations.

            In Deshler, in Henry County, town founder David Deshler bought up 10,000 acres of the former swamp.  His son John formed the Deshler Land Company.  Buyers were slowly found, but defaulters were many. In 1885, the Land Company hired a new manager, Florien Giauque.  Giauque changed the fortunes of the Deshler Land Company, and as one contemporary writer stated, “Florien Giauque turned the cat-tail patch into a mellow grain field.” 

            Florien Giauque was born in 1843 in Berlin in Holmes County, Ohio.  His parents were from Switzerland.  Florien studied to be a teacher, but was interrupted by the Civil War, in which he served as a sergeant in the 102^nd Ohio Infantry.  After the war he taught, studied law, and passed the bar.  Giauque spent most of his legal career working on real estate cases for his Cincinnati law firm, buying and selling railroad land in Louisiana.  But in 1885, he found himself working in Deshler in his native state.

            Giauque knew the Black Swamp and its reputation – a “swamp with a past.”  He also knew that foreclosed land was readily available for purchase.  Giauque bought Henry County land, cut ditches, and laid tile, built modest farmhouses and barns, and “turned the thick black swamp ooze” into a mellow black loam.  “The miles of acres once crossed only by the water snake and the muskrat now are stamped by the feet of grazing herds.”

            Florien Giauque took undeveloped swampland and created a farming paradise.  He understood that raw, treeless acres had little appeal for settlers, but farm-sized portions, already ditched and tiled, would be salable and valuable.  In 1910, Giauque sold his own holdings – some 2,500 acres – to an Indiana real estate company for $400,000.

            By all accounts, Florien Giauque was modest about his achievement.  He “would rather tell strange things of the long-ago Indians and highwaymen slipped like specters from tree to tree in the dark green shade of the Black Swamp  than to tell his part in its change from savagery.”  He is barely remembered today; a business block in Deshler bears his name.  He died in Cincinnati in 1921.  But his real achievement, the endless ditches around Deshler, can be seen any time one explores the country nearby.

 

[Information comes from the article, “Heart of Great Black Swamp,” Chicago Livestock World, October 17, 1910, and Luana Henderson, Florien Giauque Papers  Mss. 1900  Inventory. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 2007.]

 

WSPD Radio Featured “Smith’s Tennesseans”

 

One would think that a country and western band that went by the name “Smith’s Tennesseans” would come from Tennessee.  But in this case, some of the band hailed from my mother’s hometown of Green Springs in Sandusky County, and several other players had Ohio connections.  In addition, their daily radio show in the 1930s and 40s was on WSPD, Toledo’s flagship AM station.  We don’t know all the details, but let’s see what we can remember about “Smith’s Tennesseans.”

            The band was formed by a husband and wife team.  Roy Smith was born in Tennessee, but wound up as a high school band instrument teacher in Jackson Township, Sandusky County. He owned a 100 acre farm was in near Green Springs, while living in the village on Euclid Avenue.  Roy played the fiddle, the bass, and sang tenor.[i]

 In 1923, Roy married Lola Borelis.  Lola grew up in Cleveland, but lived most of her life in northwest Ohio.  Lola Smith played several instruments, including piano, accordion, and organ.  She was listed as a “station musician” for WSPD Radio from 1933 to 1957, which was apparently the duration of the Tennesseans life.  Some sources list husband Roy as the bandleader, but by 1940, Lola Smith was in charge.

That year, other musicians included “Richard,” violin and bass, joined in 1935, “Slim,” guitar, bass, and yodeling, also joining in 1935, and “Smokey Joe,” banjo, guitar, and alternate yodeler.  Other members over the years included Glencairn James Giffen, of Clyde, Ohio, vocals and guitar.[ii]

In addition to their radio show, the group was in demand for dances in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana several times a week.  In 1937, they played at the Green Springs high school auditorium.  Many years later in 1951, they played to the Macomber High School in Toledo.  The musicians changed their name around 1940 to “Lola and her Circle Star Ranch Boys.”  Now equipped with fancier, cowboy-style costumes, the Ranch Boys published a book of their songs, including “Across the Texas Plains,” “Little Sweetheart of the Ozarks,” and the memorable “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Around.”

            When WSPD began television broadcasting in 1948, the Ranch Boys were featured performers.  Local television in those days was truly local, with much of the programming originating from local talent.  Lola Smith recalled later that she had to write out her own cue cards, in large letters.  The writing became painful, and she thought she may have to give up music, but the discomfort left her once she stopped writing cue cards.[iii]

In the 1950s, the name of the band appears to have changed back to Smith’s Tennesseans.  A contemporary ad called them “Toledo’s Favorite Attraction.”  After the band dispersed, Lola worked as a private music teacher from her home in the Old West End.  It is unclear what became of Roy Smith; Lola Smith died April 18, 1996 in Sylvania.[iv]  It is unfortunate that the band never made a record, but unless some other recording is found, we cannot say just what Smith’s Tennesseans sounded like.  We can say that they provided popular music for their local audience for many years.  That may be testament enough.

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[i] Lola and her Circle Star Ranch Boys, Smith’s Tennesseans: Cowboy and Western Songs (Chicago: M. M. Cole, 1940), p. 1.

[ii] https://www.genlookups.com/oh/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/1523

[iii] Toledo Blade, April 23, 1996.

[iv] Toledo Blade, April 23, 1996.