(12-9-22) You can buy on Amazon a book that tells you the background and details of the 1872 rape and the murder of a 13 year old Mercer County girl, Mary Secaur :

The book has been noticed and used in many universities and has gained some world-wide coverage.

Description from Amazon–

On a hot and dusty Sunday in June 1872, 13-year-old Mary Secaur set off on her two-mile walk home from church. She never arrived. The horrific death of this young girl inspired an illegal interstate pursuit-and-arrest, courtroom dramatics, conflicting confessions, and the daylight lynching of a traveling tin peddler and an intellectually disabled teenager. Who killed Mary Secaur? Were the accused actually guilty? What drove the citizens of Mercer County to lynch the suspects?

Outrage in Ohio: Introduction
By David Kimmel

David Kimmel seeks answers to these provoking questions and deftly recounts what actually happened in the fateful summer of 1872, imagining the inner workings of the small rural community, reconstructing the personal relationships of those involved, and restoring humanity to this gripping story. Using a unique blend of historical research and contemporary accounts, Outrage in Ohio explores how a terrible crime ripped an Ohio farming community apart and asks us to question what really happened to Mary Secaur.

Following was on JSTOR:

  1. 3 LYNCHING (pp. 125-138) All morning they came—the humble, honest, hard-working farmers from the countryside.¹ They came from their chores, for no farmer leaves chores undone. No cows were left in pain with full udders; no horses whinnied with empty bellies. Interrupting their harvesting, threshing, and haymaking, people traveled to town on horseback, in rude wagons, and on foot from the remotest sections of the county. By ten o’clock, the streets teamed with three thousand simple country folks. They shared a purpose; they lacked only organization and direction.

    As the courthouse bell struck ten, three hundred horsemen appeared on the edge of town,..

    4 AFTERMATH (pp. 139-195)

    After the mob had executed McCloud and Kimmel, they returned to the county seat in search of Callen and Murlen, the attorneys of the supposed criminals with the intention to hang them also. What has resulted from their rash and bloody designs is not now known.Specials from Wapakonetta, Ohio, state the country around Celina, Ohio, is in a terrible state of excitement, arising from the outrage and murder of the girl Mary Belle Secor, for which two men were hung by the mob. Two men, who were supposed to have been implicated in the outrage, have since committed suicide,…

David Kimmel’s web page talks about why he writes—

I mostly write about the past in a hybrid style that blends fiction, local history, personal narrative, and historical documents into a unique examination of an event or a community.

Trained as a literature and writing specialist (PhD from Ohio State University), I spent nearly 30 wonderful years (or 30 nearly wonderful years?) as an award-winning small-college professor, teaching all levels of undergraduates how to improve their reading and writing abilities. Following the publication in Fall 2018 of my first book (Outrage in Ohio, Indiana University Press), I decided to devote myself full-time to writing and retired from my faculty position.

Background…

Where is Liberty Township in Mercer County

What was happening in 1872

  • January 2 – Brigham Young is arrested for allegedly being an accessory to murder.
  • January 3 – First patent list issued by the U.S. Patent Office.
  • February 13 – Rex, the most famous parade on Mardi Gras, parades for the first time in New Orleans for Grand Duke Alexei Mikhailovich of Russia.
  • February 20 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.
  • March – One of the first Personal Liberty League formed in the United States in response to the threat posed to the liquor industry by the growing political strength of the temperance movement.
  • March 1 – Yellowstone National Park is established as the world’s first national park.
  • March 5 – George Westinghouse patents the air brake for railways.
  • March 26 – The 7.4–7.9 Mw Lone Pine earthquake shakes eastern California with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). Twenty-seven people are killed and fifty-six injured.
  • May 10 – Victoria Woodhull becomes the first woman nominated for President of the United States.
  • May 22 – Reconstruction: President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Amnesty Act of 1872 into law restoring full civil rights to all but about 500 Confederate sympathizers.
  • June 4 – Two men lead investors to land near the Wyoming-Colorado border claiming to have found diamonds there, starting a diamond craze in the western US (which is later revealed as a fraud).
  • August – Aaron Montgomery Ward issues the first Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue from Chicago.
  • September 4 – The New York Sun breaks the story on the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal
  • September 26 – The first Shriners Temple (called Mecca) is established in New York City.
  • October 1 – The Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College begins its first academic session (the university is later renamed Virginia Tech).
  • October 2 – Morgan State University founded.
  • November – Ulysses S. Grant defeats Horace Greeley in the U.S. presidential election
  • November 2 – Spiritualist, suffragette, and Free Love advocate Victoria Woodhull publishes shocking allegations in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly claiming in “The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case” article that Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery with Theodore Tilton’s wife. The subsequent trials and hearings, “drove Reconstruction off the front pages for two and a half years” and became “the most sensational ‘he said, she said’ in American history”, in the words of Walter A. McDougall.
  • November 5 – Women’s suffrage: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time (on November 18 she is served an arrest warrant and in the subsequent trial is fined $100 – which she never pays).
  • November 7 – The Mary Celeste sets sail from New York, bound for Genoa.
  • November 9 – Great Boston Fire of 1872: In Boston, Massachusetts, a large fire begins to burn on Lincoln Street. The two-day event destroys about 65 acres (260,000 m2) of city, 776 buildings, much of the financial district and causes US$60 million in damage.
  • November 28 – Geologist Clarence King uncovers the diamond hoax in Wyoming in The New York Times.
  • November 29 – Indian Wars: The Modoc War begins with the Battle of Lost River.
  • December 4 – The crewless American-owned ship Mary Celeste is found by the British brig Dei Gratia in the Atlantic.
  • December 9 – P. B. S. Pinchback takes office as Governor of Louisiana, the first African American governor of a U.S. state.
  • William Lawrence, a dairyman of Chester (village), New York, creates the first American cream cheese.
  • First known publication of spiritual “The Gospel Train”, by Fisk Jubilee Singers.
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