Ax Murder on the Ohio River
Isabella and Cyrus M. Park lived on a farm near Charlestown, Indiana. It was about seven miles from Charlestown and three miles from Henryville in the southeastern part of Indiana. It’s also not far from the Ohio River there in Clark County.
Clark County is named for George Rogers Clark who settled along the Ohio River after the Revolutionary War. He built a cabin just above a large limestone outcropping along the Ohio in what is now Jeffersonville just across from modern day Louisville, Kentucky. His younger brother, William Clark went across the United States with Meriwether Lewis thanks to Sacajawea guiding and translating for them. That limestone outcropping is a place you can visit today and it is chock full of prehistoric fossils. I have been there and I highly recommend it.
Cyrus Mop Park had served briefly in the Union Army at the tail end of the Civil War. He was a respected member of the community around Clark County. He was reported to be a friend to black members of the community. He offered aid when needed. Some sought out his help and advice and he gave it.
The couple had four children according to the 1870 census. Marion M. Park was their oldest son at 18 years of age. Mary Evaline was 15. Helen M. was 12 and James M. Park was about 8.
On Saturday night November 11th, 1871, the family was attacked by someone wielding an ax. That killer left behind a bottle of whiskey tossed in the yard. Footprints led away from the house. They were described as being 11 inches long and 5 inches wide at the widest part. He also left the ax which he had left near the shed. The ax had been swung hard and planted deep in the ground but it still had blood and hair on it.
One newspaper reported that a man named Joseph Young was sent from church because Cyrus Park always unlocked the Presbyterian church early on Sundays for Sunday School. Park had not shown up yet and that was very odd. Joseph Young approached the quiet house and found Mary Eva in the doorway bleeding and badly injured. He ran back to the church screaming for help. Quickly a local doctor and others were fetched.
Mary Eva was in the entryway, badly wounded. She had serious, life threatening head injuries. When questioned about the rest of the family she said they weren’t up yet. She was unaware of what had happened. Her memory of the attack never returned.
As Young entered other rooms throughout the house he found Cyrus M. Park and Isabella Park, still in bed and mortally wounded from ax blows to the head and body.
As he went through the small house he found no unscathed family members. The youngest child, James, was dead from ax wounds and blunt force trauma. Helen was gravely wounded and hung on until December 8th, 1871 but ultimately died of her injuries.
Mary Eva, who is sometimes called Evaline or Eveline and sometimes her age is reported as 19 instead of 16, underwent a brain surgery in the next hours. Doctors, likely experienced in such surgery from service in the Civil War, could see that a depressed skull fracture was causing part of her brain to be visible. They removed the fragments and relieved the pressure on her brain. It was thought that she would not make it. But Mary Eva lived. She had no memory of the attack but she lived.
The killer left behind a bottle of whiskey tossed in the yard. Footprints led away from the house. The footprints were described as being 11 inches long and 5 inches wide at the widest part. The killer also left the ax behind near the shed. (The ax would have belonged to the Park Family. In those days chopping and splitting wood was a daily occurrence. Most people just left their ax outside all the time by the woodpile.) The ax had been swung hard and planted deep in the ground but it still had the blood and hair of the Park family on it.
That bottle of whisky makes me think that this killer approached the house after dark. He stood outside drinking that liquid courage before he went inside to do what he ultimately did.
Marion Park, who was the eldest child of Cyrus and Isabella, arrived from Memphis, Indiana where he worked. In the following days and weeks Cyrus, Isabella, Helen and James were buried at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Charlestown. Eva clung to life and slowly recovered.
As the days went by there was great concern that the murderer or murderers be found. Here is where the tragedy of this murder multiplies exponentially. But we need to know a little bit of the backstory of the things going on in the area.
A man named Matthew Clegg, who was also a Civil War Veteran, seems to have been quite the trouble maker. He got into a dispute with one of Cyrus Park's neighbors, Thomas Prall. Matthew Clegg had filed a lawsuit against that Thomas Prall. But he also made death threats. Cyrus Park and others began guarding Thomas Prall's house around the clock in shifts. After the murders of the Park Family, and the lynching of Squire Taylor, George Johnson and Charles Davis, someone was concerned enough about Matthew Clegg to write to the Cincinnati Times describing these events that led up to the murder.
After the murders, Matthew Clegg looked pretty guilty. He was known to be a hot head and known to be upset with Mr. Park.
It seems to me that Clegg and some other men decided to “find the real murderers”. If you look really guilty then you need to find a scapegoat. We see this everywhere today if we are smart enough to look. Who is getting blamed? Who is being made into a scapegoat?
Clegg and several other men complained that these black men had confessed the murders to them. They said they overheard the men talking about how much money Mr. Park had. The three men, Squire Taylor, Charles Davis, and George Johnson, were arrested and held in the jail at Charlestown. They also arrested the men’s wives and children and grandchildren. The women and girls were released early on but the men and boys were kept in the jail.
They didn’t just beat a confession out of Squire Taylor. No, they used his grandson against him. They took Joseph Taylor, a child “of nine or ten” aside and interrogated him. (The fact that they say he was about nine or ten makes me think he was actually probably six or seven.)
We all are very familiar with false confessions these days. Under duress, people who are grown will falsely confess.
Imagine being a child in that situation. You want to go home to your Mom. You don’t want your Grandpa to be in trouble. You don’t want these other men who are your neighbors to be in trouble. The men tell you if you swear to a story that they will let you go home. You’re tired and hungry. They feed you. They give you treats. They even took this poor kid on a train trip to find some imaginary box of imaginary evidence in Vernon, Indiana. (Vernon is about a 45 minute car trip from Charlestown these days.) Pretty soon the child was swearing he saw his grandpa and the other accused men with a wallet full of cash the day after the murder.
They searched these men’s homes and any clothing with a stain on it was suddenly a blood stain.
But the Sheriff and other officers of the law were waiting for a judge to come to town and to hold hearings on the matter. County prosecutors didn’t really exist in rural areas then. There were still circuit courts. A judge and lawyers would travel over a wide area in a state and hold court on a schedule.
It seems like Matthew Clegg really needed a scapegoat. Maybe that bottle of whiskey left in the yard was a type he was known to drink. Maybe people were looking at his shoe size a little too long.
On the evening of the 17th of November, 1871, a mob of about 40 masked men broke into the jail at Charlestown. They had brought hammers and chisels but they did not end up using them. The Sheriff unlocked the cell for them. The mob then took Squire Taylor, Charles Davis and George Johnson from the jail and hanged them.
In 1872, an ad in the papers, placed by Mary Eva Park who went by Eva. In the ad she asked that any photographer selling photos of her please stop as “a regular committee have been appointed to attend to this business for my exclusive benefit”. So, souvenir sales of her photo had been happening in the year. I don’t blame her for asking people not to profit off her family tragedy. She and her committee were wise, I think, to consider that if anyone should be making money from the sale of photos then it should be her. (Perhaps those photos were souvenirs or perhaps they were used to drum up hatred against the black community.)
In 1873, Mary Taylor, Squire Taylor’s widow, sued Matthew Clegg and a man named John Stuart for being the ring leaders of the lynch mob. Can you even imagine being so brave? Mary Taylor had guts. She was 33 then. Mary Taylor had been born around 1840. She would have been born enslaved. Her journey to Indiana can’t have been easy. Then her husband was taken in such a violent way. The suit would have been an uphill battle. She was not likely to win. She might be killed just for accusing these white men. But she brought the suit anyway. That’s brave.
I don’t think that the lawsuit was successful. I found no other articles about it except the initial announcement. But it does tell us that Mary Taylor had friends and supporters. White lawyers brought this lawsuit and were willing to speak out against Matthew Clegg and John Stuart (also spelled John Stuard in one article.) Many people in the white community were outraged by the lynching and knew that these men did not kill the Park family.
In 1876, Matthew Clegg ran for the office of Circuit Court Judge of the Floyd and Clark county circuit, against the sitting judge named D.W. LaFollette. The votes were counted and recounted. It was a tremendously close race. (I wonder if Clegg had campaigned to get all the black people out of these counties. He probably used the lawsuit that Mary Taylor had filed as propaganda. He might have waved Eva Park’s photo around.) Matthew Clegg contested the outcome until he was declared the winner.
In 1884, Clegg was publicly accused of taking bribes by a man named Solon Young. Solon Young heard of a plot by his accuser to give Clegg $100 dollars to find Young guilty. For one man to bravely accuse Clegg of taking bribes…seems like he was probably well known to take bribes. (Also, with Clegg's reputation, this accusation was dangerous to state publicly. Solon Young must have been a very brave man who was fed up.
In 1889, Matthew Clegg died at age 83 in Nabb, Clark County, Indiana. It’s a tiny community North of Charleston. He left behind a widow named Hester Patterson Clegg and ten grown children. His obituary is sparse for the time. It doesn’t talk about his judgeship or his career. It doesn’t talk about a large crowd of mourners attending his funeral. It doesn’t speak about his passing with any great sadness or melancholy. Sometimes the things that are not printed about a person speak volumes.
I used to wonder why so many people moved out West during this time period even though the trip West was dangerous. I don't wonder anymore. You might die of dysentery or starve to death or be killed by Native Americans but at least there was the chance of getting away from all the people like those who made up that 1871 Lynch mob and those who voted for Matthew Clegg for the position of Judge.
In 1888, Eva Park married Reuben B. Reynolds. Her wedding announcement largely discussed the grisly murder of her family. It also discussed the murder of her groom’s first wife while he had been out at work. Other marriage announcements of the day would talk about the dress or the people who attended. But this tragedy clung to Eva Park Reynolds.
The two later had a son named Herbert Andrew Reynolds. He joined the Army and worked at the Depot in Jeffersonville as a Quartermaster, achieving the rank of Lieutenant. Reuben (His name is also spelled “Ruben” on some documents.) died in 1921. Mary Eva Park passed away in 1943 at age 88. Her only child, Herbert, died the following year in 1944. Herbert was only 51. He left behind a wife and a step-son. (On Find-a-Grave his date of death is listed as 1914 but a closer look at the gravestone shows that the date is actually 1944. I also found documents on Ancestry showing his date of death as 1944. I suggested a correction to the site and I hope that they correct it.)
In 1909, Marion Park, the eldest brother in the Park family died of meningitis. He was a 57 year old married steam engineer when he died.
The story of Mary Eva Park is one of resilience. She survived a violent mass murder. Almost her entire family was erased over night in their home. She had to watch her sister Helen die slowly of these injuries. She had to live with incredibly traumatic brain injuries. Yet, she married and raised a child. And she lived to the age of 88. She is buried with her family members at Walnut Ridge Cemetery in Jeffersonville.
Mary Taylor, the widow of Squire Taylor, lived a much different life. It was every bit as traumatic in different ways. She had grown up enslaved. That meant enduring forced labor, rape, beatings and the nearly constant trauma of watching these things happen to those around her as well. Just when things looked better, living as a free woman in Indiana, her husband is murdered by a lynch mob on trumped up charges. They used her young grandson against him. But she didn’t sit back and accept that injustice. She stood up, at great peril, and spoke out against it and brought a lawsuit. We don’t know what became of her after that. We don’t know where to visit her grave and lay flowers. We don't have a photo of her. But maybe we can say her name and the names of these other victims out loud. Maybe we can light a candle. Maybe we can go out into the world and be kind and fair to everyone. Maybe that’s how we best remember Mary Taylor, Squire Taylor, Charles Davis and George Johnson and the murdered Park Family members. Maybe we honor them by doing some good in the world.
Comments
Post a Comment