Under the Hay Stack--Dead

Early Monday morning, November 10, 1879, word was sent to Coroner Grafham that the body of a man was laying at an old straw stack belonging to Gilmore Howell, a short distance east of his house within a few feet of the state road leading from Vincennes through Lawrenceville to St Louis.

It appears that on the morning in question some children belonging to a family moving east, in passing the straw stack, noticed hogs eating what they supposed to be a dead body of some animal, but on closer inspection turned out to be that of a human being. Mr. Howell and Mr. Jonas Wenger, neighbors, were notified immediately and word was sent to the coroner.

Sometime in the day a jury was impaneled and an inquest held, which developed substantially the following facts:

On Friday evening at about sundown, parties were at this same straw stack getting straw, and about the place where the body was found, and saw nothing of it, and are confident it was not there at that time, or they would have seen it.  Shortly afterwards, about seven o’clock, parties who had been to Vincennes passed the straw stack and saw a mover’s wagon, the pole polating west, standing by the straw stack with four horses, unhitched from the wagon and unharnessed eating corn off the ground, but saw no persons. Mr. Howell remembers that he heard on the same evening sometime after dark, in the direction of the straw stack, loud talking as if persons were quarreling, but living on a public highway he paid no attention to it.  About midnight on this same Friday night, parties passed the straw stack going home from a party in the neighborhood and the wagon and horses were gone.

The straw stack where the body was found is an old one and has been considerably eaten under by cattle.  The body seemed to have been chucked under one of these eaten-out places and covered up with straw.  When found, the flesh had nearly all been eaten away from the face, the fingers from the left hand, a considerable portion of the flesh from the right thigh and the lower abdomen by hogs.  Owing to the mutilated condition of the face, it was impossible to give anything like an accurate description of the man.  He was five feet seven or eight inches high, and from his general appearance was a young man 28 to 30 years old. He had on a suit of new clothes but was shoeless and hatless.  A card found near had been torn into several pieces but when placed together had upon it, “Star Clothing House, Louisville, KY”. 

A postmortem examination of the body revealed beyond doubt that a foul, fiendish, brutal murder had been committed. The jaw bone had been broken so that it had been torn away by the hogs and only a portion of it was found, the skull had been broken in several places, and in one place on the back of the head where the skin had not been torn away, showed plainly where a lick had been dealt, leaving an indentation as if struck with some hard instrument with a flat square surface like the pole of an axe.  The general impression seemed to be that the unfortunate man, with others, were traveling west on a tour of inspection rather than moving with families and that an altercation grew up probably over a game of cards, as some were found, and this dark and mysterious deed was the result.

The verdict of the jury in substance was that the deceased came to his death by violent means at the hands of some person or persons unknown.

In all probability, this is all that will ever be known of the mystery.  It furnished no clue to work upon and there was scarcely a doubt that the murder was committed on Friday night, and nothing known of it until Monday following.

Since the inquest was held, further evidence came to light that on Saturday morning at about 2 o’clock after the occurrences related above, parties who had gone to Mr. Daub’s butcher shop for meat noticed a mover’s wagon with four horses go through town west.

Burial of the unidentified man was at Lawrenceville city cemetery according to the coroner's death records.

Editor's Note: Somebody's family tree is missing an ancestor, and they will have no clue to where to look. Talk about a genealogical brick wall, or in this case a straw stack. If there had been DNA tests back then, he possibly coud have been identified.