Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

In 1903, Sheriff J.H. Torrence Shearer took over from Henry Dill Loveland. One of the duties that came with being the sheriff was managing the local jail, which was along East Church Street. The newspapers, at the time, would refer to it as a fort, placing the last name of the sheriff as the title. So, in January of 1903, “Fort Loveland” became “Fort Shearer.”

The jail was supposed to come with ten inmates, at that time. An eleventh was brought in almost immediately by Constable Ellis Myers, the first new convict on Shearer’s watch. An Italian immigrant from Oak Grove had stabbed another man for fifty dollars, and therefore became the next guest of Fort Shearer.

As Shearer took over, the Clinton County Times reported, he discovered that the building was more populated than he’d expected, but not with convicted criminals. No, the place was infested with insects.

“He hadn’t got settled in his new abode before he discovered that he was not only called upon to feed and care for the ten inmates,” the Clinton County Times reported,”But that he also had an innumerable host of bedbugs and cockroaches that were waiting for their chance to levy tribute upon him and his family. The sheriff is naturally a brave man, but knows when he is ‘up against it’ and he promptly threw up his hands and called for help.”

The Clinton County Times had an excessively dramatic way of reporting things, but that’s beside the point.

Shearer went to the county commissioners to ask for extermination. H. Clark Stoner, William Gummo, and William A. Hanna were serving their terms that year, and they listened to Shearer’s appeal for some help in making the jail less, well, infested.

The bedrooms and kitchen were the worst of it, as would pretty much be expected. Someone (the article doesn’t name specifically who) suggested that Shearer trap all of the cockroaches in the kitchen and release them in the bedrooms, where they would destroy all the bedbugs. The Times suggested this would be a good method for people to use at home.

Shearer regarded this as a less than adequate solution.

The commissioners, of course, agreed to help out and fund extermination procedures. “Of course he made his appeal to the county commissioners and they took immediate measures to suppress the hungry hordes in the bedrooms and kitchen,” the Times reported.

I have to throw in a quick plug for Sheriff Loveland here—-He was not a bad guy or a bad sheriff. Loveland was a Civil War vet from Lamar who joined the war at about age fourteen. One story says that he put a note with the number eighteen in his boot, so he could honestly say he was over eighteen. He didn’t, I’m sure, deliberately leave Shearer with a jail full of vermin; he may have just been unaware of the problem.

And as exterminations were getting underway, Constable Myers came in with another Italian from Oak Grove who’d stolen ten dollars, which was seventeen thousand by today’s standards. They locked him up, making twelve inmates and hopefully a much smaller number of roaches and bedbugs.

Shearer served as sheriff of Clinton County until 1906, when he handed the reins over to J. Harris Mussina, the next sheriff in line. I’m hoping he had eliminated most of the pests in the jail by that time, or at least passed along the tip about moving the roaches to the bedrooms.