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This story was told to me by Dr. Hubbard Needham, a prominent citizen of
Grant County. The time was the early part of the last decade of the
nineteenth century.
At that time there was a little saloon in Dry Ridge across from what is
now Point's Serve Station. The saloon was the meeting place for a
majority of the townspeople. The owner of the saloon also owned some
very fine horses, and one morning he discovered that one of his horses
had been stolen; a year later, another horse disappeared.
The Williamstown marshal suspected a former Sherman boy, then living in
Indiana, to be the thief. A month after the second horse was stolen, the
marshal went to Indiana and arrested the man he suspected. He and the
prisoner got on the train in Cincinnati to return to Williamstown. When
the train stopped in Sherman, several masked men jumped aboard and took
the prisoner right out of the marshal's hands. The led him to a hollow
down near Sherman Lake. Here they hanged him to a locust tree and left
him there to die-about a hundred yards from the very house where he was
born.
Mr. Needham said that he can still remember the day he looked out the
school window toward the Williamstown cemetery and saw a few people with
umbrellas over their heads standing by the man's grave in a downpour of
rain. Only about six people had attended the burial sevice for the man
whose life had been taken for just two horses.
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