EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2013.
From the documentation of the early 1800s in Richland County, everything seems to be in place for the Legend of Horse Thief Jack to be true.
So was there a Jack?
The principal Driskill affiliates were named John, John, Stephen, William and Hugh. Those of the Brody clan were John, Dennis, James, Reason and Phenix. Through the available documentation, it’s difficult to know if any of them knew how to spell their names, but if they were attorneys, their sign would read Driskill, Driskell, Driscoll, Brody, Brodie and Brawdy, Esquires.
The two head thieves were both named John, and even 200 years ago, it was common for a John to be known as Jack. Jack is a catchall everyman reference to any anonymous male. It’s one of those eponymous abstractions delineating anything, like a Jack-of-all-trades.
Jack is the name of an impersonal mythic character who could be anyone, like the guy in Jack and the Beanstalk, or Jack-in-the-Box, and, as such, most generally considered benign. But Jack is also a face card in a deck of cards, like a One-Eyed Jack, the name of which evolved through time from what was once known as the Knave card — and a knave is a dishonest or unscrupulous person. In fact, in its most recent and current usage as a verb, to jack is to take something illicitly; steal. Like carjacking.
Speaking in terms of myth and poetry, which are pretty much one and the same, Jack is not a bad name to have spun out of the stories that accompany his name.
So was he one-eyed?
Actually, if he was a composite Driskill / Brody, then he could consider himself lucky to have any facial features at all. In popular parlance of the day, Stephen Brody was known as “Cropped Ears” Brody because he had been convicted in 1815 of his third offense of horse stealing — the penalty for which was a public cropping of one’s ears — much as you would use to identify your prize pig.
Two more of the Brodys were similarly defaced, and designated in the township records as having “a swallow fork in each ear.”
John Driskill, as we have already noted, who was in later life gunned down by 56 men simultaneously, was popularly recognized by an even more unfortunate facial misfortune. His earliest fame in Richland County came on the public square in Mansfield where he appeared as champion of the Clear Forkers, a roughhousing team of brawlers from the southeastern end of the county, in a famous public melee against the Black Forkers, who rode down from the northwestern end.
Apparently this was the weekend’s entertainment attended by everyone in town and worth the price of admission because it was well remembered by all, and artfully commented on more than 50 years later in the county histories.
In one of these brawls, Driskill famously chewed off another man’s ear, a man who subsequently vowed revenge, and then had the good fortune to be incarcerated in the same cell with him years later. Driskill fought valiantly to preserve his ears but in the process had the best part of his nose bitten off.
It’s not hard to imagine how unforgettable, and easily identifiable, his face was after a robbery; or why he wore a classic bandana mask even when he wasn’t pointing guns at people; and how, through time, a legend might persist about the evil highwayman who wore a bandage/mask/patch.
Common Nineteenth-Century Richland County humor:
Frick: Jack Driskill has no nose.
Frack: Really? How does he smell?
Frick: Terrible!
So, was there a barn burning?
The Richland County History says that “in retaliation for their pursuit, the villains burned the barns of Jonathan Coulter and William Irvin,” and goes on to say that, “by the vigilance and exertions of the Black Cane Company, this gang of rascals was finally driven from the county.”
Other county histories, in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, written at roughly the same time as ours, that have stories of the Driskill/Brody gang, often refer to the gang as “driven from the Clear Fork of the Mohican River, in Richland County, Ohio, about 1830-2,” and cite as justification for that expulsion “after burning down the barn of a Black Cane Company leader.”
So it’s certain enough that a barn burned, and the only question remaining is: what village in Richland County has a ridge nearby tall enough to lob a burning log off to the roof of a barn below.
The Village
There are several villages around the southern part of the county, situated among and below high hills, that might serve as a setting for the town that did battle against the horse thieves. It could be Lucas, Butler, Perrysville or Bellville by the topography, but in these towns memory is long, and an event like that would not have slipped through the cracks where lore has the continuity of so many enduring pioneer families.
The scene is more likely to be a village that no longer exists, a town whose memory is kept only by those now in country graveyards. Among these vanished crossroad hamlets, there are some who left their name behind on a road like Millsboro or Hastings, and some like Winchester and Pinhook that you might find on an old map.
But if you went out in a car you could drive right through the very heart of these villages and never even know it.
There is, however, one little town that would fit neatly into this ghost story because it is something of a ghost story in itself, having been completely and utterly obliterated from the landscape when a dam was built to staunch the spring floods of the Clear Fork River.
That town is Newville, and the river flowed through not too far from its Main Street so that the steep hills of the river valley tucked right up behind the edge of the village. In fact, the best picture we have of the town is a view taken from high above on a hill looking down on the rooftops below … exactly as the horse thieves would have seen it in Jack’s day and age.
Intriguingly enough, there are caves nearby, deep ones and shallow ones, in the vicinity of Hemlock Falls and Bunker Hill Road, actually within easy walking distance of downtown Newville. At a gallop, a horse thief’s mount could make it in the blink of one eye.
If you follow the road out of Newville not far and turn up the Possum Run Road, oddly enough, it isn’t but a couple of miles until you come up on the back of Hidden Hollow Camp. If you were to do this walk on some summer night it, is likely that you could come across a large and snapping campfire there, surrounded by 100 little kids with their eyes shining in the firelight, listening to an old, old story, each one of them hoping that they might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the ghost of Horse Thief Jack.
Conclusion
So here we are back where we began. And now you’ve heard the evidence and are wondering: what is the conclusion of the Legend of Horse Thief Jack?
Did this really happen or is it a fictional ghost story?
The answer to that is, of course, yes.
Timothy Brian McKee grew up in Mansfield and started gathering local history when he was in the 6th grade. He left here in the 1980s with no intention of ever returning again. After a number of years in California he realized that what he knew best was Richland County history, and that if he had anything to offer the world, it was here. So he came back home and has spent the last fifteen years telling our story in books, paintings, and film.
This is Part 4 of a 4-part series about the Legend of Horse Thief Jack—A Richland County ghost story.
Parts 1 & 2 tell the story itself, and Parts 3 & 4 are an exploration to determine how the story originated, and what possible basis the legend may have in documented local history
