West Jefferson in Days Gone By - series 94 by Charlie Miller

____1895- A. A. Gregg Jr., is the manager of the Opera House (Village Hall)

____November 26, 1895 – Joseph Borland quits as the Lamp Lighter, and Neal Lambert is appointed.

____December 11, 1895 – Ollie White, who killed her husband last May is captured in Gallipolis, Ohio. (She was later sentenced to life in prison.)

____September 23, 1896 – December 23, 1896 – West Jefferson has another murder to add to its list of unfortunate homicides. Edmund Buck, who owned the Hotel Buck, was killed about noon by Marsh (March) Ricks a local barber, near the same site where Mr. Samuel Stickley was murdered. Ricks was jailed by officers George Baber and Sprague. Ricks was taken to London for fear of being lynched. (March Rix was born September 29, 1869, in West Jefferson. His father was Martin Van Buren Ricks, born June a slave 1843 in Oktibbeha, Co. Mississippi. It is believed that Ricks, wife, and a son escaped to the north when Gen. Grierson’s Raid came through Oktibbeha County, Mississippi in 1863. Ricks later served in the 27th Infantry, U.S.Colored Troops. He was killed by being hit by a fast freight in West Jefferson in 1804 and is buried in the New Hampton Cemetery.)

____December 23, 1896 – March Ricks received a life sentence in the Ohio State Penitentiary for the Murder of Ed Buck. (Per Ida Grassel he was later released and grieved himself to death as he was a friend of Bucks. Ed Buck donated the land for the St. Simon & Jude Catholic Church on Main Street)

____March 3, 1897 – Bill Stutson has opened a butcher shop in the old Ricks shop room.

____June 23, 1897 – Prof. Linson made a successful balloon accent and parachute leap here last Saturday.

____July 21, 1897-Prominent citizen of Jefferson dies. - Dr. John Nobel Beach, was born in 1829 in Madison County, located in Jefferson in 1859. In 1884 he published a history of the 40th O. V. I. of which he had been commissioned Surgeon. In 1874 he was elected Professor of the Columbus Medical College. In 1875 he represented Madison County in the Lower House of the Ohio Legislature. He was for some time the West Jefferson correspondent for the Madison County Democrat. His funeral held in Jefferson, was the largest ever seen here. (Dr. Beach built the large brick building at 11 W. Main St and had his office in the east end.)

____August 1897 – Another Murder in West Jefferson: 13-year-old Maud Whipple, daughter of Mrs. Kate Whipple of West Jefferson, was found shot near the Big Darby Creek, two miles east of town. Mrs. David Taylor, 47, was arrested as a suspect. (Kate Whipple was a widow, she had another daughter named Harriett whose husband Calvin Gillivan was the grandson of George Gillivan a Mayor of West Jefferson who died in office in 1903.)