Iron Hills Vigilantes

INGLES

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 10/21/2011 at 11:12:58

Maquoketa Community Press, July 20, 1954
(Editor’s note: Articles which were omitted from the Jackson Sentinel’s Centennial issue because of lack of space will appear for several weeks.)

VIGILANTES-Individuals who band together to aid in law enforcement-have been active in Jackson County during two periods of history.
The first group organized in the Iron Hills community about 1857 because of an obvious lack of law enforcement, soon fell into disrepute because of the mob violence it engendered. The second group, however, worked directly with peace officers and provided valuable service.
Citizens of Bellevue rid their community of a band of outlaws in 1840 by the famous one-day “Bellevue War.” But as the western part of the community became populated, the law-abiding citizens frequently at odds with rough, lawless men, who operated counterfeiting and horse-stealing activities from hide-outs in the hilly timberland.
By 1857 there had been 15 alleged murders in the county, but only one execution. Therefore, when John Ingles of the Iron Hills community was murdered while hunting in March, 1857, prominent citizens determined that the death should not go unavenged. Thus the Iron Hills Vigilance Committee was formed.
The suspected murderer having been lodged in the jail at Andrew to await the grand jury action, a mob of some sixty men marched to Andrew in double file on the afternoon of April 11, 1857. With sledge hammers they forced their way into the jail, tied a rope around the suspect’s neck and took him to a nearby tree.
There he was urged to confess, being promised that his life would be spared if he did. He not only admitted the actual shooting, but implicated two men who he said had paid him for the act. Despite the promise that had been made, mob violence prevailed and he was immediately hanged by the neck until dead.
Of the two men implicated, one escaped from the county and the other was spirited to Bellevue by constables and sent by boat to the penitentiary at Ft. Madison for safety. When he was brought back for trial some months later, the excitement had died down and he was never prosecuted.
The same mob took the law into its own hands the following month, after a former Farmers Creek township resident murdered his divorced wife at Bellevue, where she had taken refuge with relatives. On the night of March 28, 1857, the mob stormed the DeWitt jail, where he had been taken for safe-keeping, returned the culprit to Andrew and hanged him.
A third incident in the history of the Iron Hills vigilantes was the punishment some of the committee inflicted upon a man who was known as “a gay Lothario.” Accused of forcing his unwanted attentions upon women of the community, they took him one night to a ravine, smeared him with tar, and liberally applied several sackfuls of chicken feathers. History records that he left the county, never to be seen again.