War breaks out in uptown Athens

Athens wasn't always the peacenik enclave that it is today. OK, so maybe it isn't exactly that today either, as evidenced by some much-publicized rowdy behavior around town in recent years. But there sure aren't any gunfights going down on Court Street.

Well, at least once there was. It happened in 1904 and is known as the Battle of Athens.

It wasn't a battle in any traditional sense, but it was a skirmish between military units. It was late August, and 6,000 to 7,000 national guardsmen and about 1,000 U.S. Army regulars were camped just outside of town conducting maneuvers.

"That ended up in a riot in the streets between the Army regulars and the National Guard; they were here training together," said Athens County Historical Society & Museum Director Ron Luce.

At the time, the idea of the National Guard and the regular Army working together was fairly new, he said.

"They were training here, and I think there was a lot of distrust," he said. "The Army regulars didn't particularly like the national guardsmen because the national guardsmen were considered somehow lesser-trained and inferior."

This sort of antagonism between military regulars and what amounts to state or local militias goes as far back as ancient Rome.

Luce said that at night members of the two groups would sneak into town from the Armitage Road area encampment site and go to the saloons to drink.

"This one night this soldier got really drunk and started shooting his gun in the saloon," he said. "A small group of the National Guard had been assigned to be here in town to keep the drunks in order and get them back over to the camps."

The guardsmen apparently beat the rowdy Army regular into unconsciousness, shackled him and dragged him over to the sheriff's office on Washington Street, Luce said. It was the same location as the sheriff's office is today.

At that point, Luce said, some other Army regulars decided that they were offended that one of their own had been beaten and arrested by the national guardsmen.

"They decided that they were going to come break him out of jail," Luce said. "(They were) probably under the influence of alcohol. So they came marching through town."

The path of that march was over the railroad bridge (probably where the bike path crosses the Hocking River today), down Central Avenue, up Washington Street to where the middle school is now, where they gathered briefly before marching down to Court Street and over to the sheriff's office.

"They were confronted by the head of the National Guard, a Corp. Charles Clark," Luce said. "He came out of the sheriff's office and tried to break up this mob scene. Immediately, gunfire started happening and Clark was killed. A couple of other guardsmen were wounded."

At that point, the mob broke up and everybody ran, with the Army regulars fleeing back across the river to the campsites, Luce said.

A Maj. Gen. Dick came into town, shut down the saloons and began an investigation. An Athens patriarch, Civil War Union Gen. Charles Grosvenor, served as prosecutor in the trial that followed.

"They never could find the man who killed Clark, but they had a pretty good idea and he ended up getting thrown out of the Army," Luce said. "Several others were punished. As it turned out, nobody was actually punished for killing him."

One soldier got a year in jail and a fine, while another Army regular who drowned while trying to cross the Hocking that night was found to have hair on the butt of his rifle.

"It appears he was one of two men who beat a national guardsmen with gun butts," Luce said. "Had he lived, he probably would've gotten a year (in jail) as well."

ONE OTHER INCIDENT WHERE armed conflict occurred within Athens County occurred during coalmine turmoil in Chauncey in 1932. It was the time of a great mine strike.

"The people in Chauncey were striking because the owners had decided they were going to give everybody a 25 percent cut in pay," Luce said.

The United Mineworkers of America union tried to help the citizens. But once the union was brought in, the owners got upset, and the National Guard was brought in to ostensibly protect the owners' interest in the mines, Luce said.

"There was literally firing across the valley there and down the streets of Chauncey as the strikers tried to pick off the National Guard and the National Guard tried to pick off the union workers," Luce said. "They mostly were harassing them, shooting out the lights of the National Guard towers and things like that."

People were killed, though, Luce confirmed. An 18-year-old by the name of Parker was shot dead in the local cemetery, he said.

"There were homes that were hit with bullets right in Chauncey," he said. "There was gunfire going down there. People were being threatened. Houses were dynamited. If you were a scab worker, you might've found yourself and your family being threatened, or a dynamite bomb going off on your front porch. It got pretty brutal."

One long-standing story in local lore is the origins of the non-standard pronunciation of Chauncey. Most people unfamiliar with the village would pronounce it so that "Chaun" rhymes with "lawn." However, during the coal strike, union members and their supporters started pronouncing it so that "Chaunce" rhypes with "chance." This was done to deliberately trip up out-of-town scabs brought in by management.