Workhouse Records Suggest Possible Abandonment of Wife

On November 27 and 28, I spent parts of two days in Washington, DC and Maryland continuing to research the early life of my paternal great-grandfather, who was born Richard Thomas Nicholson in rural Montgomery County, Maryland. In the latter half of 1900, at the age of 18, Richard moved into Washington, DC with his parents, Clarence and Margaret, and three sisters. According to Margaret's testimony in her (1911) divorce from Clarence, Clarence deserted the family on September 20, 1900. He returned, but did this at least twice again, for three months in 1904 and for one week in August 1905, the latter reported on extensively in local newspapers, with allusions to the former (e.g., Evening Star, Aug. 8, 1905, p. 3). The Richard Nicholson who is listed as a machinist in the 1902 Baltimore city directory might be my great-grandfather; he is listed at the same address as his parents, in DC, in 1903, 1904, and 1905. (In the last year, a Richard T. Nicholson, conductor, is also listed in Baltimore; this is consistent with his occupations as a motorman and flagman for the DC street rail system.) In October 1902, Richard married Decotie Salaria Hepler, according to their marriage license application 21 years of age and resident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Nothing else is known about Decotie, except for an August 9, 1902 Evening Star newspaper mention of her needing to retrieve an unclaimed letter from the post office.

Richard and Decotie Marriage License Application 1902
Maryland State Archives T944-6

Before my most recent research in DC, what was known about the next period of time was that Clarence appeared in the Police Court, the local DC municipal court, on January 3, 1906 (Evening Star, Jan. 3, 1906). One Judge Kimball ordered him to pay Margaret four dollars per week in child support; a sentence of a $20 fine or 60 days in jail was imposed but suspended. ('"If you don't give her $4 a week regularly I will send you to jail," warned Judge Kimball.') The Evening Star of October 20, 1906 similarly reported that Clarence had been arrested "on complaint of" Margaret. The issue here was, again, abandonment of the family. In the interim, however, by March 22, Richard had made his way to St. Louis, Missouri, where he filed a declaration of recruit for the US Army, formally enlisting into Company G of the Second Cavalry on March 26, two days before his 24th birthday. (He had to swear that he was not married.) On April 9, he was received into Company G at Fort Riley, Kansas. Richard never returned to Washington, DC as far as is known. However, until April 19, a sergeant in Company G was one George Edward Wallace. Wallace had been stationed at Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Georgetown where the Nicholson family lived, from April to December 1903. Perhaps Richard and Wallace knew each other then. Regardless, they would have met in Kansas in April 1906. Then, from June 1907, as part of Company E of the 13th Cavalry, his next posting, to February 1910, when he retired from military service, Wallace was stationed again at Fort Myer. The following month, he married Richard's sister Cora. This would be an awful coincidence if Richard and Wallace didn't know each other.

Richard "O'Hagan" Declaration of Recruit 1906
National Archives and Records Administration

In November, I visited the District of Columbia Archives in order to search through ledgers of commitment to the DC jail beginning in 1900. These ledgers give summary information: commitment number, commitment date, name of committed person (sometimes with information on age and race), committing body (e.g., Police Court), offense, discharge date, and discharging body. I searched from July 1, 1900 to March 24, 1906, and found no record of Clarence or Richard being jailed. (Records for November 1, 1900 to October 31, 1901 are missing.) Fortunately the archivist was thoughtful enough to also bring me ledgers of commitment to the DC workhouse. From this I learned that misdemeanors of the era led to time in the workhouse while felonies led to time in the jail, so searching through the workhouse records was just as important as the jail records. These records are also more extensive, even in their summary form. They list: name, date of commitment, age, color, state of birth of parents, marital status, whether the person could read or write, state of birth of committed person, occupation, "on what account" committed, the number of prior commitments, days of commitment, discharge date, discharging body, remarks (which cite missing Police Court records), and any fines. I searched the workhouse records from July 1, 1904 (preceding surviving records only go up to 1900) to September 30, 1907, and located no records for Richard. I did, however, locate two records for Clarence. One of the records gave context to the family's situation in this period that has allowed me to make inferences about Richard's situation at the same time.

On January 31, 1906, Clarence was committed to the workhouse for "disorderly conduct." He was sentenced to 15 days, but was discharged on February 9, by the Police Court (record #3158, p. 172, remarks #283014, $5 fine). This was four weeks to the day after he appeared in Judge Kimball's court (see above), and less than two months before Richard appeared in St. Louis (if he hadn't left the area already). This was Clarence's second commitment, but his first commitment must have been before July 1, 1904, as it does not appear in the surviving records I was able to consult. Similarly, on January 31, 1907, exactly one year later, Clarence was committed to the workhouse again, this time for "non-support of child." He was sentenced to 90 days, but was discharged on April 15, by the Juvenile Court, "for good conduct" (record #3072, p. 283, remarks #150046, no fine).

Curious about the charge of Clarence's third commitment, I have since learned that 1905 was a major year for the reform of laws to punish men who abandoned their wives and/or children. Washington, DC suffered acutely from this problem from a jurisdictional perspective because it was especially easy for men to cross into neighboring Maryland or Virginia. Abandonment needed to be made at least a misdemeanor in order to be able to enforce extradition across state lines. In Washington, DC, reform was led by the Associated Charities (see the study Family Desertion and Non-support Laws, by W.H. Baldwin, a member of the organization, from 1904). The Associated Charities was a Catholic organization that was part of a movement that did not support almsgiving to abandoned women, on the belief that it would incentivize false claims of abandonment, nor the institutionalization of the abandoned, as had been common previously (see Elizabeth Katz's 2019 "Criminal Law in a Civil Guise: The Evolution of Family Courts and Support Laws" in the University of Chicago Review of Law). 

On February 27, 1906, the Washington Post reported that a bill had been passed "making it a misdemeanor in the District to abandon or willfully neglect to provide for the support and maintenance by any person of his wife or of his or her minor children" (p. 2). The Evening Star of February 16 (p. 6) had made it clear that this was Senate bill 4303. (The Senate then made laws for DC.) On April 18, 1906, the Washington Post reported this (p. 3): "Wife deserters in the District will have to support their families or go to the workhouse hereafter. This was the declaration made at the Carnegie Library last night at a meeting under the auspices of the Associated Charities. Although the law has been in force only a month, several cases have been prosecuted, and in other instances delinquent husbands have been brought to time by the threat of prosecution. At the workhouse they will have to work hard, according to Superintendent Zinkhan, and as the offense is a felony [this is misreported], the penalty cannot be escaped by flight to any part of the United States."

Washington Post, April 18, 1906
Newspapers.com

This was the ethos in which Clarence was first brought to trial in early January 1906, before the reform law was passed. Margaret's complaint of him in October 1906, and Clarence's third commitment to the workhouse in early 1907, must have been under the auspices of the new law. He was arrested, tried, and committed to the workhouse over an approximately three-month period. The timing of all of this is notable, and it's led me to the following theory. If Richard had abandoned Decotie but never divorced her (it's not known whether they had children, and it wouldn't have mattered under the new law), he would be a target for the law that was passed in late February 1906, some three weeks before he appears in St. Louis enlisting in the Army under a false surname, into a unit commanded by a likely acquaintance. To compound things, Richard's own mother seems to have been willing to utilize this new reform movement to hold her own husband accountable, a fact that, if Richard abandoned Decotie, couldn't have put him on good terms with his mother. If your mother filed a complaint against your father for what had since become a crime and which you were also guilty of, what would you do? It would no longer be sufficient to flee across state lines, because of the new possibility of extradition; additional disguises would be necessary to avoid discovery.

On the second day of my research, I visited the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis in order to rule out other possibilities related to Richard. There I searched the civil and criminal docket indexes for Montgomery County, Maryland for the years spanning Richard and Decotie's possible marriage (1902-1906). There is no record of either of them, meaning that they were not divorced there, nor did either of them commit a crime there. (Other divorce records are readily located, such as Clarence and Margaret's.) I also searched the civil docket indexes for Baltimore; there is no record of divorce there either. In 2018, I previously searched for a divorce within Washington, DC; again, nothing. (I have not searched criminal records there, but Richard's absence in the jail commitment records at least means he was never convicted of a crime and saw time there.) It is possible that Richard and Decotie were divorced in Frederick County, Maryland, to the north of Montgomery County, but this is unlikely; no other records tie Richard or his immediate family there. This growing body of evidence suggests that there was no criminal reason as to why Richard left Washington, DC and changed his surname; nor does there seem to be any record of divorce. This, then, is consistent with the theory that Richard fled an imminent criminal conviction, quite possibly one related to the abandonment of his wife, one that was already gaining traction within his own family between his parents.

Maryland State Archives
November 28, 2023