Friday, August 17, 2012

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The August 31, 1880 Stamford Mirror in its Bovina column, reported the following:

Wm. Richardson was down by the brook below his house one evening last week, and saw what he supposed was an owl, in a tree, near by.  So he went to Thomas Miller and asked him for his gun - saying that there was the biggest owl over there that he ever saw in his life, and that it would kill all his hens around the place.  The gun was given to him and he went and blazed away, and knocked one of R.F. Thomson's turkey's out of the tree.
I've been trying to work out the geography of this incident and I think it happened in the Coulter Brook area.  The brook probably was the Little Delaware.  Robert F. Thomson (1829-1917) lived on Coulter Brook road.  William Richardson (1828-1917), who was Isabell Irvine Russell's grandfather and a Civil War veteran, may have been living in my house at the head of Coulter Brook Road.  Thomas Miller (1826-1911) lived on what is now Reinertsen Hill Road.

Whether any compensation was provided for Thomson's turkey is not known, but it appears someone had an impromptu turkey dinner.

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