Shouts of a Chicken Thief's Wife
Quiet little Hicksville had a knack for making the news. A year earlier, the Dredgers - a man and his two grown sons - were arrested because their barn was full of stolen items, including about a hundred chickens. The Dredgers confessed to the theft of everything found in the barn. The arrests were duly reported by the newspapers, after which unknown other thieves promptly emptied the barn, stealing the almost-recovered property all over again, hens and all. Moral: In Hicksville, don't count your chickens until the police return them to you.
Now, two days after news first broke of the puzzling death of William Rhodes, another story put Hicksville in the news yet again. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle - the evening newspaper with the largest circulation in America - devoted almost a full column to poultry thefts.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 20, 1878
Ethnic references abounded in the press of the day. Almost always,
African- Italian- Jewish- Polish- Chinese- and German-Americans who
made the news for any reason were labeled ethnically. My favorite
example is a story about a man's being rescued from drowning; the
title read simply SAVED BY AN ITALIAN
An angry, battered woman had shouted to the world that her husband, Pete Thompson, was a chicken thief. Word spread, and Thompson was arrested. He confessed, implicating three others. He said that the four men (two German-Americans and two African-Americans) had been responsible for many of the thefts. Thompson, James Seaman, and a man called Reinhardt were roving thieves; Jacob Gobhardt of Hicksville was their fence. Birds were delivered to Gobhardt's home in Hicksville in exchange for cash (six cents per pound for chickens, and a full dollar - equivalent to twenty-one dollars today - per turkey). Until slaughtered, the birds were concealed in a secret cellar that Gobhardt had dug for precisely that purpose. After he slaughtered a batch of birds, Gobhardt drove to Brooklyn, always late at night. He then took a ferry to Manhattan. Come morning, he sold his ill-gotten poultry. Following a search of his Hicksville property (including the secret cellar below the trap door), Gobhardt was arrested. Seaman and Reinhardt could not be found.
The importance of these arrests could not be exaggerated. For more than a year, the county had suffered an astounding incidence of poultry thefts - more than ten thousand chickens per month. There had been neither progress nor suspects.
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