Edward Roe’s 1904 “How to Do Business” warned readers to be wary of itinerant agents.

Scams and swindles proliferated in the late 19th century, despite a sometimes idealized modern-day view of the period. “Work at home” offers targeted housewives in an era with very few opportunities for women to gain respectable work outside of the home. The candidate had to purchase a sample embroidery kit or small artwork, complete it, and return it to the company. Invariably, the finished work was never acceptable – because the companies made their money not in farming out work to home-based workers, but in selling samples.

Patent medicines were rife. Food adulteration was common. Fake doctors took trains from town to town, offering miraculous cures. Promissory-note shenanigans took place.

One little-known yet strange swindle, which affected Washtenaw County farmers, the state as a whole, and elsewhere, involved no more than a simple metal stick – a lightning rod.

Swindling Fraternity

“Next to the substitution of saw-dust packages for counterfeit money, and the sale of brass jewelry, the business of putting up lightning rods is a favorite field for the operations of the swindling fraternity,” wrote John Phin in 1879. Phin was a onetime faculty member of New York’s People’s College and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to publishing a Shakespeare encyclopedia, several works on microscopy, a treatise on “Open Air Grape Culture,” and a primer on the “Preparation and Use of Cements and Glue,” Phin also published “Plain Directions for the Construction and Erection of Lightning Rods,” from which the above quote is taken. At an 1871 meeting of the American Institute of the City of New York for the Encouragement of Science and Invention, he was regarded as the reigning expert on the subject.

From beyond the grave, Ann Arbor’s Dr. Alvan Chase warned readers of the dangers of the lightning-rod men.

The swindling fraternity to which Phin referred consisted of itinerant lightning-rod men plying backroads in a wagon. When they visited farms they used one of at least three methods of trickery.

Ann Arbor’s own Dr. Alvan Chase, author of the popular 1896 book “Dr. Chase’s Recipes, or, Information for Everybody” described one such tactic in his posthumous 1894 book “Dr. Chase’s Home Advisor and Everyday Reference Book.” “The scheme is to sell the lightning rods, and to take pay, usually in the form of a swindling note or contract, which is placed in the hands of an innocent third party, and can be collected.” In other words, after securing a promissory note from a farmer, the swindlers could cash it at a bank. The farmer then had to contend with the authority of the bank – perhaps the one that held his mortgage – as the bank attempted to redeem the note for cash money.

Another scheme involved altering the contract presented to the farmer. After taking an order from a farmer and filling out a contract, the swindler would alter it. “After the contract is signed, the sharper inserts a 5 before the 7, making the amount per foot 57 instead of 7 cents,” noted Edward Roe in his 1904 book “Safe Methods, or, How to Do Business.” He continued, “And there being nothing said in the contract as to the number of points, vanes, etc. to be used, the lightning-rod man throws them in ‘good and plenty,’ so that instead of the business costing [the farmer] about $28 as he expected, he finds that the bill runs up to $185 …”

“Two men are working a new swindle among the farmers,” reported the Sept. 21, 1888 Marshall Statesman. “They claim to represent the National Tube lightning rod company and [have been] sent out by an insurance company to inspect lightning rods.” After the rods were “tested,” said the paper, invariably they were found defective. The men offered to replace them. “It’s the old story after that,” continued the paper. “[T]he farmer who signs obligates himself by a sleight-of-hand trick of the agents to pay two or three times the value of the rod.”

Fire Insurance

Lightning rods served as a lever for swindles for several reasons. One was the lack of reliable rural fire service and telephony. Washtenaw County towns had municipal fire services. Ann Arbor organized a primitive one in 1836 when the city was a village with only two small wards, according to Chapman’s 1881 “History of Washtenaw County.” Ypsilanti organized a fire department in 1873. Dexter followed suit in 1877, Manchester in 1883, and Chelsea in 1889. The farmer in a distant township, however, was largely on his own.

Some farmers forewent the expense of insurance, though many plans were available from a variety of states. The 1890 Polk’s Ann Arbor city directory lists 52 insurance companies in all: one exclusively for plate glass, three for life insurance, three for accidents, and 45 for fire insurance. Many local policies were sold by James Bach from his office at 16 E. Huron Street, among other agents.

In contrast to these stockholder-based insurance companies, Washtenaw farmers organized at least four local mutual farmers’ insurance cooperatives. The Ann Arbor-based German Farmers’ Mutual organized in 1859, as did the Ann Arbor-based Washtenaw Mutual. The Manchester-based Southern Washtenaw Farmers’ Mutual formed in 1872, and the Dexter-based Northwestern Washtenaw Farmers’ Mutual began in 1898. Regardless of this panoply of choices, some barns still burned to the ground uninsured.

In 1905 the secretary of Washtenaw Mutual gave a summary of his company’s recent claims, as reported in the September 7, 1905 issue of the Western Underwriter. “The largest number of losses, thirteen, occurred in November, seven by fire and six by lightning. July was second with ten losses, all lightning . . . [f]or some reason not fully understood, the number of lightning losses is on the increase.”

Lightning was a leading cause of fires in the era. Turn-of-the-century annual reports from the Michigan Insurance Bureau categorized seven causes of fires: lightning, steam threshers, incendiary [arson], field or forest fires, defective chimneys or stove pipes, unknown, and miscellaneous. For both 1886 and 1903, lightning was the second-largest cause of all fire claims submitted to Washtenaw Mutual, exceeded only by faulty stove pipes. In 1886 Washtenaw Mutual paid out $1,712 for lightning claims, the equivalent of $43,000 today.

One additional possible reason for farmers’ vulnerability to fraud was a general lack of information. Without reliable access to news, including communication technologies or the local turn-of-the-century institution of rural delivery mail routes (which also delivered newspapers, many of which were printing warnings against the swindle), farmers may have been at a disadvantage.

Some farmers had little tolerance for the marauding lightning-rod men, as depicted here from the 1907 book “Swindling Exposed, from the Diary of William B. Moreau, King of Fakirs.”

Regardless, some farmers rebelled against the traveling agents. “A farmer in St. Clair County settled a note given to a lightning rod swindler,” said the February 6, 1878 Owosso American, “by grabbing the note when it was presented for payment and kicking the swindler off his premises.” The July 9, 1906 Marshall Daily Chronicle reported, “[One] farmer was given a second ‘contract,’ to which he affixed his signature. The swindlers were unable to cash the note in the vicinity, and one farmer got rid of the slick chaps by threatening to use a shotgun.”

The widespread fraud took its toll. “According to the Bureau of Standards it has been estimated that not more than fifteen or twenty per cent of the buildings in the United States which are liable to damage by lightning are protected in any manner against it,” reported the January, 1921 issue of the National Fire Protection Association Quarterly. “The lack of protection is charged largely to swindling lightning-rod agents of thirty or forty years ago, who prospered greatly at the expense of a credulous public.”

Over time the stigma faded. The swindlers drifted off – only to resurface in 2011 in Kansas, last May in Pennsylvania and last November in rural Wisconsin. Here’s hoping the local sheriff “conducted” the swindlers out of town.

Mystery Artifact

Jim Rees correctly guessed last column’s mystery artifact.

Mystery Object

It is a “Dice Box” patented by Ann Arbor’s Eugene Gregory in 1894. Talk about a great guess!

See if you can suss out this column’s mysterious 1892 diagram. What does this depict? Take your best guess!

Contact Laura at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to keep us from falling prey to lightning rod scams. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

This late 19th-century public domain stereoscopic image shows threshing in Illinois.

In the mid-1880s, one fraudulent scheme snookered thousands of Michigan farmers across the lower half of the lower peninsula, including many in Washtenaw County. As the fraud spread like a storm over sixteen Michigan counties, it left farmers crushed by debt, newspapers issuing shrill warnings, and a rising tide of lawsuits that crested not once but several times in the Michigan Supreme Court.

The miracle product responsible for ruination was the fabled “Bohemian oats,” a variety of oat touted as far more valuable than the regular oats then for sale from 35 to 50 cents a bushel in southeastern Michigan.

Scamming Oats

With minor variations the proposition was this: the “oat company agent” offered to sell the farmer 10 bushels of Bohemian oats for $10 per bushel. The farmer would grow and harvest the crop, at which time the agent would buy 20 bushels of the oats for $10 per bushel, minus a reselling percentage. For an investment of $100, the farmer would make nearly $100 in pure profit. One-hundred dollars in 1885 Michigan – equivalent to $2,500 today – was enough to buy a decent farm horse

If the farmer agreed, the agent would present him with a contract with an “abundance of red and green inks, [a] very broad seal (intended to look like gold, but . . . only Dutch metal) and the bold signature of a secretary [of the agent’s purported oat company] . . . ” according to the March 1886 issue of the American Agriculturist. The farmer signed the bond – the agent did not. The farmer rarely paid in cash, but with a promissory note to be paid one year later, when he received the agent’s payment for the oat crop.

It was at this point that the scheme took one of several paths.

Sometimes the agent showed up at harvest time, collected the oats, and paid the farmer not in cash but in his own promissory notes, which turned out, at the bank, to be worthless.

Other times the agent, instead of holding the promissory note for a year, would sell it to a bank. An unsuspecting bank customer might buy it for face value, trusting in the farmer’s good name, and later try to cash it. But the farmer couldn’t redeem the note prematurely without the largesse from the oat crop.

He had to either sell off some stock animals, perhaps the very ones that enabled him to plow, or plead unable to pay, which often led to a lawsuit from the note’s purchaser. A third option for less scrupulous farmers was to try to pawn off the oats to his neighbors, perhaps while brandishing the gloriously colored and impressive certificate from the agent, to demonstrate the oat company’s authenticity.

Marketing the Oat Scam

A third strategy extended over the span of two years, as detailed in Willard Tucker’s 1913 book “Gratiot County Michigan.” The agent breezed into the county and signed up several of the more prominent farmers for the oat deal. When the crop was harvested, the agent duly paid per the agreement

Then he published an ad touting testimonials from these respectable and prosperous men. One Robert Smith was quoted as saying that Bohemian oats were “the best and most profitable branch of farming that they had ever engaged in.” The ad was read with interest by numerous other Gratiot county farmers.

The ad did not go unnoticed by newspapers. The Nov. 20, 1885 Marshall Statesman wrote, “The Bohemian oats agents in Gratiot county are so audacious that they actually advertise in the local papers the list of their victims.”

“And the farmers fell over one another in their anxiety to get some of those oats,” continued Tucker, “and to give their notes for them at $10 a bushel.” The farmers showered the agent with promissory notes and planted their crop.

This time, the agent quietly laundered the pile of notes at a bank and wafted away.

Newspapers all over Michigan watched this ongoing pillage of local farms with mounting frustration. Editorial after editorial had gone for nought.

The March 12, 1886 Marshall Statesman wrote: “Parties about Morenci [Lenawee County] who have been duped by the Bohemian oats scheme into giving notes have banded themselves together to resist payment of said notes. It is wonderful how many dupes the swindlers can make in this reading age, when the papers have so long been filled with exposure.”

A May 1886 issue of the Ovid [Clinton County] Union, which had railed against the scheme, said, “[Some farmers who] thought they were too poor to pay 75 cents a year for the Union  . . .  will have to pay Bohemian oat notes to the extent of several hundred dollars. You see the point?”

Women v. Bogus Oats

Not everyone fell for the scam. Some starry-eyed farmers were dissuaded by flinty-eyed wives.

In his 1907 memoir “Swindling Exposed, from the Diary of William B. Moreau, King of Fakirs,” the author wrote of his experience shilling Bohemian oats. “The first farmer we came to listened to us, and there is little doubt of our bagging him were it not for his wife, who called him one side, and then the jig was up. We never tried to work a man after he consulted with his wife, unless she also fell into the trap, which was seldom the case. Rather cast down in spirits, [we] drove away . . . ”

An illustration from Moreau’s book hints at the despondency suffered by farmers who were fleeced.

The Feb. 11, 1887 issue of the Marshall Statesman reported, “The fact that Farmer Courtright, who lives near Lansing, is confined to his bed by serious illness, did not prevent a Bohemian oats agent calling this week, and demanding payment of a $160 note. Nor was Mrs. Cartwright prevented from settling the business by catching the agent by the slack of his coat, getting possession of the note and tearing it into fragments, and then walking the fellow out of the house, too quick.”

Other schemes of the day evolved to target women. One Mrs. R. F. Johnston gave a Jan. 23, 1885 talk at the Monroe Institute about the deceptive nature of work-at-home schemes marketed to housewives. One of these was the processing of silk cocoons. “Those who have tried it report very hard work, no play, and very poor pay. The money seems to be gathered in by those who have the silkworm eggs and the Russian mulberry for sale,” said Mrs. Johnson. “When the cocoons are spun and steamed and packed, and express charges paid to Philadelphia, and the association fails to remit at all, or pays only half schedule value, one is inclined to believe there must be some ‘Bohemian oats’ about the scheme.” The term had become derisive slang.

Origin of Bogus Oats and Beyond

Other farmers figured out for themselves that Bohemian oats were a scam. As noted by the February 6, 1885 Marshall Statesman: “Bohemian oats fiends undertook to convince farmer Graves of Washtenaw county, that he needed a supply of their choice seed. Farmer Graves meandered to the house, came out loaded with a shotgun and other implements of war, and informed the fiends that he was subject to fits of temporary insanity, whereupon they left for parts unknown quickly and without ceremony.”

The culprit may have been one Alfred Hammer, who in 1884 organized a company called the Ypsilanti Bohemian Oats and Cereal Company, a mysterious concern that is not listed in mid-1880s Ypsilanti city directories. Hammer’s venture was short-lived; he was arrested in Flint for oat fraud and after a two-day-long trial, sentenced to either two years in prison or a $250 fine. Hammer paid the fine.

An illustration from Moreau’s book depicts him and a confederate out to sell Bohemian oats.”

Many other lawsuits filled Michigan courts at the local, circuit court, and Supreme Court level. The Michigan legislature acted and in 1887 with the approval of Governor Luce passed the “Bohemian Oats Bill,” which made it a felony for anyone to take a note or receipt for the sale of grains at a “fictitious price,” defined as twice the going market rate or greater. Iowa and Ohio passed similar laws.

By the late 1880s when the scheme had petered out, the loss was counted in hundreds of thousands of dollars to Michigan farmers. Berrien county farmers paid $1,000 for oats in 1885 [$25,000 in today’s money]. Farmers in Eaton Rapids lost $35,000 [$863,000]. Livingston County farmers lost $100,000 [$2,500,000]. The Ypsilanti company is said to have cleared a tidy $100,000.

Michigan was not the only state affected. Similar Bohemian oat swindles were reported from Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, and a few in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Dakota Territory. Even Connecticut and Maine, hardly grain belt states, each reported one fraud case.

When Bohemian oats had run their course, swindlers turned to other ingenious schemes. Some involved other exotically-named strains of barley, oats, and wheat. Others branched out into other farm products. “The Bohemian oats scheme has recently been o’ershadowed by a new scheme, which for unadulterated, galvanized ‘cheek,’ is entitled to the first prize,” said the April 16, 1886 Marshall Daily Chronicle. “An oily-tongued individual offers for sale Plymouth Rock eggs for $75 per dozen, and agrees to buy all chickens hatched from these eggs for $100 each. The fact that these eggs are pretty thoroughly boiled does not seem to interfere in the least with the sharper’s success.”

One well-known scam throughout the Midwest involved lightning rods. A salesman promised to install lightning rods on a farmer’s house and barn for a fixed cost. A tiny clause in the contract stipulated an extra fee if the collective length of the rods happened to accidentally run a bit over the agreed length. One Indiana farmer who signed up had second thoughts and ran to town to consult an attorney. “Upon returning,” said the Oct. 26, 1895 Goshen Weekly News, “he found his buildings bristling with lightning rods so that a bolt could not get between them to the buildings.”

The ingenuity of scoundrels perpetrates scams to this day, but 19th-century Michigan farmers also had their full share.

Mystery Artifact

In the most recent column, Donna Estabrook guessed that the item in question was kitchen tongs.

Mystery Object

That is what I believe they are. I’m not 100% sure, however, and if corrected would be grateful for the information.

This Mystery Object was invented by an Ann Arborite, but what might it be? Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is assistant editor at Michigan History Magazine. Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to keep us from falling prey to Bohemian news sales pitches. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.