Aberdeen, Ohio, and Maysville, Kentucky, are linked by a steel bridge and a shaky family tree. The smaller Aberdeen, on U.S. Route 52 in Brown County, never culminated in a typical nineteenth-century business district, as did Maysville and neighboring Ripley, home of Ohio’s burley tobacco market. Maysville and Ripley are red brick and Southern in appearance and attitude, but Aberdeen is more informal, all white and sprawling, as if its founders had to keep their options open.
The village of about two thousand people is known for one thing: the Simon Kenton Bridge, built over the Ohio in 1931. It seems a one-way route: Ohioans cross the river to shop, work, and entertain themselves. A century ago, however, generations of Maysville people came to little Aberdeen just to say “I do” because they didn’t need a marriage license. All they needed was desire. Ever since, genealogists on both sides of the river have been trying to untangle their conjugal roots.
Aberdeen, meanwhile, has spent the last century trying to live down—or live up to, depending on your family’s perspective—its past of lax marriage rules. Some women flowed across the river in yellow velvet gowns; others sneaked across at night in homespun dresses. They all sought temporary relief on Aberdeen’s muddy shore, where anybody could be hitched fast and for the right price.
By the time I came along, the marriage paper trail had blown into eternity. It was all a memory, or a retelling of someone else’s tale. Yet the Marriage Capital of Ohio lives on in the minds and record books of local people and institutions. The town still celebrates its marital history with a summer festival, which some couples make a nuptial event and where others renew their vows.
Because marriage itself is a gamble, Aberdeen became a rural Las Vegas, and the region’s number one marriage market in the 1800s. So many couples married there that neighboring states lost count. The town became a wedding turnstile. As a modern chamber of commerce advertisement points out, the earliest Aberdeen marriage certificate dates to June 11, 1772, “making Las Vegas and Niagara Falls look like modern interlopers to the small river town.” Aberdeenians exploited their town’s strategic location on the Ohio (fifty miles west of Portsmouth; forty-five miles east of Cincinnati) by bringing in boatloads of couples and offering low-cost witness service. Weddings were Aberdeen’s cash crop. Some local men made a living by witnessing.
Today, Route 52 zigzags along the Ohio like a strip of gingerbread, touching rusty trailers and lonely campsites that slowly come to life in spring. In Aberdeen, small businesses—car wash, fast-food restaurant, motel, antique shop—give the village a measure of activity. I felt I was in the country when I saw a sign for Sissy’s Restaurant. Directly across the river, a busier Maysville was hunched on the banks, like a collection of Victorian dollhouses. Spires and steeples rose from the hills, which appeared to fall into the misty river below.
On a fine spring day I went to Aberdeen looking for a wedding. I couldn’t find one, not even in the mayor’s office. These days, few transient couples rush here to be married by public officials, and shotgun-toting fathers rarely charge into town (well, at least not too often) from the hills.
In Margaret’s Kitchen, a little white restaurant on the highway, the old counter and knotty-pine seats looked comfortable enough to hold a dozen eloping couples, but the place was quiet by early afternoon. I asked where a guy could marry quickly in this town, and people stared as though I were an undercover cop. Two waitresses looked me over from head to foot, possibly considering me marriage material or a molester, then informed me that Aberdeen—and its scenic river vantage point—is the most romantic place in Ohio for a wedding. I had to tell them the bad news: I’m already married.
No matter. As if I should know it, one woman said, “Aberdeen was the home of the marryin’ squires.”
Another waitress said, “People stop in here all the time to ask about the old boys, who must have hitched everybody’s ancestors. We hear about that stuff all the time from genealogists. Yeah, Squire Beasley— oh, gracious, he married a lot of couples.”
An old man seated at the counter looked up from his serving of apple pie and said, “Uh, yeah—thousands.”
His buddy turned to me and added, “Naw, man. Tens of thousands.”
He was not exaggerating. In the 1800s, Aberdeen was called “America’s Gretna Green,” referring to a village in Dumfries, Scotland, once known as a runaway lovers’ haven. (Aberdeen is also the name of a city in Scotland.)
Aberdeen has no anvils left, but its Greta Green nickname came honestly enough in the form of Thomas Shelton, a Huntington Township justice of the peace who elevated the holy bonds of matrimony to cottage-industry status. His successor, Massie Beasley, took the tradition to new heights. At one point in the late 1800s, it seemed the town would forever serve the impetuous lover. If a couple wanted to elope, all they had to do was go to Aberdeen, where nobody worried about marriage’s minute details—license included. Steamboat companies and, later, the railroads, made Aberdeen a regular stop on the Cincinnati-to-Pittsburgh route. Shelton’s pockets bulged. Keeping his effort at a minimum, he stood before each couple and said loudly: “Marriage is a solemn ordinance, instituted by an all-wise Jehovah. Jine yer right hands. Do you take this woman to nourish and cherish, to keep her in sickness and health? I hope you live long and do well together. Take your seats.”
Beasley’s ceremony lasted a bit longer, and he married, by his estimates, twenty thousand paying couples over twenty-two years. Some women complained that the ceremonies joined the man only to the woman, and not the woman to the man, but the squires didn’t care.
I drove around Aberdeen’s few streets for a while and on Market Street saw Massie Beasley’s two-story brick house, which was being renovated. I was told to ask about the squires at the village hall. The white concrete-block building on Route 52 is equipped with a clock that shows only military time. (“All I know,” a secretary said, “is when it’s time to go home.”)
Village manager Graham Ruggles, a ninth-generation Aberdeenian, said he’s used to people inquiring about the squires—letters, personal visits, telephone calls. “Beasley,” Ruggles said, “married two or three of my relatives. His deputy, Jesse Ellis, was my great-great-grandfather, the mayor, and the best man or witness in many marriages. My wife’s side of the family was all married by the squires, who made a mint because the State of Ohio was pretty lax about marriage licenses in the early days. So the village issued its own marriage license. Finally, the state set new regulations governing such things, but personally I don’t see the big deal. Is there really a difference between what the squires did and what the mayor does now? A while back, he married a couple on Friday. On Monday they were back in here, wanting him to take it back.”
Ruggles said Aberdeen was poised to become a major community in the early 1800s, but industry never arrived and Aberdeen remained small. A tannery, hotel, tavern, and lumberyard were all it had to offer, and then the marriage game started. Out-of-town couples provided local merchants and residents with money. When marriage became big business, well, who could turn it down?
“Now, I think we’re finally going to grow,” he said, “and it’s not because of marriage. We’ve got another bridge and a $10 million high school to serve four townships. We were going to call it Southern Brown High School, but somebody noticed that the kids would be running around with SB on their jackets.”
In the squires’ time, townships were powerful local governments that controlled the schools, taxed, built roads, and kept the peace. There were no real “squires,” but local people used the term endearingly to refer to their justices of the peace—influential country magistrates elected by the townships. They not only married people, but served as court officers and worked with township constables to prevent breaches of the law.
Shelton did all these things—and more. He was born in 1776 in Stafford County, Virginia, and migrated to Brown County, Ohio, as a young man. Shortly after his appointment as township justice of the peace in 1822, he determined that marrying couples could be a lucrative sideline to politics. From then on, the good squire concentrated on matrimony. He’d marry anybody who could pay—and do it with or without a license. Beasley was worse. He falsely told grooms he could face a long prison sentence for marrying couples without a license, but, for a fee commensurate to the risk, he’d cooperate. The squire invested his considerable earnings in gold and bank notes.
As word of easy marriage spread in the 1820s, Shelton married couples from all over the South and from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, New York, and other states. Thousands flocked to Aberdeen. Each morning, Shelton followed a ritual: He’d walk down to the wharf to watch for steamboats bringing other happy—and sometimes desperate—couples. Shelton used to say, “The early squire gets the wedding.” He preferred payment in cash, of course, usually twenty dollars, but, if that wasn’t possible, he’d take a pocketknife or anything he considered valuable. Twenty dollars was a large fee in those days, but Shelton knew his customers had few options. If they were poor, he’d accept payment in pork, potatoes, apples, turnips, and other vegetables to stock a large produce house that he operated as another sideline.
He was an entrepreneurial wedding machine. He even married slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. He accepted whatever payment they could offer. “In thousands of cases, the squires didn’t bother to record the marriages,” said Dorothy Helton, a member of Brown County’s genealogical and historical societies. “They married couples under the table, you might say. Other times, the squires intended to file marriage certificates in the courthouse, but they didn’t go over to Georgetown, the county seat, too often. When they finally went, they forgot to take the certificates. Most of the ‘lost marriages’ involved Kentuckians, who came to Aberdeen to avoid an 1800s Kentucky law requiring couples to produce a bondsman—usually a family member with cattle or some other form of security—to assure the marriage’s longevity. The funny thing is, Ohio at one time made people wait three days before they could marry. That’s why during World War II a lot of Ohioans went to Kentucky to be married fast.”
The squires’ casual attitude and forgetfulness have caused much trouble across the river ever since the 1800s. “Some families wonder if their ancestors ever did bother to marry,” said Molly Kendall of the Mason County Museum in Maysville. “In my own family, the squires married a number of people, so I can tell you from experience that this is a tough genealogical pursuit. Shelton turned in some of his marriages to the courthouse, but Beasley didn’t bother much. He was so eager to marry people, though, that he’d row out into the middle of the river, if necessary, and marry them right there in rowboats.”
Oddly enough, few villagers complained about his multiple business practices. He operated by popular demand. Years of ignoring the law finally caused trouble, however, when the Civil War ended in 1865. Seeking pensions for themselves and their children, widows of veterans applied to the state of Kentucky, only to be told that their marriages were invalid and their children illegitimate. After thousands of widows complained, Molly Kendall told me, the Kentucky legislature was forced to recognize marriages performed in Aberdeen before the war. Despite the criticism, Shelton did not slow down. In fact, after the controversy his marriage business increased. More eager couples arrived in Aberdeen, many wearing fancy clothes and riding in carriages. Some married while sitting on horses, in case they needed to make a quick escape.
By the time Shelton died on February 15, 1870, it was apparent that Aberdeen’s business of matrimony had become too big—and necessary—to be stopped cold. Shelton estimated, conservatively, that he had married ten thousand to fifteen thousand couples in forty-seven years. This amazes me. I am also amazed that the man lived to brag about it—and to be ninety-six years old! But his death did not stop Aberdeen. Beasley, who served as justice of the peace from 1870 to 1892, was even more prolific. He refused to accept alternate payment plans (no credit cards then). His business card read: “No money, no marry.” He also interpreted the marriage laws more liberally than Shelton, if that was possible. To Beasley, marrying couples was a business, regardless of the circumstances. His son, Thomas, took over as pilot of a riverboat, the aptly named Gretna Green, which ran up and down the Ohio picking up eloping couples.
When Squire Beasley left town on business every so often, some local rascal would bet his drinking companions that he could convince a gullible couple that he was the one and only Squire Massie Beasley. Over the years, hundreds of couples left Aberdeen under the assumption that they were married. Probably Beasley himself couldn’t determine if he had actually married them. After performing so many marriages, some without licenses, he was as ignorant of couples’ names as he was of the fakers. But he honestly believed he was performing a valuable service to society. In his lackadaisical way, Beasley defied church and state, but always with a smile.
Enraged parents in Maysville were powerless to stop him, as they had been Shelton. Dorothy Richardson, a Maysville resident and a writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 1890s, determined that illegal marriages ran through three generations of families. “The question naturally arises as to why these men were never prosecuted, and why the people of the town stood by and suffered their laws to be ignored,” she wrote in a newspaper story in 1897. “The apparently perplexing query is readily explained by the old adage, ‘A kind heart covers a multitude of sins.’ A more popular man than either of these rollicking, careless old squires never trod the earth, and if they made money easily and in a questionable way, they in turn spent it just as freely among their neighbors. The only people who ever said harm of Massie Beasley, or who ever tried to do him serious injury, were the local members of the clerical profession on both sides of the river, who openly denounced him from their pulpits. But in spite of all their preaching and teaching against him, when any members of their congregations wanted to get married, it was often Massie Beasley, and not the minister, who was favored with the job.”
Beasley’s only known competitor was a preacher who called the squire “this evil crying in our midst.” Most eloping couples ignored the preacher, so he quit his church to enter the marriage business full time. Pressed by the competition, Beasley had to temporarily decrease his rates. His agents actually bragged that Squire Beasley was the only official authorized to marry without benefit of marriage license. The preacher, in exasperation, gave up and left town.
“When an agitated and breathless couple came hurrying down to the ferry,” Richardson wrote, “with an infuriated father or guardian following close at their heels, it was Massie Beasley who calmed their fears by the assurance that he would see them safely over, and that he would not give their followers an opportunity of boarding the boat. And he was always true to his promise. Nor were any threats or prayers on the part of gesticulating parties in pursuit strong enough to deter him from his purpose of landing his passengers on the borders of the land of promise.”
If the pursuers followed in skiffs, the Beasleys were prepared. When the Gretna Green whistle blew six times, everybody in Aberdeen ran to the wharf to gather around the squire to offer protection. Beasley usually watched the river through a powerful spyglass, which he carried at all times in his coat pocket. In such emergencies, he shouted his brief ceremony to the eloping couple as they docked and ran from the boat, with irate family in pursuit.
Most couples, especially those whose parents opposed their wedding, eloped at night. They didn’t have to worry, for the Aberdeen marriage machine worked around the clock. The Gretna Green was so busy at night, in fact, that Beasley’s dock supervisor earned additional income by renting skiffs to desperate people who couldn’t fit into the boat. Townspeople helped by assisting with the marriages, sewing wedding clothes, furnishing special wedding items, and rowing boats across the river. The town’s boys held the reins of wedding party horses. The local printer called his newspaper the Gretna Green and promoted the squire’s cause at every opportunity.
Steamboat elopements brought Aberdeen many of its large, fancy weddings. Every few days large coaches rolled into town, pulled by teams of expensive horses. The people of Aberdeen left their workstations and homes to watch the bride and her bridesmaids. For those customers, Beasley reserved much respect, offering the bride his arm and walking her to the doorway of his home. But they paid for the honor—$150 for an elaborate wedding. Sometimes, groups of ten couples married at the same time.
Unfortunately for Beasley’s neighbors, all was not quiet on the marriage front. They complained when grooms on horseback fired pistols to waken the squire at night. One time, a young Kentucky man and his future bride rode for days to get to Aberdeen. “There had been a feud between the families for generations,” Richardson wrote, “and the father of the bride vowed that he would kill the lover rather than permit him to marry his daughter. The pursuers were so near that the noise of their horses’ hooves could be heard distinctly when the Squire poked his head out of his window in answer to a volley of shots.… The Squire was then in his seventy-eighth year and was too stiff in the joints to dress himself quickly, so he appeared before the excited couple wrapped in a long quilt and shod only in his socks. The Squire mumbled over a hasty marriage ritual at the conclusion of which the new husband flung him a well-stuffed wallet and dashed away toward the hills … just as their pursuers came up the street to find they had been foiled.”
Another time, a young man paid somebody ten dollars to row him and his girl across the Ohio to Aberdeen. Her father, who was close behind, hired another skiff for twenty dollars. In the middle of the Ohio, the young man stood up in the boat, waved his hat in the air in jubilation, and promptly fell overboard. The father plucked his daughter from her boat.
Such events continued until Beasley’s death. His body was barely cold when several greedy men, assuming that tradition would continue, started marrying couples in Aberdeen. But the state decided to enforce its marriage-certificate rules, and the Brown County sheriff chased away the offenders.
Jesse Ellis, Beasley’s deputy, became the next justice of the peace, but he didn’t try to continue the marriage racket. He had kept the previous squire’s files, Molly Kendall said, but nobody knew what they contained. In 1992, fired destroyed them and the home of an Ellis descendant. Dorothy Richardson wrote that she reviewed the surviving files briefly in 1897 and concluded they were a potential hotbed of campaign scandals. Apparently Shelton and Beasley kept enough names—Richardson counted five current and thirty-four former congressmen, even former senators and a retired foreign minister, among the grooms, not to mention the squires’ exorbitant fees charged for over seventy years.
No wonder Squire Massie Beasley died with a smile on his face.