Trials were spectator sport in Iowa during the 1880s --- long before the days of instant communications. And the trial of the year at the Lucas County Courthouse during 1888 actually had been moved to Chariton from Albia on a change of venue.
It was a court-ordered retrial of a 35-year-old blacksmith from Albia named Royal A. Adams, convicted of manslaughter a year earlier after a 17-year-old youth named Sidney Daring had been fatally shot during a charivari --- another form of entertainment that has for the most part passed away.
Royal had married Minnie Larson in Ottumwa on Aug. 15, 1888, then the couple came to his father's home in Mantua Township, Monroe County --- east of Albia --- to visit. They were greeted there by a charivari --- that ended badly. Here's a report of what happened, published in The Chariton Democrat of Aug. 23, 1888, under the headline, "Killed in a Charivari."
"An Albia dispatch of the 18th to the (Burlington) Hawkeye says: A distressing tragedy occurred in Mantua township, this county, early yesterday morning. On Wednesday of last week, Royal Adams, who resides in that township, went to Ottumwa, and got married to a Wapello county girl. He returned home Friday night and stopped at his father's. About one o'clock Saturday morning a charivari party began to fire off guns and revolvers near the house. A window was raised and three or four shots fired in air, as was supposed, but during a promiscuous firing a lad of 17 years old, by the name of Sidney Derring, was struck in the abdomen, the ball glancing downward, from the effect of which he died last night. The sheriff arrested Royal Adams yesterday and his preliminary trial will be had on Monday, Aug. 20. It is a hard matter to tell who fired the fatal ball."
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Sidney was the eldest son of Henry and Caroline Daring, who farmed nearby. During the fall of 1888, Royal was convicted of manslaughter for his death and sentenced to prison, but the next year an appeal of that conviction was successful and a new trial ordered. It was decided that Royal could not receive a fair trial in Monroe County, so a change of venue to Lucas County was ordered.
Here's how S.S. King --- who rarely observed the journalistic barrier between fact and opinion, reported the opening of the trial in his Democrat of Nov. 14, 1889, under the headline, "The Charivari Case."
"In August of 1888, Mr. Royal Adams of Monroe county was married. He had been with "the boys" on a number of charivari excursions and "the boys" went to his father's residence after he was married to "bring him out." They used such weapons as cow-bells, tin-horns, muskets, shot-guns and revolvers, and engaged the still hours of two or three nights in this barbarous work. Finally young Adams shot one of the boys so badly that he afterwards died. He was arrested, tried before Judge Stuart and convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to seven years and a half in Fort Madison Penitentiary. The defense appealed from Judge Stuart's instructions. The appeal was sustained on the ground that the circumstances which caused the shooting were some of the worst features of barbarism, and the case came back for a new trial. A change of venue was taken and the case is being tried in Chariton this week. There are altogether 50 witnesses here and the costs to Monroe county will be enormous.
"On general principles, we would say charivariers ought to be shot."
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A Lucas County jury eventually declared Royal Adams not guilt and sent him free, a verdict that obviously pleased Mr. King when he reported it in his edition of Nov. 21:
"The case of the State vs. Royal Adams, charged with manslaughter for killing Sidney Daring in Monroe county over one year ago, when Daring and others were making life hideous on the occasion of Adams bringing his newly married wife home, was given to the jury about six o'clock last Friday evening. The jury was out till nine o'clock Saturday morning when they returned a verdict of not guilty, and Royal Adams, who has been whipped through the courts for more than a year, and been for that time confined in two or three different jails and also served a short time in the penitentiary at Fort Madison for an accidental killing, was made a free man.
"Seldom has a jury rendered a verdict which was more acceptable to those who heard the evidence than did the one which sat on the case of the State vs. Royal Adams. Adams is a man 35 years of age and seems the very opposite of a bad character. It is the general impression here that he was a little careless in the use of his revolver on the occasion when he killed Sidney Daring, but we believe no one things he intended doing any harm. He has at least suffered enough, and now that he is free seems to suit all except the gang who were with Daring on the occasion of the killing. When Adams returned to Albia he was warned that it was not safe to remain there and he immediately returned to Chariton. That night a barn filled with hay belonging to his mother was burned by an incendiary.
"The boys who were engaged in that charivari were probably, usually, quiet civil boys, but they have carried this matter too far. If it could be done, we would like to see the courts legalize the killing of anyone that will engage in a charivari. This would stop the barbarous custom without loss of life."
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Subsequent reports state that Royal and Minnie Adams took a train from Chariton after that for the West, where they spent some time waiting for tempers to cool, then returned to Albia, where they raised a family of five children before Minnie's death in 1914.
Royal lived to be 80 and died during 1935 at the home of one of his daughters in Des Moines, then was buried in Woodland Cemetery.
Largely forgotten in all of this was young Sidney Daring. His family eventually moved to Arkansas, where Henry and Caroline died. Their son's remains most likely rest in an unmarked grave in one of Mantua Township's cemeteries.
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