Ch.1: The Loomis Gang’s Market Revolution
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Description
The chapter appears in the book, Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America. Edited by Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson.
Chapter abstract: Just before dawn on the morning of Sunday, June 17, 1866, a mob of angry citizens gathered in the semidarkness about a mile from the Loomis farm in Sangerfield, New York. The Loomis dogs had been poisoned the night before, and the vigilantes quickly rousted the family from their beds and set fire to the house and barns. They hanged two family members from a nearby tree in order to extract confessions for a series of recent crimes; no one was killed, but the mob left in the early morning light with a Loomis son in irons, bound for the county jail. The Loomises were clearly not an ordinary farm family; this remarkable operation of “lynch law” capped a twenty-year career of large scale larceny, horse thieving, and fencing of stolen goods. Their criminal activity stretched from Pennsylvania to Ontario and from Vermont to Ohio, and made their large family conspicuously prosperous. They conducted their business proudly and publicly, and they seemed to relish their wide social and political influence. The 1866 lynching ended the family’s criminal enterprise, but not before they had achieved local, statewide, and even international fame as one of the most effective, efficient, and well organized criminal operations of the 1850s and 1860s.
ISBN
9780812291025
Publication Date
2015
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
City
Philadelphia
Keywords
Loomis gang, Economics, United States, Crime, New York
Disciplines
Economic History | Social History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Mackintosh, Will, "Ch.1: The Loomis Gang’s Market Revolution" (2015). Books and Chapters. 17.
https://scholar.umw.edu/hist_amst_books/17