A Fourteen-Year-Old's Elopement Ends With a Mob Chasing the Groom Down the Tracks
A farmer's daughter slips away to marry a man eleven years older, her father gives in — then a gang of neighbors decides otherwise.
UNIONTOWN, April 22. — This town had quite a sensation Saturday and Sunday in the shape of an elopement, the parties being Miss Katie Stribich, a young girl of 14, and Barney Behner, aged 25 or thereabouts. Miss Katie is the daughter of Herman Stribich, a well-known farmer, residing about three miles from town on the Moscow road. For some time past the girl has been away from home, working for a farmer named William Wieber. Last Saturday afternoon she informed Mrs. Wieber that she was going to town to spend the night with her grandmother, and so be able to attend church in the morning. Mr. Wieber was not quite satisfied with the girl's manner and rode over to tell her father, who immediately drove to town. Not finding the girl at her grandmother's as he expected to, he was at a loss what to do next, till informed that his daughter and Behner had been seen on the evening train bound for Genesee. Stribich then started for Genesee, taking one of his friends with him. They arrived there about 9 o'clock and found the young couple penitent and willing to be married, so the father gave his consent and the knot was tied. Sunday, as the newly married couple were returning to Uniontown, a mob, headed by three or four of Stribich's friends, got after them, driving the girl to her grandmother's and chasing the young man down the railroad track. The affair caused considerable excitement, and not a little indignation was expressed over the action of the mob. Talk of arrests was indulged in freely, but nothing was done. Stribich has taken the young man's part and will furnish a house for the youthful couple to live in.
“A mob, headed by three or four of Stribich's friends, got after them, driving the girl to her grandmother's and chasing the young man down the railroad track.”
A fourteen-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old, a rushed wedding, and a lynch-minded crowd — the story reads as quaint gossip but turns on questions we still argue: how young is old enough to consent, and who gets to enforce a community's judgment outside the courts. The father's quiet acceptance versus the mob's anger is the whole tension, and descendants reading it today would want to know what became of Katie.
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