The 'Kid Mayor' of Michigan Found in Port Townsend
A brilliant young con artist once known as the 'Kid Mayor' has fled the Washington Territory after his real identity—and a trail of fraudulent bonds—finally caught up with him.
The flight of Thomas Nevin, alias J. L. Voorhees, from Port Townsend brings once more into public view a sharper whose name was at one time familiarly known throughout the country and whose career was remarkable for the brilliance and audacity of his schemes. Three years ago, Thomas Nevin was the mayor of the city of Adrian, Michigan. He was but twenty-two years old and was familiarly known as the 'Kid Mayor.' He was a persuasive and ready talker, a shrewd judge of human nature, and a master hand at winning the confidence of others. Suddenly he collapsed; he departed from Adrian in the darkness of night. It was generally known that an attempt had been made to swindle the government out of the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Fraudulent city bonds had been issued by Nevin and signed by him as Mayor. He then took the bonds to New York and was only prevented from negotiating them by a mysterious telegram which warned the bankers. He fled, and it became known that he departed with an amount of money not his own, variously estimated at from $30,000 to $50,000.
Not a great while after this, J. L. Voorhees appeared on the Sound, first at Whatcom and then at Port Townsend. He formed a partnership with a prominent Port Townsend lawyer and became a well-known figure at the bar and a favorite in social circles. Lately, however, a number of Michigan people visited Washington Territory and recognized him as the defaulting Adrian Mayor. It became an open secret among ex-residents of Michigan in the Territory that Voorhees and Nevin were one and the same. Warned that his whereabouts were known, Nevin suddenly decided to make another disappearance. He raised a small sum of money by forging the name of a Port Townsend businessman, assumed another name, and on Thursday, the 19th, took passage on the Mexico for San Francisco, leaving his Michigan friends to wonder where the 'kid' would turn up next.
“He was, as one of his friends once remarked, 'the smartest kid on this continent,' and he knew it.”
The 'Kid Mayor' incident highlights the transient, opportunistic nature of late 19th-century boomtowns, where a new arrival with a suit and a story could easily reinvent themselves. Today, while digital background checks have made such 'Kid Mayors' harder to sustain, the underlying tension between the established community and the confidence man persists in the modern era of online fraud and investment scams.
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