Marshfield: Where the Reno Gang Made History

There is almost nothing left of Marshfield, a former watering stop on the Jeffersonville, Madison and Indianapolis Railroad about three miles northwest of Scottsburg. But on May twenty-second, eighteen sixty-eight, twelve men from the Reno Gang boarded an express train as it paused at the depot, overpowered the engineer, uncoupled the passenger cars, and made off with ninety-six thousand dollars from an Adams Express Company safe. It was one of the first peacetime train robberies in American history.

The Reno Brothers and their associates had pioneered the crime form in Indiana in the years after the Civil War, exploiting the lawlessness of Reconstruction-era rail corridors. The Pinkertons investigated and eventually arrested most of the gang, but before any could stand trial, vigilantes lynched ten members of the gang, four of them inside the New Albany jail. Marshfield itself faded away in the early twentieth century, absorbed by the countryside.

An Indiana historical marker stands near the site of the depot.