The Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society

In the early eighteen fifties, a group of Adams County landowners gathered in Bentonville and decided they had had enough of horse thieves. The result was the Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society, a vigilante organization formed to do what frontier law enforcement could not always manage: pursue stolen animals, identify the culprits, and see them prosecuted. Horse theft in the antebellum era was not a minor offense.

Horses and mules were the tractors and trucks of the nineteenth century, and losing one could ruin a farm family. These societies, which appeared across Ohio and Indiana, operated in a gray zone between neighborhood watch and mob justice, and the Bentonville group was one of them. The organization grew more formal over time, but it started as something simpler: neighbors fed up, organized, and ready to ride.