Blast from the past: Resident donates 19th-century ballot box to Washington County
These pictures show a Beallsville ballot box from 1892 that was stuffed full of ballots in Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi’s office Tuesday.
Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi holds a ballot from an 1891 Fallowfield Township ballot box.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
A Beallsville ballot box and ballots from 1892.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
A Bea ballot box from 1891, filled with ballots, is shown in Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi’s office in Washington on Tuesday.
When Washington County Elections Director Larry Spahr and Assistant Director Melanie Ostrander were summoned this week to the seventh floor of Courthouse Square about uncounted ballots that had turned up unexpectedly, the twosome figured they were being called on the carpet.
The call came from the executive assistant to county commission Chairman Larry Maggi, who, in years he’s not on the ballot, is also in charge of the elections board.
Spahr’s and Ostrander’s apprehension melted away when they saw the uncounted ballots weren’t from either the May primary or the razor-thin Rick Saccone-Conor Lamb special election for Congress.
They found themselves looking at what was undoubtedly the height of technology for the 1890s: a wooden box with a series of round holes for funneling ballots into corresponding metal boxes that separated tiny printed paper slips for various contests.
Red candle wax has dripped onto the lid, but not the sides, so it probably isn’t indicative of a seal.
Printed on a tally sheet accompanying the box were the words, “Given for each candidate by the male taxable persons inhabiting within the Borough of Beallsville who voted at the school house … on the third Tuesday of February, A.D. 1892.”
Women in most states, including Pennsylvania, weren’t permitted to vote until 1920, so the Beallsville voter roll included only the names of men and their occupations: coal miner, stone mason, carpenter, laborer, farmer, brick layer, for example.
There are no party designations on the slips, just the offices being sought and candidates’ names. Among the county offices for which voters were casting ballots was “director of the poor.”
Some voters of yesteryear, using pencil, had crossed out names on the pre-printed chits and wrote other names.
Although Maggi told elections office personnel that he had “uncounted” ballots, it’s unknown if the Beallsville votes had been tallied.
Maggi said he’d like to check election records of old to see if the county logged results for the little borough along the National Road.
Spahr speculated the box may have been used to store ballots for a length of time prescribed by law. He noted that in 1892, Democrat Grover Cleveland defeated Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison, becoming the sole U.S.president to serve nonconsecutive terms.
Why this snapshot of voting history was preserved, however, remains a mystery, but Sara Greenlee, who donated the election materials to the county, gave a glimpse of its provenance.
Her husband, Barrett, who died in January, was the recipient of the Beallsville ballot box from Lester Miller, whose father, Jess, once owned a bank in the municipality.
Jess Miller’s son, Lester, she said, “worked for Mellon Bank in Washington,” she recalled. “His father left this ballot box to him. He gave it to Barrett just after we were married 45 years ago.
“It was just a lovely conversation piece when we had parties. We never let people touch it. We’ve always just enjoyed looking at it.”
The accompanying papers give the dates of presumably primary elections in February, a few months earlier in the year than the present-day May primary, which is moved up to April in years featuring presidential contests.
Election practices of 1890 in Southwestern Pennsylvania lack the reputation of, say, New York City’s Tammany Hall.
“That’s the history we’ll never know,” said Maggi, a self-described history buff. “You could spend the next six months of your life researching it.”
The population of Beallsville in 1890, according to census records that Spahr keeps at his fingertips, was 860, and that included men, women and children. By 2010, it had dipped to 466.
“If Beallsville had a historical society, that’s where would I want it to go,” said Greenlee, whose husband’s family operated a funeral home in Beallsville since 1936.
The largely rural county as a whole had just 71,155 residents in 1890, a figure that had grown to 207,820 by the last decennial census.
The commissioner hopes to display the ballot box and related materials at the Courthouse Square office building.