Late on the evening of Jan. 12, 1915, Allegany County Sheriff Harry Irvine heard the doorbell ringing at the county jail.
Irvine, 43 years old, was in his second year as the county sheriff. Previously, he had served as the first Cumberland chief of police under the city’s newly adopted commission form of government. It also marked his entry into public office in 1910.
Before that, Irvine held a variety of jobs because he had been forced to earn his own living since he had been a young teenager. He had worked at a glass factory in the Narrows until he turned 18, then moved on to work as a tin plater at the N&G Taylor Tin Mill. He even served as a co-manager of the Cumberland Giants, a Class D level professional baseball team in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-Maryland League, in 1906. However, it was with his appointment as chief of police for Cumberland that Irvine discovered his career was in public service.
The sheriff was upstairs in the residential area of the jail where he lived with his family. He looked out the window and saw a lone man standing at the door to the jail.
“That you, sheriff?” the man asked, according to The (Cumberland) Evening Times.
“Yes,” Irvine told him.
“Well, hurry and come down. I have a prisoner.”
Irvine was curious since he only saw a single man. He dressed and went downstairs. He opened the door and saw a shabbily dressed man standing in front of him.
“Where’s the prisoner?” Irvine asked.
“I’m him,” the man replied.
“Yes, but where’s the officer who brought you here?”
“I’m him.” The man thrust a paper at the sheriff. Irvine took it and skimmed it. “You see, I came from Lonaconing. The judge up there sentenced me to jail for 60 days for vagrancy. I told him it was not necessary to get an officer to bring me here. He gave me the commitment, and I acted as my own officer.”
Irvine read the judgment and realized the man in front of him wasn’t lying. He might be a vagrant, but he was also apparently honest.
“Gee whiz, that’s the first time I heard of anyone trying to break into jail,” the sheriff said.
The man identified himself as David Richardson, according to the newspaper.
Which David Richardson is the question?
Census and county directories show two David Richardsons in the county at the time. Both of them lived in Lonaconing.
The first David Richardson was born in 1860, so he would have seemed mature enough for a judge to trust to turn himself in. However, that Richardson was caring for his siblings in his own home and working as a coal miner as late as 1910.
The second David Richardson would have been 29 at the time of this arrest. He was still living with family at this time, and he seems to have lived a bit on the wild side, although he would calm down once he married the mother of his son in a few years.
A third option is that it might have been another David Richardson who was a vagrant, although it would have been unlikely that a judge would have trusted a true vagrant to turn himself in to the sheriff.
Irvine would return to being a tin worker for a few years until winning election to the Cumberland City Council in 1924.
In 1939, he was named mayor to fill out the unexpired term of Thomas Koon. Irvine was elected to the position in 1940.
The (Cumberland) Evening Times noted in an editorial, “His career was not meteoric and that he succeeded was due to the fact that he was not overly ambitious but was willing to take things in stride.”
He died in office in August 1942 after being in the hospital for five months.
Contact Jim Rada at jimrada@yahoo.com or 410-698-3571.