…Holland and Springfield Township Recollections
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of stories on mayors of the Village of Holland. Holland-Springfield-Spencer Historical Society president Karla Miller submitted this story as part of the village’s centennial celebration this year.
Each month, the column will feature one of a dozen mayors the village has had over the past 100 years. This month’s story is about John J. Beattie.
The second mayor of Holland, John Jay Beattie, was born September 8, 1885, in Bryan, Ohio, Williams County, to Erwin Robert Beattie and Nancy Jane Ferguson.
By the end of June 1900, John and his family had moved to Hillsdale, Michigan, where his father bought a farm.
The census for Greenbay, Wisconsin, July 1904, has John, now age 21, listed as a railroad agent joining the U.S. Army infantry. He is described as brown eyes, dark brown hair, light complexion, 5’ 8.
He was discharged January 13, 1906, from Ft. Snelling Minnesota SCD Act good certificate received. On May 4, 1905, John, 24, is boarding at the home of Simeon Lees in Springfield Township, still a railroad agent. On June 12, 1912, in Lucas County, he married Hazel Dell Wood who was born July 15, 1886, in Holland, to Harrison Wood and Mary Jane Corson.
John became a telegraph operator for New York Central Railroad and retired after 45 years. He also was the justice of the peace for 12 years.
He became mayor of Holland in 1926 and stepped down in November 1928. John and Hazel had two children, Helen Johnelle, born 1914, and Glenn Harrison, born 1916, in Holland.
Hazel was the notary public for 40 years in Holland and assisted the town’s people with their income tax returns every year.
On April 13, 1918, a story reported that John, at age 32, became the target of the Ku Klux Klan, or White Hats as they were called, because he was accused of not buying war bonds and being against World War I.
Two other Holland men became involved, William Wagner, 44, a truck driver, and Perry Hall, 25, town marshal. When Hall got wind of the 17 vehicles heading for Holland looking for Mr. Beattie, he and Wagner armed themselves and left for Toledo to find John who was on his way home on the interurban.
About midnight, the Klan intercepted the car. The three men were placed on a truck and taken to Ottawa Park for a Kangaroo Court and found guilty of being pro-German Socialists.
They were then stripped of their clothes and liquid tar was poured over their bodies, then rolled in feathers said to have come from Pennsylvania.
The men were paraded around Toledo, then made to kneel before the American flag but not touch it and recite the oath to our country, then taken to the police station, held for three days before the tar was removed.
Less than a month later, John Beattie was elected president of Holland’s Loyal American Club.
