A Nightmare on Main Street.

   Every parent’s worst nightmare is to have a child go missing. This has happened twice in the small town of Seelyville in Lost Creek Township in eastern Vigo County. 

The first case became a nationwide hunt when a search was conducted and every old mine shaft and barn was searched for the child of the respected town Doctor, Dr. S. L. Byer, but, he was never seen again.

 Doctor S. L. Byres is something of an enigma. The doctor is mentioned in newspaper clippings of the time as Doctor S. L. Byers who attended among other things a banquet held in Terre Haute for local Doctors. 

  He and his family appear in the 1900 and 1910 U. S. Census. In 1900 he is S. Lenard Byers with Martha as his wife and eight children with Richmond shown as a year old (actually 10 months.). The doctor was born in Kentucky in 1851, and his wife Martha in Indiana in 1862. They had 8 children all together. In 1910 the Doctor is Leonard S. Byers, with wife Martha, and five children with ages between eight and twenty. In both census reports that Byers’ kept borders in their home. But since Seelyville was at the time a coal town with several mines in the area keeping borders was a lucrative business.

  The youngest boy, named Richmond, went missing on May twenty-ninth in the summer of 1904 after he was supposedly seen talking to a strange man.

  Now here the story varies. In one version the boy, on the morning of the first of June, had crossed the street to the local Ice Cream Shop at the corner of Ayers and Main Streets and was returning home when the meeting with the strange man is supposed to have happened.

 However the Doctor sent letters all over the country trying to find his son and these tell a different story.

  In the Doctor’s own words;

Quote “After coming to the ball grounds at about 3:15 P.M. Sunday the 29^th of May, 1904, bringing home his tricycle, (Rich) immediately left, we supposing he expected to return to the company of children at the game. It has not been definitely settled that he got back there, but he was seen by Mrs. Coffy (a resident of the town), who called him back and asked him what he had said to a man to whom he was talking. He told her that he said to the man: ”You have a blackened eye, where did you get it ? At the saloon ?”

  The man was in his shirt sleeves. Now, he had a coat somewhere. He would not have been dressed like that had he been a resident of any town near here, as everybody was dressed up, it being the first really fine Sunday that spring, which makes me believe he had a wagon somewhere near the town. Besides, five wagons passed through the town that afternoon and six wagons were together when they passed through Terre Haute, eight miles from here. One of them came back next day. Four were overhauled the next night (and searched) but the sixth was never overtaken.

  A Doctor of Clinton, sixteen miles from Terre Haute, wrote me that a covered wagon went into a lane four miles from his home that Sunday night. Now it is the custom for these rovers to go into camp before sundown, as they depend on the children to beg their food and let their emaciated horses graze. It is useless to try and convince me that that wagon did not have my boy in it. And a covered wagon was seen over 100 miles north near the state line, making good headway.

I thank you kindly for your respect and sympathy.” End quote.         

  It is assumed the “Ball Field” the Doctor referred to was the local school ground which stood just a few doors south of the Doctor’s Main Street home. As the boy was only four, maybe just five since he was 10 months old when the census was taken, at the time many today might wonder that he had such freedom to start with, but these were simpler times and children were seen as more independent and small towns as very safe places.

  At the time “Gypsies” had been seen in the area and they were often blamed for anything missing. That same day over one hundred searchers started looking and that night under the electric light in the center of the town a meeting was held to plan a bigger search. This story soon spread state wide.   All of the local mines closed shop the next day and every miner within ten miles of the town took off work and searched the area for any sign of the boy.                           

   This meant roughly four hundred people, many experienced miners, searching the area. Every old mine was searched and every sink hole, pond, stream, field, and woods walked over and searched.

  At the United Mine Workers Convention in Indianapolis, held from the fifteenth to the thirtieth March in 1906, the group passed a resolution submitted by the Seelyville union local to ask all union locals to remind their members to keep watch for any sign of the boy. From the wording this was the second time the motion was made and passed. This placed over a million sets of eyes on the watch for any sign of the boy.

  The Brazil Times on the third of July 1908 ran a story of how a crude note was found west of Terre Haute along the National Road than may have been written by the boy and tossed from a wagon as his kidnappers returned to the scene of their crime. Other stories of bazaar ransom demands were also written of in the local papers. The story ran in the Fort Wayne news two years later with the picture of the boy shown above. 

    By the third of June the story was in the Indianapolis papers, and the story and the search lasted for years afterward. Along with the local papers it ran in The Sun of Chanute Kansas on sixteen February, 1906, and The Marlboro Democrat of Bennettsville, South Carolina, on the twenty third of March in 1906. The story also appeared in a periodical called “The Motor Way” for car enthusiasts who liked to travel by motor car. Published in 1905 the article asked motorists around the mid-west to keep watch for the boy. And rewards of $500 were posted in these articles which was quite a bit for those times.  

  The boy was described at that time as “having a light complexion with grey eyes, the left eye being noticeably crossed. Has a small “V” shaped nick in the edge of his left ear, with a sharp chin and narrow projecting forehead. Is small for his age and unusually bright, speaking like a much older child.”   

 The good Doctor even was reported to have made trips as far afield as Arkansas to look for the boy. A fund was raised of some $1500 to help with the search, and a few years after the boy went missing the United Mine Workers had donated $3000 and called on every local union in the country to keep watch for the boy.

  While the Doctor seems to have left no stone unturned not everyone accepted his story. Rumor has it though that Richmond may not have just gone missing. The Doctor had a bit of a reputation among some neighbors for being abusive with his family and some believed he accidently killed the boy and hid his body in the cellar of the house.

  This is somewhat supported by a story passed down in the Dickerson family who owned the property behind the Doctor’s house, extending all the way from the National Road to the school yard. One of the family men, who worked the evening shift for the railroad and who lived on the National Road roughly a block west of Main Street, told of hearing a child crying as he walked home from the railroad station late one night through the woods behind his home and upon searching he found a young boy, the Doctor’s son, tied to a tree. When asked what happened the lad said that it was his father who tied and left him there.

  At the time people would mind their own business and the Doctor was seen by most as respectable. Mr. Dickerson freed the boy and said nothing to anyone outside his own family. In those days a man was the King of his Castle and seldom questioned. One family member later swore though that if the Doctor’s house ever stood empty they would go looking for the boy in the cellar.

   As it happens as of now that house now stands empty.