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If you're capable of reading this column, it's a fair bet that I don't have to explain to you about what the KKK represents, or the bigotry involved in their activities. We have a tendency to think of this sort of thing as being fairly rare, but as the last few years have shown us, it's not exactly as uncommon as we believe.
Sadly, there's been KKK activity right here in Clinton County... and also one man who fought against it.
In the 1920s, the KKK made an encampment at Dunnstown. They were on the land of a farmer named Merritt McCloskey, who was a good enough man to fight back a bit.
McCloskey was born in 1879. He inherited land in Dunnstown from his father Abner, and built a house there in 1908. It still stands on the corner of Church and Arch Streets, one of the older houses in the neighborhood. Though the place is now mostly residential, it was farmland back then, and McCloskey was a busy guy, keeping up with it.
The KKK needed a place to meet weekly. They decided that McCloskey's farm was a perfect place for it. McCloskey didn't think his farm was the perfect place for it, and told them so. But they kept the pressure on, suggesting that maybe bad things could happen if he didn't let them use his land. His family could be hurt, his barn could burn down. All of which, somehow, they could protect him from. Now, at the time, the KKK was also putting on a good show of being a regular social group, like the Odd Fellows or something. They made donations to local schools and churches, right out in the open. They got on the front page for donating flags to the schools, which gave people the impression that they weren't all that bad. That was the really horrible part of this whole thing.
So McCloskey reluctantly accepted, and let them use his land. Very reluctantly.
Over the next couple of weeks, McCloskey learned that the group would prepare a cross every Monday, hide it in a nearby location, and hold a very open, public cross-burning on Wednesday night. And one evening, talking with his 15 year-old son, Gordon, and his friend, Jack Burns, they began to speculate about how amusing it would be if the cross suddenly, somehow, happened to go missing.
"Wouldn't it be funny," he said, "If some Wednesday night, those (expletive deleted, but you can probably imagine) fools came riding over here in their nightshirts and couldn't find their cross?"
So on Tuesday night, the night before the big ceremony, the three of them snuck out to the camp in the dark of night. Imagine Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible," except a 1920s farmer. They stole the cross and took it apart, dropping the short piece into an apple grove and throwing the bigger piece into the river.
The next night, the obvious happened. The Klan discovered that their cross was missing, and threw an unbelievable fit over it. They made some grandiose threats, talking about hiring detectives from Williamsport to investigate the crime, but nothing ever happened. They chalked the loss up to just another incident, and moved on. (Or none of the local detectives could be bothered, which seems a bit more likely to me.)
They left McCloskey's property, though, perhaps suspecting that their crosses were going to continue to disappear if they stuck around.
The next fall, the large part of the cross turned up. Rabbit hunters discovered it in the canal, and pulled it out. They made a big production out of it, draping an American flag over it and parading it up Main Street. "Hell," McCloskey said at the time, "You'd think they found the Holy Grail."
Merritt McCloskey died on Dec. 9, 1951, and was buried in Dunnstown Cemetery. I've shown his grave on tours occasionally, and I always take a moment to tell this story -- the farmer who stood up to bigotry and hatred. Out of all our local figures, Merritt McCloskey is one to admire.
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Lou Bernard is a Lock Haven resident with a keen interest in the history of this area. He is adult services coordinator at Ross Library and may be reached at loulhpa@gmail.com or 570-660-4463.