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IOCHESTER, INDIANA WIFE FOR A WIFE-EVENTRADED FRAUS AND JUMPED THE BROOMSTICK FOR KEEPS.Revival of the Story of an Old Time Wife Trade by the Death of One of them Recently at North Manchester.“The North Manchester papers record the death of an old lady, well known in the northern part of this county,” says the Peru Republican. “She was known thirty yej.rs ago as Mrs. Mary Ann Adams. Her husband, Henry Adams, died in 1861 and two years later she married John Ball, and has lived most of the time since then at North Manchester. Her age was over 77 years. There is a romance in the early life of this lady that is very strange. Her first husband was named Ernsperger, to whom she bore three children, two girls and a boy. Henry Adams and wife were neighbors, and they had three children, two boys and a girl. They lived at that time in Ohio. One day the two men agreed to trade wives, which was done, the mothers tak-iug the daughters and the fathers taking the sons. About 1847 Adams moved to this county aud a few years later Ernsperger moved to Fulton county. The two families maintained friendly relations as long as they lived. After the death of Mrs. Ernsperger, who had been Mrs. Adams, Miss Ernsperger, then a young lady living with her mother, went back home and kept house for her father. While there she took the typhoid fever. Her mother, Mrs. Adams, who had been the first Mrs. Ernsperger, went to Ernsperger’s and nursed her daughter until she died. Mrs. Adams was the mother of four children by her second husband, HenryAdams.”As the Ernsperger family is widely known in Fulton county, a Senttnel man started out to hunt up the iacts or fancies of the story. The eldest member of the family here is Grandmother Julia Ernsperger, a resident of this city and nearly eighty-two years old. Although quite feeble her intellect and cultured conversational talents are still intact and she talked frankly of the story.The Ernsperger referred to in the wife trade never lived in Fulton County. He was Jacob Ernsperger and lived in Pulaski County many years, afterward moving to Marshall where he died at Burr Oak several years ago. However the wife trade occurred in Ohio in the vicinity where Grandma Ernsperger lived and she remembered the details very well. The children were not divided as reported but were kept together. Mr. Ernsperger keeping his and Adams providing for his.Previous to the announcement of the trade of wives it was a general report that all was not right in the two families. Jake and Mrs. Adams were old lovers and the fiame never fully died down. They seemed happiest, always, ia each others company and Adams and Mrs. Srnsperger were much alike in their general characteristics and seemed much out of place with their life partners. So the story went that a proposition to trade was made and readily accepted by all four and, to seal the contract, the broom stick was taken down and, with legendary solemrityr jumped b* the newly united couples when they each went their way. But friendly family relations were maintained until the death*of all concerned.The parties to the transaction were all respectable people and, excepting this one sensational transgression of the marital law, they always lived lives of admirable uprightness. It is probably the most remarkable case in the history of civilized matrimony.
Newspaper Details
Rochester Sentinel
Rochester, Indiana, US
Fri, Mar 30, 1894
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Jerry E.
USA 25 Jun 2019
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