Train robberies were frequent in the years following the War Between the States, and the Marshfield robbery by the Reno brothers was one of the most successful.

There were six Reno children, five boys and one girl. Four of the boys and the girl were “of the same hard, comely, stalwart, reckless type.” The fifth boy was totally different and was known as “honest Reno.” The other four boys, John, Frank, William, and Simon Reno, grew up to be infamous bounty jumpers during the war. After the war they robbed the Adams Express Company on several occasions in 1867. The Reno’s operated out of Rockford, a little town two miles north of Seymour on the JM&I. There they “lived openly among their neighbors, who were assured of dire vengeance in case of betrayal.”

Returning from a raid through Missouri, John Reno, the eldest of the brothers, was apprehended at Seymour with the help of Allan Pinkerton, head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and several determined Missourians. He was tried and convicted of robbing the safe of the county treasurer at Gallatin, Missouri, and sent to the Missouri penitentiary for twenty-five years' hard labor. Thereafter, he was not involved in the gang’s operations.

Early in 1868 a gang led by the three remaining Reno’s, Frank, William, and Simon, made a raid through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, robbing county treasurers and banks. Frank Reno, Albert Perkins, and Miles Ogle were arrested by William Pinkerton, son of Allan Pinkerton, for robbing the safe of the county treasurer at Glenwood, Iowa. The three men were taken to the Glenwood, Iowa, jail, but somehow managed to escape and return to Rockford.

Shortly after their escape, their most famous and profitable robbery occurred: that of the Adams Express Company car on the JM&I train at Marshfield, Indiana, the night of Friday, May 22, 1868. The job was well planned and well executed. The Marshfield robbery “may properly be considered the first of the great train robberies committed in the United States.”

The last JM&I train for Indianapolis left Jeffersonville at 9:30 pm on May 22. At 11:00 pm it stopped for wood and water at Marshfield, a station in the middle of a swamp about a mile north of Scottsburg and 19 miles south of Seymour. Charles Francis Bourke colorfully described it in his 1906 article:

The night was dark and gloomy. It had rained during the early part of the evening, and drifting banks of clouds obscured the heavens as though to shut out from view the deed of violence about to be enacted below.

The twelve-man gang was led by Frank Reno. His followers were Simon and William Reno, Albert Perkings, Michael Rodgers, Miles Ogle, Frank Sparks, John J. Moore, Fril Clifton, Val Elliott, Charles Roseberry, and Henry Jerroll. The gang was divided into three groups of four men each. The plan was for the first group to overpower the Adams Express Company messenger and break open the safe. The second group was to uncouple the express car and the engine. The third group of four men with the extra horses were to cut the telegraph wires (the telegraph had been installed only a few years before) to prevent the spread of alarm.

As the fireman was taking on water from the tank, David Hutchinson, one of the locomotive engineers, swung down from the cab and began oiling the engine’s side rod bearings. Startled by the crunch of footsteps he turned around in time to see a large shadow. He tried to cry out but was silenced by a revolver butt. The watering finished, the two firemen began walking to the cab. They saw the shadow of a man standing on the tender, and one shouted, “Get off there! Who are you?” One of the firemen climbed up on the tender but was hurled to the ground. In the engine’s cab, the other engineer, George Fletcher, was wondering about Hutchinson. As soon as he climbed down from the cab, he was immediately surrounded by men who beat him into unconsciousness.

The outlaws now swung into action. The express car was quickly uncoupled from the coaches. The locomotive with Frank Reno at the throttle chugged off into the night, pulling the express car. In the forward coach Conductor Americus Wheeler, sensing something wrong, ran out and opened fire at the shadows moving about the tender. He was answered by several flashes of flame and he fell, severely wounded. Passengers who knew the reputation of the Seymour district “swarmed out of the cars like bees from a broken hive” and hid in the swamp.

As the wood burner moved through the night with the express car at twenty miles per hour, three outlaws began to crawl along the roof of the express car. Two of them dropped to the rear platform and jimmied open the door. Messenger Harkins fired at them, but missed, and was pistol whipped and struck about the head with crow bars before being thrown out the door. He was found by the side of the track the next morning, miraculously still alive.

By the time Frank Reno stopped the locomotive, the gang in the express car had broken into the three boxes of the Adams Express Company. The boxes were made of iron and were about four feet long and two feet high and wide. There was a package from Nashville consigned to New York containing $13,000 and another from Louisville containing $10,000 in greenbacks of large denomination (a fact which afterward helped detectives to trace the robbers). There also was a small consignment of government bonds and sufficient cash in other packages to bring the total loss up to $97,000.

The gang had moved the locomotive and express car about 13 miles before abandoning them at a deserted spot just south of Seymour, where the gang’s horses were waiting. The robbers “melted into the darkness … [and] early next morning, May 23, the engine and the express car were found where the robbers had deserted them on the previous night.”

Immediately after the Marshfield robbery, Frank Reno, the leader of the gang, fled to Canada. Later, after legal battles that tested the extradition laws of the U.S. and Canada, he was brought back to Indiana. Meanwhile, Elliott, Clifton, and Roseberry had been captured. Fed up with the inability of the established justice system to defeat the Reno gang, the citizens of the Seymour district decided to take the law into their own hands. One night they captured Elliott, Clifton, and Roseberry from the lawful authorities and strung the three up on a tree near Brownstown. Three days later, Sparks, Moore, and Jerroll (who had been arrested in Illinois) were similarly captured and strung up on the same tree! Now there were only four remaining members of the gang -- Frank, William, and Simon Reno, and Charles Anderson (who had been captured in Canada with Frank Reno). They all were being held in the New Albany jail, a few miles from Jeffersonville.

The last act in the Reno brothers’ saga occurred the night of December 11, 1868, less than two years after their first train robbery. A southbound JM&I train picked up a coach on the siding at Seymour that “was full of men – at least 50 of them – all wearing caps and masks, and evidently under the command of a tall, dark man whom they addressed as No. 1.” Interestingly, the train’s conductor could not remember anything. He did not even remember that his train had picked up the car of vigilantes in Seymour!

JM&I passenger trains terminated in New Albany rather than Louisville, since the Ohio River Bridge was not yet completed. When the train reached New Albany, the masked men marched off to the jail and demanded admittance. The sheriff refused and resisted, wounding some of the vigilantes. But the vigilantes broke into the jail and, in spite of the pleadings of Frank Reno to spare his two younger brothers, proceeded to string up the four last members of the Reno gang from beams in the jail corridor. The vigilantes now walked back to their car. A northbound train at 3:30 am took the car to Seymour, and the mysterious men all disappeared into the darkness. Later, it was rumored that the tall, dark man known as No. 1 was a prominent railroad official.