The Loomis Gang loot

Documented outlaw history; the buried loot is the lore

Through the middle of the 19th century the Loomis family ran what has been called the largest family crime syndicate in the United States from a farm in Madison County, New York, on a high pinnacle above the Nine Mile Swamp. George Washington Loomis Sr. bought land near Hubbardsville in 1806 and married Rhoda Mallet in 1814, daughter of a French officer who had fled to America after embezzling from his government. They had twelve children, and Rhoda taught them to steal while they were still young, along with the lesson that everyone steals but only the stupid are caught.

The children were well educated, and George Jr., known as Wash, read law with a local judge before taking over the family business in the early 1840s. He turned it into a multi-state syndicate with four regions around the farm: Bill ran horse thieves in the north from Hastings Center and sold the animals in Canada, Grove ran the south, an associate named Bill Rockwell the west, and Wash the east. They stole horses and livestock, sheep, clothes, gold and silver, passed counterfeit money and robbed stagecoaches. The house and barns had false floors and crawlspaces for hiding goods, and the swamp, impassable to anyone but the gang, served as an escape route and a hidden corral. Neighbours who were robbed often got their property back with Loomis help; anyone who complained to the law risked a mysterious fire. Bribed officials, good lawyers and missing paperwork kept convictions rare.

In 1849 a sanctioned raid turned up twelve sleigh-loads of stolen goods, stored carelessly at the farm instead of in the swamp, and Wash went off to the California gold fields for a while. He came back, and the gang did well out of the Civil War, stealing horses on a large scale to sell to the Union Army. But the returning veterans were less willing to be bullied. In 1865 a mob led by James Filkins, a blacksmith turned Sangerfield constable, attacked the farm and Wash was killed; in 1866 another mob burned the house and half-hanged Amos "Plumb" Loomis. The family lost the farm for unpaid taxes and faded away.

The stories stayed. Neighbours said Wash's last words promised violent death to anyone not a Loomis who tried to own the farm, that his ghost appears as an omen of death, and that spectral horsemen ride the roads on October nights where the farm once stood.