Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 128, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1912 — Saws Home in Two Dividing Property [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Saws Home in Two Dividing Property

DENVER, Col. —If James W. Ponder had not been so conscientious he would not have been a prisoner here. He was arrested on complaint of his wife, who accuses him of carrying out too literally an agreement he had made with her in court when she was granted a decree of divorce from him. This agreement was really Ponder’s own idea, and it was to eliminate the alimony idea and to make an equal of the property owned by the couple. This seemed fair to the woman and she slgned the agreement. Neighbors were called in to witness the division. First the furniture was shared. The parlor furnishings were separated with care, and when Ponder received a kitchen chair with a broken leg Mrs. Ponder took three cracked coffee cups to equalize matters. Everything in the house was shared*

without any and then the barn was visited. First the flock of chickens was shared, and then the bales of hay, grain and farming implements. Two lumber wagons were easy to divide, but theone surrey was a problem. Ponder solved this' puzzle by having the wagon pulled out to a vacant lot and burned, so that neither would have the vehicle. -Then the one horse owned by the couple was turned loose and allowed to wander away. Mrs. Ponder became a little angered at this and demanded how her erstwhile husband was going to share the real estate and the property. The land was easy to divide, Ponder said, and he had a scheme that would make equal the sharing of the house and barn. Going to an outhouse he got a long cross cut saw and climbing to the roof of the dwelling house measured the roof tree, and then finding the exact center of the building started to saw through the shingles. Mrs. Ponder began screaming for help. The man had cut his way through two of the rafters before the police arrived and he was forced to stop his equal division operations.