Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1874 — A Thrifty Wife. [ARTICLE]

A Thrifty Wife.

A case which gave a queer specimen of woman’s rights was reported in our court reports Saturday. It appears therefrom that Charles A. Mayhugh went to California, and in 1859 ceased to communicate with his wife. After waiting eight years the wife gave him up for dead, and, through a real estate agent named Robinson, exchanged her property in this city for a farm. Five years after that Mayhugh turned up, claimed his property in the city, and Robinson paid him $3,000 for a quitclaim deed. Doubtless Robinson thought that, as the wife had conveyed all, she had conveyed her right in it! But in a year Mayhugh died, and then the wife put in a claim,to her dower in the very property she had conveyed wholly to Robinson when she thought her husband dead. Thus she made a good thing out of him, both dead and alive. Robinson was now called on to pay the third time for what he bought out and out the first. The dower claim was defeated in the Court of Common Pleas, but the District Court held that as the wife’s deed, when her husband lived, was null, her right of dower still remained. As there is no bar to a wife’s securing a conveyance, we suppose she held on to the farm that was conveyed to her, and that Robinson had no recourse on her. This was considerably better than the entire independence of the wife. —Cincinnati Gazette.