Murder in Newcomerstown: The 1917 Nickles–Mayer Case

An early-morning confrontation at an Ohio foundry in 1917 ended two lives in different ways.

Content warning: This post contains a historical discussion of ethnicity and race in Tuscarawas County.

Very little is known about William “Bud” Nickles (1871-1925) other than what newspapers reported about him at the time. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky and lived there most of his life, before joining the Great Migration north to find work in the factories of Ohio around 1915. He arrived to work as a laborer at J.B. Clow and Sons in Newcomerstown in 1916 and lived among the community’s small, black population. His time in Newcomerstown was short though; the result of a run-in with a night watchman at the J.B. Clow and Sons foundry during the early morning hours of July 7, 1917.

The night watchman that day was named Alva Franklin Mayer (1874-1917), born in Coshocton County, Ohio to German immigrant parents. Mayer married Sarah L. Calentine (1873-1958) in May 1893 and Mayer followed the work wherever it took him. The couple first lived in Newcomerstown, before a stint in Akron, Ohio where Alva worked in the rubber industry for several years. The Mayers, now including a daughter, returned to Newcomerstown around 1914 and Alva had just started working as a night watchman for the Clow foundry a few months before his fateful encounter with William Nickles in July 1917.

In the months preceding the encounter tensions were high between the small, recently arrived black community and Newcomerstown’s white inhabitant leading to threats from both parties. Adding to that existing tension, there were frequent thefts of coal from the Clow foundry which lead to the stationing of night watchmen like Mayer to protect the company’s assets. In the early morning hours of July 7, 1917, as Mayer made his rounds in the dark, he spotted a black man stealing coal from the foundry’s coal car. When Mayer confronted him, the man drew a revolver and allegedly said “I just kill you, damned you” and fired three shots at Mayer. Two of the rounds hit Mayer in the torso while the third nicked his left arm.

Upon hearing the shots a crowd quickly gathered around Mayer and witnessed the shooter running towards the river. A hastily gathered posse was unable to locate the man and it took a description of the man by Mayer given to the local black community to discover the name of the shooter, William Nickles. Authorities discovered Nickles at his home, as well as a revolver, and took him to the hospital to be identified by the fatally wounded Mayer. Mayer positively identified Nickles as his shooter, despite Nickles’ assertion that he had not been there, and Nickles was taken to the Tuscarawas County Jail in New Philadelphia.

After five days at the hospital in Coshocton, Ohio Alva Mayer succumbed to his wounds and was buried South Lawn Cemetery in Coshocton. William Nickles was charged with second degree murder and awaited his trial in the county jail in New Philadelphia. Nickles’ trial did not occur until November 1917 and it was a short one. Nickles chose not to take the stand in his own defense and the prosecution offered an expert witness who testified that a gun found in Nickles home could have been the one used in the shooting. The jury took less than thirty minutes to find Nickles guilty of the murder of Alva Mayer.

After his conviction William Nickles was transferred to the Ohio State Penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence. Nickles served a little over seven years of that sentence before he died in prison from tuberculosis in July 1925. He was buried in the prison’s burial ground. Alva’s wife Sarah continued to reside in the Newcomerstown area until her death in October 1958. By the time the headlines faded, both men were gone, and Newcomerstown moved on.

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© Noel B. Poirier, 2025.