George Chahoon (2 February 1840–29 July 1934), mayor of Richmond, was the son of John Chahoon, a building contractor, and Temperance Jameson Chahoon and was born in Sherburne, Chenango County, New York. A few months after his birth the family moved to Virginia and during the 1840s and 1850s lived in Botetourt County. Chahoon's childhood and education are not well documented. He probably attended one or more private schools in Virginia, and he studied law. About the time the Civil War began Chahoon moved to Washington, D.C., where by 1863 he was a clerk in the treasury department. Three men of his name enlisted in New York regiments during the Civil War, but it is unlikely that Chahoon ever served in the army.
Chahoon evidently went to occupied Norfolk in 1864 and practiced law for a few months before moving to Elizabeth City County, where he was elected commonwealth's attorney the following year and then became a leader of Williamsburg's Republican Party after the end of the Civil War. Late in 1866 Chahoon moved to Richmond, where in May 1867 Judge John Curtis Underwood appointed him commissioner of the United States District Court. In July of that year local Republicans nominated Chahoon for city attorney. Although as a federal official he was ineligible, under Virginia law, for municipal office, Brigadier General John McAllister Schofield, the state's military commander, appointed him mayor to replace the longtime incumbent, Joseph Mayo. Chahoon took office on 6 May 1868 and set out to cleanse the municipal government of Confederate sympathizers. He removed ten white police officers, recommended that African Americans be appointed to replace some of them, and created a twenty-five-member special Black police force, selecting as its chief Benjamin Scott, who had organized a unit of mounted guards after the Civil War and was a prominent figure in protests against the city's segregated streetcars. Chahoon also required saloonkeepers to post their city licenses. In moves rejected by the city council, he sought to hire lamplighters to relieve policemen of that duty and requested a stiffer dog ordinance. All of those actions provoked protests from the city's police officers and native white political leaders.
Following the end of Reconstruction in Virginia, the governor declared all city council seats vacant, and on 16 March 1870 the new council members named Henry Keeling Ellyson interim mayor. Chahoon and some of the former Republican council members refused to surrender power, and for a nearly a month two city administrations and police forces struggled to oust each other. Supporters of the new council and mayor briefly besieged Chahoon and his allies in the police station, cut off the gaslights, and refused to let them have access to food and water. Chahoon finally left the building and let the courts resolve the controversy. When the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals met in the Capitol on 27 April 1870 to deliver its opinion, the courtroom was so crowded with curious spectators and officials that the gallery collapsed and approximately sixty people died. Chahoon was injured, as were about 250 other people, some seriously. The court ruled in favor of Ellyson and against Chahoon.
In the second of two elections held in May and November 1870, both of which were marred by fraud and violence, Anthony M. Keiley, supported by the new Conservative Party, was elected Richmond's mayor. The army refused to interfere in Chahoon's behalf, and he finally relinquished his claim to the office. His political enemies then prosecuted him for forgery in connection with a case that they exploited to try to stain the reputations of other Republicans, among them the former attorney general Thomas Russell Bowden. Tried in 1870 and again in the following year, Chahoon was twice convicted and sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary. The trials involved several irregularities, and although the Supreme Court of Appeals did not vacate the second verdict, Governor Gilbert Carlton Walker, a fellow New York native, pardoned Chahoon on 16 December 1871, citing both the large number of petitions he had received supporting a pardon and the jury's recommendation of executive clemency, but reportedly on the condition that Chahoon leave the state.
After two years as one of Virginia's most controversial local political leaders and a principal in a celebrated court case that led to one of the state's most deadly accidents, Chahoon returned to New York. On 24 September 1867 he had married Mary Jane Rogers, member of a wealthy family of Black Brook, a township in Clinton County, New York, about fifteen miles south of Plattsburgh. They had two sons and one daughter. Chahoon prospered as an officer of his in-laws' enterprise, the J. and J. Rogers Company. Running a foundry and later a pulp and paper mill that his wife's family owned, he served many years as the company's vice president and eventually became president. Chahoon's namesake son (1872–1951) followed in his father's footsteps, moved to Quebec, and early in the twentieth century became one of the leading pulp and paper manufacturers in Canada.
In 1895 Chahoon won election to a three-year term in the New York Senate to represent the counties of Clinton, Essex, and Warren, and in 1898 he was reelected to a two-year term. During his first term he served on the Committees on Agriculture, on Forest, Fish, and Game Laws, on Miscellaneous Corporations, and on Railroads, and he chaired the Committee on Trades and Manufactures. During his second term he gained seats on the Committees on Banks and on Penal Institutions. Chahoon retired from electoral politics in 1900 but remained politically active until his death. He served for twenty years on the Clinton County board of supervisors, for part of that time as chair, and as a leader of the county Republican Party and a delegate to national party conventions. His career paralleled that of the rising class of Republican businessmen who achieved wealth, political office, and respectability during the Gilded Age.
Chahoon's enjoyment of life in the Adirondack Mountains and his involvement in that area's industrial development led him to publish three articles, on the Hudson River's water supply and on the birds and the bears of the Adirondacks. Following the death of his wife on 27 November 1887, Chahoon in 1898 married Christiana Van Allen. She died on 13 August 1903. George Chahoon died in Au Sable Forks, Clinton County, New York, on 29 July 1934 and was buried in Fairview Cemetery in that town.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Daily Richmond Whig, 5 May 1868, and Edgar L. Murlin, The New York Red Book: An Illustrated Legislative Manual… (1897), ix (portrait), 140 (with birth date); birth and death dates on gravestone; first marriage in Au Sable Forks Methodist Episcopal Church Records, Au Sable Forks, Clinton Co., N.Y.; publications include "Water-Supply of Rivers," Popular Science Monthly 13 (July 1878): 288–292, "The Birds of the Adirondacks," Popular Science Monthly 57 (May 1900): 40–47, and "The Adirondack Black Bear," Forest, Fish, and Game Commission, State of New York, Report, 1901 (1902), 243–249; Richmond Whig, 28 Apr. 1865; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 8 May 1867, 27 July 1867, 4 May 1868, 5 May 1868, 7 May 1868, 30 Apr. 1870, 28 Oct. 1870; Richmond Mayoralty Case (1870) (19 Grattan), Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 60:673–719; Chahoon v. Commonwealth (1871) (20 Grattan), Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 61:733–799, and (21 Grattan), Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 62:822–845; pardon recorded in Secretary of the Commonwealth, Executive Journal, 16 Dec. 1871, Record Group 13, Library of Virginia; George L. Christian, The Capitol Disaster: A Chapter of Reconstruction in Virginia (1915), 11–12; Louis Bernard Cei, "Law Enforcement in Richmond: A History of Police-Community Relations, 1737–1974" (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1975), 72–82; Michael B. Chesson, Richmond after the War, 1865–1890 (1981), 96, 104–114, 227; obituaries in New York Times, Plattsburgh Daily Press (portrait), and Richmond News Leader, all 30 July 1934; obituary and account of funeral in Plattsburgh Daily Republican, 30 July, 1 Aug. 1934.
Photograph in The New York Red Book: An Illustrated Legislative Manual (1897).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Michael B. Chesson.
How to cite this page:
Michael B. Chesson, "George Chahoon (1840–1934)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006, rev. 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Chahoon_George, accessed [today's date]).
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