Dutch Billy
by Andrea Cassel
Special Newsletter Supplement - Friends of White Clay Creek State Park (FWCCSP RECORD, Vol. 9, No. 2, November 2006, p. 7)
Every area has unique legends that are passed down to younger generations. One of White Clay Creek Valley’s was about Dutch Billy. Many long-time valley residents reminisced about the stories they had heard about him.
William Losien, his real name, was born in Germany in February of 1858 and immigrated to America in 1882. Long time area resident, Eugene ”Dick” Robinson, said that though Dutch Billy did not go into Newark much, he did see him once. He described him as heavyset with a full beard.
Dutch Billy lived alone with his hunting dogs in a small cabin in the woods on the south side of Pleasant Hill Road. Evidence of the lane that went by his cabin is barely visible today. Long-time resident Norman Dempsey remembered that Dutch Billy’s cabin was where several farms (Harkness, Niven, Hopkins, and Lamborn farms) came together near the Nine Foot Road and Lovers Lane. Every few years local men would move his small cabin to an adjacent property so he would not have to pay rent.
Besides growing some vegetables in a small garden, keeping chickens, and hunting, Dutch Billy was a respected handyman and butcher for area farmers. His renown as a hunter was widespread. He used his 2 or 3 hounds for hunting small game such as raccoons, squirrels, and rabbits. Dick Robinson said that at night one could hear his coon dogs running up and down the valley. The dogs had harmony and were wonderful to hear. They had different ways of barking depending on what was happening. They had one sound when they were trailing an animal and another when they treed it. It was a long bray, then a yap, yap, yap. Billy would follow the sounds to get his quarry.
In late February 1927, the residents near Pleasant Hill Road did not hear the sounds of the dogs for several days so they went checking on Dutch Billy. He had shot his dogs and then himself. He had been ill and people assumed that he feared for the future of his dogs without him. Since he was poor, his normal burial plot would have been in a potter’s field. He was so beloved by his neighbors that a collection was taken, led by J.Leslie Eastburn, so he could be buried in a marked grave by the Mill Creek Quaker Meeting House. The stone is still standing today. His only possession, a rifle, was buried resting in his arms. It is this gun that neighbors believe they hear fired at midnight each February 28, the anniversary of his death.