27. A Seedy Gilded Age Reverend and a Small Town Heiress
Mrs. Pettit might have thought that her husband would mend his ways now that he was a man of the cloth. If so, she thought wrong. William – now the Reverend Pettit – continued to carouse and womanize. Seedy clergymen were no different in the Gilded Age than they are today. It soon became known that Reverand Pettit pinched many of his female congregants, and liked to cop a feel every now and then. His most significant pursuit was of Elma “Clementine” Whitehead. She was the widowed daughter of David Meharry, a founder and patron of Pettit’s church, and one of the richest men in the region.
Elma was no beauty, and as one contemporary reporter put it in less-than-chivalrous terms: “the most liberal of men would hesitate to call her attractive“. However, what she lacked in looks, Elma more than made up for in wealth; she was one of western Indiana’s richest widows. That made her one of the region’s most desirable women. Reverend Pettit had helped Elma’s father write his will in 1888. He was thus aware that she would inherit most of his estate, valued at $40,000 – a hefty sum back then. She also had a nice nest egg of her own, that she had inherited from her late husband.