Jacob Overholzer Canadian

Jacob Overholzer was one of twenty-one men charged with high treason in June of 1814. He was a farmer, newly-arrived in Canada. He was an elderly man for whom ninety-six of his neighbours signed a petition asking for his release. Overholzer was the innocent victim of misguided revenge after the American burning of Newark in 1813. He was accused of taking a traitorous part in the American raid. Under normal circumstances such charges would have blown over, but in the charged climate toward the end of the war, his defense was rejected. He escaped the fate of the other men charged, who were hanged and decapitated with their heads put on public display, by dying of typhus in a Kingston military prison three months after the war had ended.