A bearded man is a fashionable criminal who suffered because of his beliefs (7 photos)

This guy would have been lucky if there had been a fashion police in his era. After all, then he would have been subjected to maximum persecution on her part.





In 1830, Joseph Palmer sported a long, luxurious beard, which was then considered such a challenge to the norms that men attacked him and local authorities sent him to prison. For over a century, men have considered facial hair unacceptable.



Joseph Palmer

Joseph Palmer was born in 1789 in Notown, a village between Leominster and Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

He was described as "an honest, good-natured man and a good citizen, deeply religious but tolerant, a man of many intellectual interests." Not without a bit of eccentricity, of course. But which of us is ideal?

By age 40, he decided to imitate Moses and Jesus by growing a beard. And then it began... General ridicule, insults, poking. One clergyman even accused Palmer of being like the devil. To which he replied that he had never come across an image of the ruler of the sulfur lands with a long beard. But Jesus, on the contrary, appears with her in all images.





One day in May 1830, Joseph Palmer went to a Fitchburg hotel to deliver meat and cucumbers. Four men with scissors and razors approached him and tried to cut off his beard. Palmer fought back, wounding two of them with his knife. Because he defended himself, local authorities arrested him and charged him with unprovoked attack. Judge David Brigham ordered him to pay a $10 fine, $40 in court costs and post $700 bail. Palmer chose to go to the Worcester County Jail instead.



He was sick for the first few weeks in prison. Palmer had a hard time. The guards beat the ideological bearded man, starved him and placed him in solitary confinement for several months. Other prisoners did not lag behind and also tried to cut off the stubborn neighbor’s beard.

But Joseph Palmer managed to make life difficult for his pursuers. He wrote letters to the Worcester County Sheriff complaining about his mistreatment. One day he even sent him all the food he had been given that day to show him how little he was being fed. He also wrote letters to local newspapers, which published them.

His case began to embarrass the public, and several delegations arrived at the prison to ask him to pay a fine and leave. Judge David Brigham visited him with a letter from his mother, begging him to return home. But Palmer still refused. In the end, the authorities got pretty tired of the stubborn man, and the jailers carried him out of the prison on a chair and put him on the sidewalk.



Palmer's Fruitlands Community Farmhouse

Joseph Palmer, who became a celebrity, nevertheless paid the costs, bought the land and began cultivating it. Together with his wife Nancy, he hosted tramps, writers and reformers who came here over the next 20 years. Neighbors called the place "Old Man Palmer's Hobo House."



Joseph Palmer died in 1873, just as beards were coming back into fashion. On the tombstone of a man who maintained his own beliefs until the end of his life, despite the discontent of others, in Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Massachusetts, a bearded portrait of the deceased is carved with the inscription “Persecuted for wearing a beard.”