Benjamin Franklin Witherspoon was a majestic figure astride a horse and wearing his star on his vest in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
He brought his wife, Martha Maniza Nelson to Downey from Texas in 1882, so she could be closer to her mother who had moved here with three sons previously.
A daughter, Zora, was born to the Witherspoons 11 years later.
Witherspoon, or "Spoony" as he was known familiarly, was the constable in Downey from 1885 to 1923.
His daughter remembered there was no jail for many years, and when someone had to be taken in, her father would transport the transgressor to county jail in Los Angeles by way of the Southern Pacific rail line.
She said when her father wasn’t using the rail pass she would borrow it for shopping trips to L.A.
They lived in a wood-frame house her father built at Firestone and Paramount boulevards.
About 1920, Downey was a colorful small town with a train depot, a gas station, two saloons, a fire station, two banks, two newspaper offices, several dress shops, a grocery store and the sheriff’s office.
She recalled that once her father came home and told them there had been a murder. Witherspoon had to stand guard at the home where the slain bodies of a man, his wife and their two-year-old child were found on Gardendale Street until the coroner could come out from Los Angeles.
She also recalled Downey’s worst disaster, the gas station explosion and fire of 1922, in which her brother, Lester, was critically injured.
In the early years, Witherspoon enforced the law by himself, but in his later career he deputized George Kellerman to help him.
The young men of Downey showed no mercy on the aging constable in his later years. They used to run the stop signs in the old downtown and then race to the nearby orange groves where they hid from the old lawman.
Whether he actually could have caught them or not is a moot question. He probably thought about that long train trip to Los Angeles before plunging into the groves.