On Sunday, July 18, 1880, at Brookline, Missouri, 26-year-old M. C. McConnel and 19-year-old Edwina James were in company with another young couple, Henry Adams and Mattie Gibson, having a good time and carrying out practical jokes. They started challenging each other to see who could come up with the most daring deed, and it finally came to such an extremity that McConnell and Miss James sought out a local minister, J. W. Grubbs, and asked him to perform a marriage ceremony, just for fun. Grubbs went through with the ceremony but carried it a bit further than the couple had intended.
On July 20, the preacher filed a record of the marriage with the Greene County recorder, and the recorder entered it into the marriage book. "The couple were placed in an extremely awkward predicament," said one observer at the time. "To admit the marriage and obtain a divorce was impossible, because there was no legal grounds for a divorce."
The only loophole the couple could find was to adopt the argument that no bonafide marriage existed to begin with. So, a warrant was sworn out for the arrest of Rev. Grubbs on a complaint that he had unlawfully caused a false entry of a pretended marriage to be made in the county records. Grubbs was tried before a Springfield magistrate in front of a curious audience. He was found guilty and fined $25 and court costs.
However, the result, according to one reporter, did "not settle satisfactorily to the minds of the young couple the question whether or not they are married."
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