Before 1830, in small-town New England, the answer is unequivocally “Yes, and probably daily.”

1830 is the year that Joseph Palmer spent a year in prison in Worcester, Massachusetts, for wearing a beard.

He was a farmer (and a veteran of the War of 1812) who’d been assaulted on the street by four of his fellow citizens – they tried to hold him down and shave him. He managed to fend them off with a pocketknife, but was sent to jail for his efforts.

Well, in reality, it was a little more complicated – he was fined, but refused to pay it because he’d felt it was unjust. Instead, he became a bit of a cause celebre, thanks in part to a series of letters his son smuggled out to the Worcester Spy. People started offering to pay his fine for him, but he refused. His sentence ended, and he wouldn’t leave.

“I won’t walk a single step toward freedom,” he declared. Ultimately, the jailer evicted him from jail – carrying him out in the chair from which he refused to rise.

Prior to the assault on the street, Palmer had been in a battle of wills with the local pastor, Reverend George Trask. In one public exchange, Trask asked him why he went around looking like the devil, and Palmer countered by saying it he’d never seen much of beard on likenesses of the Devil, but Jesus wore a beard like his.

That battle culminated with the minister refusing to serve him the wine and bread of communion, and Palmer grabbing the cup out of his hands, taking a swig, and announcing to the congregation “I love my Jesus as well, and better, than any of you!”

There’s another story about Trask and Palmer meeting on the street decades later – perhaps even after Abraham Lincoln brought beards into the White House. By then, even Trask wore a beard.

Palmer (the story goes) eyed him on the street, stroked his own beard and said, “Knowest thou that thy redeemer liveth?”

One fun telling of his story is in Stewart Holbrook’s Lost Men of History, excerpted here. Palmer, much later in life, is also one of the characters in Louisa May Alcott’s “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a sarcastic memoir of her childhood in a utopian commune, Fruitlands. (Palmer helped them farm as much as he could, but their group collapsed anyway.) His beard story – especially the Trask confrontation – is part of other histories of Fruitlands, including one written by Clara Endicott Sears.