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Lydia Sherman, the Derby Poisoner, Commits the “Horror of the Century”

Lydia Sherman had an unfortunate addiction to murder. She went on a decades-long killing spree in New York and Connecticut, poisoning at least eight children and three of her husbands.

Lydia Sherman

Her sensational trial in 1872 resulted in newspaper headlines that called her “America’s Queen Killer,” “The Poison Fiend,” “The Modern-Day Lucretia Borgia” or simply, “The Derby Poisoner.”

While awaiting trial, she wrote a best-selling confession, called, The Poison Fiend!: Life, Crimes, and Conviction of Lydia Sherman, (the Modern Lucretia Borgia,) Recently Tried in New Haven, Conn., for Poisoning Three Husbands and Eight of Her Children : Her Life in Full! Exciting Account of Her Trial–the Fearful Evidence : the Most Startling and Sensational Series of Crimes Ever Committed in this Country : Her Conviction and Confession.

Lydia Sherman

The childhood of Lydia Sherman offers few clues to her emergence as a serial killer. She was born Lydia Danbury on Christmas Eve, 1824, in Burlington, N.J. A year after her birth, her mother died, and she went to live on her uncle’s farm until she turned 16. Then she went to live with her brother in New Brunswick.

She was slim and pretty, with blue eyes, dark hair and porcelain skin. She also had a strong attachment to the Methodist church. At 18, she attended a Methodist dinner and met Edward Struck, a widowed blacksmith with six children. Shortly afterward, he proposed marriage. She said ‘yes.’

They set up housekeeping in New York City and had eight children of their own. With such a large family to support, Edward Struck decided he needed more income. So he got a job as a New York City police officer. But a few years into the job, witnesses charged him with cowardice during a hotel robbery in Manhattan. Edward Struck lost his job.

How It Started

Edward Struck sank into depression, refusing to leave the apartment or his bed. Lydia decided to put him out of his misery.

One day she went to the drugstore to buy arsenic, easy to obtain as a rat-killing poison in the 19^th century. She stirred a thimbleful into Edward’s oatmeal – though a few grains will kill a man – and after several agonizing hours he died. First his throat burned, then he suffered excruciating abdominal pains and diarrhea, then convulsions and finally death.

Months earlier, their two-year-old daughter Lydia contracted measles but died of similar symptoms. Her mother never admitted to killing her, though she confessed to killing eight other children. .

Child Killer

As the Civil War raged, Lydia created carnage in her own household. Without any means of support and young children to feed, Lydia decided her youngest three — Martha Ann, 6; Edward, Jr., 4 and William, 9 months old — “could do nothing for me or for themselves.” She decided to put them out of the way the same way she had disposed of their father. Less than six weeks after killing Edward Struck, Lydia poisoned her three children.

Three of her older children stayed alive, at least for a while, by finding work to support the family. But then George, 14, contracted lead poisoning from his job as a painter. He took to his bed, a fatal mistake. His mother gave him arsenic in his tea.

Lydia’s 12-year-old daughter Ann Eliza was the next to go, as she didn’t have a job and had always been sickly. John, 16, had moved out of the house, which probably saved his life. Eighteen-year-old Lydia, the last child living at home, had a job as a retail clerk. But then she fell ill and had to stay in bed. Soon, her mother got rid of her the same way she got rid of the others.

Then she got a job as a nurse.

Move to Connecticut

By the end of the Civil War, Lydia’s stepson Cornelius Struck grew suspicious about Lydia and shared his concern with the district attorney. The DA promised an investigation, but nothing happened.

Confessionaal best-seller by Lydia Sherman

When the Civil War ended, Lydia got a job selling sewing machines in New York City. She met John Curtiss, a customer impressed with the 41-year-old’s nursing experience. In 1867, he hired her to take care of his elderly mother in Stratford, Conn.

After eight months with the old lady, she encountered a rich widower named Dennis Hurlburt in the local grocery store. She still had her looks and enough charm to convince Hurlburt he needed her as his housekeeper. She accepted the job, and soon he asked her to marry him.

On Nov. 22, 1868, Lydia married Dennis Hurlburt and made sure he wrote her into his will. Fourteen months into the marriage, she noticed his hands shaking while he shaved for church. He said he felt dizzy, and couldn’t shake it off.

She decided he suffered from some malady, so she put him out of his suffering with a large dose of arsenic in his clam chowder. Three excruciating days later, Hurlburt died, leaving Lydia $20,000 worth of real estate and $10,000 in cash.

Eight weeks later, she met a Derby, Conn., factory mechanic named Horatio Sherman, a recent widower with four children. They married within a few months later, and she moved to Derby.

Lydia Sherman Unmasked

Horatio Sherman, unaware of his wife’s murderous proclivities, drank heavily and spent her money freely. One day, while drunk, he ranted that he wished his sickly infant son Frankie would die to end his suffering.

George Frederick Barker, who discovered the arsenic used by Lydia Sherman

Lydia Sherman took the hint, and mixed a little arsenic into the baby’s milk. He died quickly. The next month, her 14-year-old stepdaughter Ada came down with the flu. Doctors couldn’t help her but Lydia Sherman knew how to take care of her.

The death of his beloved daughter caused Horatio Sherman to go on a bender. Lydia decided to make her husband sick of liquor, so she spiked a bottle of brandy with arsenic. When he took to his bed, she left the brandy by his bedside.

When Dr. J.C. Beardsley came to treat Horatio, he grew suspicious of his strange symptoms. Horatio, inevitably, died, and the doctor asked Lydia Sherman if he could order a post mortem. She agreed.

Beardsley sent Horatio Sherman’s organs to Yale for analysis. Sure enough, Yale professor George Frederick Barker found large quantities of arsenic in Horatio Sherman’s body.

Autopsies performed on Dennis Hurlburt and Frankie and Ada Sherman found more arsenic.

Arrest and Trial

Lydia Sherman had moved to New Brunswick to live with her family, but on June 7, 1872, police arrested her for murder. They took her to New Haven to await trial.

Her trial began on April 16, 1872 and lasted eight days. Lydia Sherman appeared prim and proper in court, wearing a black alpaca dress, a shawl, gloves, a straw hat with a thin veil. She steadfastly claimed her innocence. But the jury, faced with overwhelming evidence, convicted her of the second-degree murder of Horatio Sherman.

Tabloids called it the Horror of the Century.

Five years into her prison sentence, she pretended to have a serious illness and escaped. She got a job as a housekeeper to a rich widower in Providence. He survived his employee, probably because authorities tracked her down after a week and sent her back to prison in Wethersfield, Conn..

Lydia Sherman died on May 16, 1878, from cancer. No one gave her any arsenic to put her out of her misery.

With thanks to Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Connecticut History by Ray Bendici. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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11 Famous People Committed to McLean Mental Hospital

Sylvia Plath called McLean mental hospital the best mental hospital in the United States. U.S. News & World Report did too.

Though McLean mental hospital has excellent staff and conducts groundbreaking research, its reputation rests mostly on its rich and famous residents. They lend the place an odd glamour when they come to dry out, get sane or avoid prison.

So many Boston Brahmins stayed at McLean that it was said a proper Bostonian lived on Beacon Hill and had an uncle at Mclean mental hospital. Louis Agassiz Shaw II, for example, strangled his Irish maid and spent the rest of his life there surrounded by his books.

Creative people and their relatives also stayed at McLean mental hospital, including Al Capp’s daughter, John P. Marquand’s son, two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers and two of Van Morrison’s sidemen. Even, perhaps, William James.

McLean Mental Hospital History

Otto Folin in biochemistry lab at McLean Hospital, 1905

In 1811, prominent Bostonians founded the Asylum for the Insane in Charlestown, Mass., to care for the homeless mentally ill.

In 1823, a Boston merchant named John McLean left a generous bequest to the insane asylum, which renamed itself after him. Another renaming — to McLean Hospital — reflected the evolution of thinking about mental illness.

Originally built around a Charles Bulfinch mansion, in 1895 it moved to the Boston suburb of Belmont.One of the 11 famous people who stayed at McLean mental hospital chose the new site.

McLean mental hospital

McLean combines teaching, treatment and research, unlike most hospitals for psychiatric disorders. Today it is a private, nonprofit division of Massachusetts General Hospital and a teaching hospital for Harvard University’s medical residents. But most people know it through the songs, poems, books and movies that its patients created over the decades.

1. Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted selected the site for McLean mental hospital when it moved to Belmont.

Toward the end of his life he went to McLean after showing signs of dementia. Olmsted reported ‘noises in his head.’

His influence makes the place look more like a college campus than a mental hospital.

Frederick Law Olmsted

2. A Beautiful Mind

John Nash, the mathematical genius and subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind spent a month at McLean in 1959. Doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he spent the next 11 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

In 1970 he began to control his illness, and in 1994 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

3. Brother Ray

In 1964, police arrested Ray Charles for possession of pot and heroin, his third drug arrest. A sympathetic judge sent him to McLean for observation.

“The nicest part was meeting one of the nurses who I got next to a little later on,” Charles wrote in his biography, Brother Ray. He also entertained the other patients when he found another piano player. “A classical cat,” he wrote, “who could really wail.”

He alluded to his drug use in the song, Let’s Go Get Stoned.

Ray Charles publicity still

4. Sweet Baby James

As a high school senior at Milton Academy, James Taylor fell into a deep depression, sleeping 20 hours a day. He was sent to McLean mental hospital, where he was heavily medicated but grateful to be there.

After 10 months, he checked himself out against medical advice. He later wrote a song about it: Knocking ‘Round the Zoo.

Brother Livingston and sister Kate also spent time at McLean.

5. Interrupted Girl

Susanna Kaysen was the daughter of John F. Kennedy’s deputy national security advisor, Carl Kaysen. In high school, her parents sent her to McLean mental hospital for treatment for depression.

Doctors diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. She left after 18 months. In 1993 she wrote a memoir about her time at McLean, Girl, Interrupted, made into a movie starring Winona Ryder in 1999.

6. Sister Morphine

Part of the 1960s British Invasion, Marianne Faithfull had a couple of hit singles and a relationship with Mick Jagger. She got addicted to drugs and alcohol, and at one point she was anorexic, homeless and a heroin addict.

She made a comeback, tried to dry out in Minnesota and then checked into McLean in 1985. Faithfull then resumed a long career as a recording artist and actress on stage and screen.

Marianne Faithfull on Danish TV in 1966

7. Best Seller

David Foster Wallace published his literary best-seller, Infinite Jest, at the age of 34.

In it he describes the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, based on Granada House in Brighton, Conn. He spent time there after a four-week stay at McLean Mental Hospital for help with alcoholism, drug addiction and depression.

Wallace struggled with depression for decades. At 46, he committed suicide.

8. Demon of Screamin’

Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer, was confronted by his bandmates about his drug use in the mid-80s. So he checked himself into the rehabilitation wing of McLean Mental Hospital.

He stayed off drugs after his stay until he fell off the wagon with painkillers. Back in the day they didn’t have safer alternatives to opioids like the kratom strains from Star Kratom that many rely on these days. Tyler returned to an unnamed rehab hospital.

Steven Tyler performing with Aerosmith on the National Mall in 2003

9. Bell Jar

In 1953, a depressed 20-year old Smith student named Sylvia Plath crawled under her house and swallowed a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. She lay under the house for three days until she was found.

Plath then entered McLean Mental Hospital for six months of treatment, which she wrote about in her novel The Bell Jar. She published several collections of poetry, which won critical acclaim. But she, too, committed suicide. After her death she won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.

10. Farm Equipment Heir

Stanley McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, played champion tennis at Princeton but fell prey to mental illness later on. T. Coraghessan Boyle later portrayed him as a sex-mad recluse in his novel Riven Rock.

11. Mayflower Screwball

The Brahmin poet Robert Lowell suffered from manic depression all his life.

He stayed at McLean Mental Hospital four times in eight years. Of his stay at McLean he wrote the poem Waking in the Blue in 1976. In it, he described ‘Mayflower screwballs.’

Robert Lowell

Image: McLean Mental Hospital administration building By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715880. Robert Lowell By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26201157. Marianne Faithfull By Photographer: A. Vente – FTA001007877 013 con.png Beeld & Geluid Wiki, Fanclub, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57844584. Steven Tyler By Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Rob Rubio – https://web.archive.org/web/20030911122036/http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=9357, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=994727.

This story about the McLean Mental Hospital was updated in 2022.

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The New England Opium Trade

The New England opium trade in the early 1800s produced considerable wealth for America. As it was never seen as a wholesome pursuit, however, those who prospered from it tended to downplay its significance — much the way many family histories marginalized slave trading.

And in truth America’s trade in opium was insignificant compared to Britain’s role in promoting opium. For centuries, opium – harvested from poppy plants – made its way around the globe as a fairly insignificant product.

Wellcome Library, London
The boiling and testing of opium by Chinese men watched by a European man. Wood-engraving by F. Dadd, c. 1880.

Smoking opium took hold in China as a remedy for toothaches and other pains. But its addictive qualities quickly drove consumption for recreational uses. By the early 1700s, the damage done by opium addiction was readily apparent in China’s flop-houses and drug dens. As early as 1729 Chinese officials tried to enforce bans on the drug.

But Britain’s East India Company was becoming addicted to opium, too. Some historians argue that opium had replaced tea in importance to the East India Company because of its high profit margins. Demand was non-stop and competition was virtually non-existent. By 1793, Britain had a virtual monopoly in supplying Indian opium to China. Merchants used a precise system of harvesting, delivering and selling opium into the market.

But the politics of the drug remained complicated. By 1800 the Chinese government had outlawed opium yet again. Even in Britain it was viewed as unwholesome.

The New England Opium Trade

The East India Company, meanwhile, demanded Indian farmers sell their opium to the company, cutting out competition. The company would refine the opium and sell it to smugglers. The smugglers could deliver it freely to China’s markets rather than having to deal through China’s official Canton factory system. British ships themselves were strictly forbidden to carry opium into China.

This convoluted mechanism for selling opium left plenty of room for profit. That fact was not lost on New England merchants developing their own China trade.

The New England opium trade began as a necessary trade-balancing strategy. The Chinese had tea, porcelain and silk that Americans wanted. But America (as well as Britain) had far fewer goods that interested the Chinese.

China also demanded payment in silver. That demand burdened America and Britain, which had little access to silver. In looking for another commodity that could be traded with China, the British had identified opium as such a product. American traders decided to follow suit.

American vessels had been operating on the fringes of the opium trade prior to 1800, but in 1805 the trade blossomed. The Philadelphia firm Willings & Francis and James and Benjamin Wilcocks took the first leaps into opium. They sent ships to Turkey to purchase opium that the East India Company didn’t control for shipment to India.

But New Englanders were not far behind. Thomas Jefferson’s trade embargoes in 1807 and 1808 crippled New England merchants. With American-based vessels restricted to port and under the thumb of customs officials, the concept of trading products that never needed to enter American jurisdictions had immense appeal.

Family Businesses

The Cabot family had launched the opium trade in the 18th century. Then in the next century, James and Thomas Perkins of Boston contacted their nephew John Cushing to urge him to investigate the business. Cushing. the Perkins’ representative in China, belonged to the first group of traders to set up a permanent post there.

Cushing would become a millionaire in his own right during his 30 years in China overseeing the interests of Perkins & Co. He would return to Boston as one of its wealthiest men and most eligible bachelors.

Other families that accumulated great wealth from the New England opium trade include the Cushings, Welds, Delanos and Forbes.

How much Perkins & Co. and the other New England China traders made from the trade in opium is unknown. They engaged in numerous lines of business, from loaning money to importing Chinese goods.

Volatility

Jacques M. Downs, an historian of the opium trade, notes the market became more volatile as New England and other American merchants rushed into the opium business. Unlike the precise approach of the East India Company, these independents would rush to Turkey for opium and back to China as fast as possible. The margins were so high at some points, traders would buy opium exported to London and return to China with it to sell at a profit.

However, when too many shiploads of opium arrived in Chinese ports, the price collapsed. One trader noted in 1807 that the opium trade had “disappointed many this past season” because of oversupply.

England began getting better control over opium sales with the end of the War of 1812 and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. British interests began monopolizing a greater share of Turkish opium. By 1862, after fighting two wars with China (called the Opium Wars), Britain and France forced China to open its markets and legalize the opium trade.

America’s appetite for opium, meanwhile, had grown rapidly. With trade embargoes lifted after the War of 1812, opium imports skyrocketed. In 1840 New Englanders imported 24,000 pounds of opium. That was enough to draw the attention of the federal government, which quickly taxed the stuff.

This story was updated in 2022.

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How Alcoholics Anonymous Got Started in Manchester, Vt.

When the first airplane landed in Manchester, Vt., in 1929, two drunks tumbled out of the cockpit and lay on the ground. The pretty Vermont town would within five years become the center of the coincidences that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill W., the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, grew up seven miles away and attended high school in Manchester. His wife, who founded Al-Anon and Alateen, summered in Manchester. So did Ebby T., who sponsored Bill W. So did Rowland H., who sponsored Ebby T.

Bob S., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is usually described as an Akron doctor, but he grew up in St. Johnsbury, Vt., 100 miles north of Manchester.

So it’s unsurprising that Alcoholics Anonymous preaches that there are no coincidences – they are simply God’s way of staying invisible.

Before Alcoholics Anonymous

Rowland Hazard passport photo

Rowland Hazard III was a scion of a prominent Rhode Island family that included a founder of Brown University, founders of textile fortunes, a philosopher, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Matthew and Oliver Hazard Perry. His Aunt Caroline Hazard was president of Wellesley University. His family ran the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company and the Solvay Process Co.

Rowland was born in 1881 in Peace Dale, R.I., the village founded by his family, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

He was a drunk through middle age. To cure his alcoholism, he went to Switzerland to consult famed psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung told him he was beyond a medical cure and needed a ‘vital spiritual experience.’

In 1931, Hazard went to a meeting in New York of the Oxford Group, a Christian fellowship group dedicated to the four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. The group preached personal change through confidence, confession, conviction, conversion, and continuance.

It helped him quit drinking.

Rowland bought a ranch in New Mexico, and from 1932 to 1936 he divided his time between New Mexico and Shaftsbury, Vt., near his family’s summer home in Manchester.

Rowland had a friend who was the son of a judge and a member of the Oxford Group. He told Rowland about a mutual friend who’d been arrested for drunkenness in Bennington, Vt., and faced six months in jail.

Manchester, Vt.

Ebby T.

Edward Throckmorton “Ebby” Thacher was descended from a family that arrived in America in 1635. Thomas Thacher was the first pastor of the Old South Meeting House in Boston. James Thacher was a Revolutionary War surgeon and historian.

Ebby’s grandfather made the family fortune in the railroad car business in Albany, N.Y. His father played golf in Manchester with Robert Todd Lincoln.

Ebby was kicked out of high school and went to work at the family foundry. Ebby lost his job when the foundry closed. The family fortune didn’t disappear, though, until he was in his 40s, so he had no problem finding money to support his habit.

By January 1929, 33-year-old Ebby was living in Albany and drinking with barnstorming pilots. He ran into his high school friend Bill Wilson at a party, and they decided to fly to Manchester the next day. Word spread that the first-ever plane would land in Manchester, and half the town came out to watch.

“All three of us had been pulling on a bottle of liquor,” recalled Bill. They landed on a bumpy meadow. “The delegation charged forward. It was up to Ebby and me to do something, but we could do absolutely nothing. We somehow slid out of the cockpit, fell on the ground, and there we lay, immobile. Such was the history-making episode of the first airplane ever to light at Manchester, Vermont.”

Three years later, Ebby had become the town drunk in Albany and an embarrassment to his brother, the city’s mayor. Ebby moved to the Battenkill Inn in Manchester, Vt., where he spent the next two years becoming that town’s drunk.

He was awaiting trial for drunkenness in Bennington when Rowland Hazard arrived. He asked the judge to bound Ebby over to him rather than send him to jail. The judge agreed. Rowland took Ebby to New York. In November of 1934, Ebby surrendered his life to God at the Calvary Episcopal Church mission. He sometimes fell of the wagon but died sober in 1960.

Bill W.

Bill Wilson

Bill Wilson was born in East Dorset, Vt., in 1895, the son of tavern owners. His mother and father both deserted him, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.

His grandfather, Fayette Griffith, was a successful small businessman; a cousin became Vermont’s first millionaire. He doted on Bill but pressured him to excel at everything he did. Bill grew up tall, gawky, shy and insecure.

He went to high school in Manchester, where he met Ebby Thacher in 1911. Thacher lived across the street from the Burnhams, a well-to-do family summering from Brooklyn. Bill met Dr. Clark Burnham’s daughter Lois while sailing on Emerald Lake.

Two years later they were married. “She had social graces of which I knew nothing,” he said. “People still ate with their knives around me, the back door step was still a lavatory.”

Bill spent three years at Norwich University and then officers training school. He was called up and took his first drink while stationed in New Bedford, Mass.

He moved to New York, where he became a successful stock speculator on Wall Street. During the 1920s, he drank heavily – sometimes with Ebby.

Bill’s drinking ruined his career. By 1932 he was a hopeless drunk, though Lois stood by him.

Ebby, newly dry, visited him and told him about the Oxford Group. It didn’t help. In 1933, Bill was admitted to the Charles B. Towns Hospital for Drug and Alcohol Addictions – for the fourth time — with delirium tremens. He expected to die or go insane.

Ebby visited him and told him to put himself in the hands of God – or some kind of higher power.

As Bill tells the story, he was lying in his hospital bed and shouted, “I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”

Suddenly he saw a white light and felt ecstasy, then serenity. His doctor said, “Something has happened to you I don’t understand. But you had better hang on to it.”

He never drank again.

Bob S.

Dr. Bob Smith

On May 13, 1935, Bill Wilson took a business trip to Akron, Ohio. It didn’t go well, and he realized he was in danger of relapsing. He called a leader of the local Oxford Group, who put him in touch with a doctor named Bob Smith. Smith invited Bill to stay at his house and quit drinking for a month.

Smith grew up in St. Johnsbury, Vt., to an old New England family. His very religious parents took him to church four times a week. He vowed he’d never go to church when he grew up.

He began drinking at Dartmouth College and continued during medical school at the University of Michigan. He barely graduated. He drank while running a surgical practice in Akron, Ohio.

His wife got him interested in Oxford Group meetings, but they didn’t help. He checked himself into hospitals and sanitariums more than a dozen times, but couldn’t stop – until Bill Wilson rolled into town.

After a month of sobriety, Bob Smith went to a convention in Atlantic City. There he hit the booze hard. He returned to Akron on June 9, and Bill gave him a few drinks to prevent delirium tremens.

The next morning he drank a beer to steady his nerves for an operation. It was June 10, 1935, the day Bob S. had his last drink. It is celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Why Alcoholics Anonymous?

The identities of Bob S. and Bill W. were only revealed after their deaths, in 1960 and 1971, respectively.

Bill W. explained why anonymity was important to the group. “Anonymity isn’t just something to save us from alcoholic shame and stigma,” he said. “Its deeper purpose is to keep those fool egos of ours from running hog wild after money and fame at AA’s expense.”

When he died on Jan. 24, 1971, he left 475,000 admitted alcoholics, 15,000 Alcoholics Anonymous groups in the United States and 88 countries.

To see Bill discuss alcoholism, click here.

Photos: Bob Smith By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37884612

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Why the Ghost of Eugene O’Neill Haunts a BU Dorm

Eugene O’Neill lay dying in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel in Boston just before Thanksgiving in 1953. For years he had suffered from depression and what doctors diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease. They later determined he had cerebellar cortical atrophy.

The rare illness caused hand tremors that prevented O’Neill from writing.

No wonder he was depressed.

Ultimately, pneumonia killed him in that residential hotel suite on Nov. 27, 1953, at the age of 65.

Eugene O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, and his doctor, Harry Kozol, stayed by his deathbed. They heard him whisper his last words:

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and, goddammit, died in a hotel room.

Not happy

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill was born in the Barrett House on what is now Times Square in New York City on Oct. 16, 1888. His alcoholic father, James O’Neill, was a well-known actor who immigrated to the United States from Ireland. His mother, Mary Ellen Quinlan, also Irish, suffered from mental illness.

Because his father traveled so much, O’Neill attended boarding school. He then entered Princeton, and left it after one year. He spent summers at his family’s home, the Monte Cristo Cottage, in New London, Conn. (which you can now visit in the summer).

Monte Cristo Cottage

Depressed and drinking heavily, O’Neill went to sea aboard a tramp steamer for several years. He joined the Maritime Transport Workers Union of the IWW, or Wobblies, and wrote plays.

He found his stage in 1916 with the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod. Four years later he published his first play, Beyond the Horizon, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Over his lifetime he steered American theater away from the frothy comedies of George M. Cohan and Charles Hoyt. His characters often belonged to the working class and used vernacular to express hope, despair, disillusionment and pessimism.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature during his lifetime as well as three Pulitzer Prizes. Only the plays of George Bernard Shaw were more widely produced.

Postscript

Eugene O’Neill left written instructions not to publish his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, until 25 years after his death. His wife published it three years after he died, and O’Neill received another Pulitzer Prize for it posthumously.

The story is a semi-autobiographical account of one day in the life of his mother, father, brother and himself at their seaside cottage. Tension escalates throughout the day as they spar over addiction, blame and regret while trying to show love and sympathy for each other.

The year after Eugene O’Neill died, Boston University bought the hotel and turned it into the Shelton (now Killachand) Hall dormitory.

Kilachand Hall

BU students say they’ve heard or felt O’Neill’s ghost. The elevator sometimes opens for no apparent reason. They hear strange scratching sounds. Lights dim suddenly and toilets flush themselves.

O’Neill’s ghost is described as benevolent. Perhaps it really is the specter of the playwright, at last at peace. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his autobiographical character Edmund recalls the bliss of getting lost in fog during his sailing days:

The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

The floor was named ‘Writer’s Corridor’ in 1984, and every spring its residents put out a collection of writing called Eugene’s Legacy.

This story about Eugene O’Neill was updated in 2022. Images: Monte Cristo cottage By Ntiprog – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64209889. Kilachand Hall By ForksForks – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86395697.

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