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Foster

A Governor’s Son, a French Monster and the Murder of Schoolteacher Marietta Ball

On July 24, 1874, a Friday, schoolteacher Marietta Ball left her St. Albans, Vt., school at 3:30 in the afternoon. She planned to walk a wooded path to a friend’s house. She often spent the weekend and Sabbath with Foster Page before returning to Mrs. Abel’s boarding house for the week.

Illustration from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster.

So no one in St. Albans was alarmed when Marietta didn’t show up at her boarding house. And when she didn’t arrive at Foster Page’s house on Friday, he didn’t worry either. She often stayed in town and came later to attend Sunday services. But he made inquiries the next day and soon the people of St. Albans found out their school teacher had gone missing.

A search party set out to locate Marietta, and found her lifeless body in the woods along the path to Foster Page’s house. “Her head was mangled as if beaten with stones and the evidence of outrage to her person was unmistakable,” the newspaper reported.

Rewards and a Manhunt

Marrietta Ball from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

The murder of 20-year-old Miss Ball incensed the town of St. Albans. Immediately a $3,000 reward was offered to anyone who could identify the murderer.

Suspicion fell on a burglar from Boston who robbed a jewelry store in Richmond, Vt., but nothing connected him to the crime.

The town was also reeling from a second murder. Two strangers had accosted and stabbed Joseph Minard, a young man passing through from Holyoke, Mass., to his home in Canada.

Two detectives worked to find out the truth. But as the weeks passed, the case grew colder. The detectives’ bills mounted, approaching $300 by November, and still they hadn’t identified the murderer.

Two hundred days after Marietta Ball’s murder, a St. Albans minister led his congregation to the site where her body was found. And with the winter wind blowing he preached his sermon surrounded by trees draped in black crepe. He urged his congregation to look after their fellow citizens. By May, the reward had been upped to $6000.

A Governor’s Son

Soon gossip began pointing to one young man in town, George Gregory Smith. George Smith’s powerful father, J. Gregory Smith, had served as a senator and governor of the state. His family holdings included a rail car manufacturing factory and he was president of a railroad. He had the means to cover up a murder committed by his son.

J. Gregory Smith

Stories began circulating: George Smith had attended a dance at the hotel in Bakersfield, and he had insulted Marietta Ball there. People had seen him visiting at her boarding house. Someone had seen a coach and team of horses on the night of Marietta’s murder near the crime scene, and could identify it as George Smith’s. One of the detectives in the case had supposedly mentioned his certainty that George Gregory Smith was involved in the murder of Marietta Ball.

The rumors infuriated Smith. In July of 1875, almost exactly one year after the murder, he demanded a public hearing. Witness after witness was called. All had heard the stories about George Smith, but one by one witnesses refuted them. He had not insulted Marietta Ball at a dance (he hadn’t even attended). He had not visited her boarding house. And the person who reported seeing the coach and team of horses said she could not identify who it belonged to. Finally, the detectives in the case told the packed town hall hearing that they had never said they believed George Gregory Smith murdered Marietta Ball.

Another Murder and a Clever Detective

Josie Langmaid from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

With George Smith’s name cleared, at least for the time being, the detectives went back to work on their case. Still, the murder of Marietta Ball might have gone unsolved but for a gruesome discovery on Oct. 4, 1875. That morning, the body of Josie Langmaid was discovered in the woods of Pembroke, N.H.

Josie Langmaid, 17, lived in Pembroke and attended Pembroke Academy. She had left her home at about 8:30 a.m. and headed off on her regular path to school. But she never got there. Along the way, someone attacked her ferociously. When the townspeople found her, they were stunned. She was assaulted and beaten badly, her head cut off. And her face bore the marks of what doctors thought was a heel strike from a boot. The town erected a memorial to Josie that still stands today.

At first, the town suspected a neighbor of attacking Josie. Bill Drew was a layabout. A story circulated that Josie had told her teacher that Bill Drew had “grossly insulted” her. He threatened to kill her and cut her into pieces if she told her father. Bill Drew was arrested, for fear he would flee. But a sharp-eyed detective had a hunch. The attack on Josie Langmaid struck him as suspiciously similar to the attack on Marietta Ball. He began piecing together evidence.

Link to the Marietta Ball Murder

Sure enough, he found that a man linked to the Marietta Ball case named Joseph Lapage now lived in Suncook, N.H. Detectives had detained and questioned Lapage in the Ball murder. He had lived in St. Albans at the time, but they could make no case against him.

In Suncook, Lapage “was known as a sort of wandering crazy person, yet he knew many persons there and frequently chased young girls.”

Joseph Lapage from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

Police arrested Lapage and searched his home. The search turned up an ax and a razor. Doctors identified human blood on some of his belongings.

The French-speaking community in New Hampshire took issue with the arrest. No one witnessed the crime, and some suspected police targeted Lapage because of his French Canadian origins. Coverage of the crime was coarse and xenophobic, with the media branding him “The French Monster.” Some may have even tried to clumsily cover for him.

But over the course of a nine-day trial in a packed Concord, N.H. city hall, an ugly story spilled out. Lapage originally came from Joliette, Quebec. There he had a troubling history. He had departed Canada shortly after his sister-in-law accused him of raping her. He had attacked and raped a cousin in Vermont, and even tried to attack his daughter, but his wife intervened.

His behavior patterns in Pembroke eerily resembled those in St. Albans. He stalked girls, asking where they lived, how they traveled to school and whether they had boyfriends. He carefully observed their movements so he would know just when to strike.

The Trial

After some legal wrangling over how much of his history prosecutors could use against him, a jury convicted Lapage of murder.

One observer of the trial came all the say from St. Albans. He noted: “We wanted to lynch him and sure it would have been a lucky thing for this other unfortunate girl, Josie Langmaid, if we had only hung him up on a tree to feed the crows and buzzards.”

Joseph Lapage had no more victims after Josie Langmaid. The State of New Hampshire hanged him in 1878.

Thanks to: The Trial of Joseph Lapage, the French Monster. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Places Where A Gallows Once Stood

So many people died on the gallows in New England that you may well have walked over a spot where someone met his or her maker.

With hanging as the primary form of execution in the United States until the 1890s, more than 400 people in New England have been hanged by the neck until they were dead.

Hangings used to serve as public spectacles back when film and video weren’t around to provide violent entertainment.

The Gallows

Typically, crowds would gather to watch as the prisoner was taken to the gallows, usually in a horse-drawn wagon. The hangman bound the prisoner’s hands and feet, tied a blindfold around the head and placed a noose around the neck. Then a trap door would open, the prisoner would fall through and, theoretically at least, the weight of the prisoner’s body would snap his or her neck.

Often that didn’t happen, and the prisoner died a slow gruesome death. Sometimes the prisoner had strong neck muscles, sometimes the prisoner didn’t weigh enough, sometimes the rope was too short and sometimes the hangman put the noose in the wrong position. In that case, the prisoner would die of slow strangulation, eyes popping, tongue protruding, limbs thrashing violently and bowels loosening.

Massachusetts has hanged 198 people, Maine 21, Connecticut 108, New Hampshire 24, Rhode Island about 50 and Vermont 21.

Here are six places where people were hanged, one in each state. If you know of an interesting place where someone was hanged, please share it in the comments section.

New London, Conn.

A 12-year-old girl was once hanged on the gallows here in New London.

Connecticut authorities hanged Hannah Occuish in New London on Dec. 20, 1786, the last female executed in the state. She was only 12 years old.

Hannah had murdered six-year-old Eunice Bolles after Eunice accused her of stealing strawberries she’d picked in New London. The colonial court didn’t recognize extenuating circumstances. Hannah’s mother was a Pequot Indian, her father African-American. Both parents died, and she may have suffered a mental disability. Shuttled among foster homes as a child, she had been forced to work as an indentured servant by the age of 12.

On July 21, 1786, Eunice was walking to school when Hannah lured her into the woods with the promise of a piece of calico. Hannah then beat and strangled her to death, and tried to cover her body with large stones.

A passerby soon discovered Eunice’s body, and Hannah confessed to the crime. Officials charged her with murder and, after a swift trial, she was convicted and sentenced to hang.

She cried during much of the day of her hanging, which took place on a gallows built behind the old meeting house, near the corner of what is now Granite Street.

The Rev. Henry Channing from Yale College gave a long sermon before the hanging, at Hannah’s request. It was called “God Admonishing His People of Their Duty, As Parents and Masters.”

“She seemed greatly afraid when at the gallows, and said but little to anyone,” according to The Courant on Dec. 25, 1786. “She thanked the Sheriff for his kindness, and launched into the eternal world.”

Fort George, Castine, Maine

Where Ebenezer Ball died on the gallows at f Fort George in Castine, Maine

Maine has executed 21 people by hanging. Hanging, in fact, has been the only way Maine executed anyone.

In the summer of 1811, a Deer Isle counterfeiter named Ebenezer Ball met his maker before a crowd of people in the center of Fort George in Castine, Maine. Ball had shot to death a sheriff’s deputy, John Tileston Downes, who tried to arrest him.

After a jury found Ball guilty, he appealed the case, claiming he didn’t intend to shoot the sheriff’s deputy.

Nonetheless, Ebenezer Ball was executed on Oct. 31, 1811. A local minister, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, wrote two ballads on the hanging.

Officials erected the gallows in the center of Fort George. A large crowd followed the criminal as he was escorted from the jail to the gallows. Parson Fisher sold copies of his ballad to the crowd:

But oh! The sight — the shocking sight
This day our eyes did see,
A sinful and a harden’d wretch–
Launch’d in eternity.

Proctor’s Ledge, Salem, Mass.

Memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials at Proctor’s Ledge, site of the gallows where they were hanged.

You might think the 19 people hanged for witchcraft in the Salem witch hysteria of 1692-3 met their maker on Gallows Hill. But you’d be only partly right. They were hanged on Proctor’s Ledge, a city-owned wooded spot on Gallows Hill.

Sidney Perley identified the spot as the site of the hangings around the turn of the 20^th century. The scholars merely confirmed his research.

In 2016, a group of seven scholars who called themselves the Gallows Hill Project identified Proctor’s Ledge as the site of the hanging after five years of research. They used court records, maps, ground-penetrating radar and aerial photos. The city marked the spot with a memorial.

South Cemetery, Portsmouth, N.H.

Entrance to South Cemetery, where Ruth Blay once died on the gallows.

Ruth Blay died a slow painful death before a thousand spectators in Portsmouth, N.H. On Dec. 30, 1768, a horsecart took her to the highest point on South Street, now South Cemetery, and an executioner placed a noose around her neck.

She stood on the wagon under a newly built gallows, and the horse pulled the cart from under her feet. It probably took her several minutes to die of slow strangulation.

Ruth Blay was hanged because she concealed her illegitimate child. A 31-year-old schoolteacher, she ultimately admitted to wrapping her stillborn baby in a quilt and hiding it under the floorboards of a barn in South Hampton, N.H. Children playing in the barn discovered the baby’s body three days later.

Ruth received three reprieves before she finally lost her life on the gallows. She was the last of three New Hampshire women hanged for concealment. After the American Revolution, New Hampshire abolished the death penalty for concealment.

Gravelly Point, Newport, R.I.

26 pirates where once hanged on 26 gallows here.

Gravelly Point in Newport, R.I. is the place where Rhode Island hanged 26 pirates in a violent spectacle on July 19, 1723.

A British warship had captured 35 pirates under the command of the notoriously cruel Edward Low. The British took most of them to Newport, R.I., where 26 of them were sentenced to death by hanging.

Rhode Island authorities attached their captured pirate flag onto the gallows at Gravelly Point. A large crowd watched – and celebrated.

“Never was there a more doleful sight in all this land than while they were standing on the stage, waiting for the stopping of their breath and the flying of their souls into the eternal world,” wrote one witness. “And oh! How awful the noise of their dying moans!”

Catamount Tavern, Old Bennington, Vt.

Monument on the site of the Catamount Tavern.

On June 11, 1778, the Republic of Vermont hanged David Redding, but didn’t bury his bones properly for another 198 years.

During the American Revolution, David Redding made the mistake of choosing the Loyalist side. He joined the Queens Loyal Rangers, and while out of uniform tried to steal muskets stored in a barn. Locals caught him and put him in a temporary cell in the Catamount Tavern barn. Redding escaped, but got caught in Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

A jury found him guilty of treason.

He almost died on a temporary gallows in front of the Catamount Tavern, but won a week-long reprieve. Only six jurors had heard his case; under English law, there should have been 12.

The crowd gathered around the gallows was disappointed by Redding’s reprieve. A clamor arose and the crowd threatened violence.

But then Ethan Allen arrived, mounted a stump and spoke. “You shall see somebody hung at all events, for if Redding is not then hung, I will be hung myself.” The crowd, satisfied with Allen’s words if not his grammar, then dispersed.

A jury of 12 quickly re-convicted Redding, and he was hanged on June 11, 1778. A local doctor took possession of his body, which ended up as a teaching tool until the doctor died. The bones passed to his son, who stored them in his attic. Then the Vermont Historical Society got wind of the bones in the attic and took them, only to put them in a drawer. Finally in 1976, the people of Vermont gave David Redding a proper burial in the cemetery of Bennington’s Old First Church.

A statue of a catamount marks the site of the Catamount Tavern, which burned in 1871.

End Notes

Images: Fort George By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34096704; Gravelly Point, By The original uploader was Swampyank at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Kurpfalzbilder.de using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5872173; Catamount Tavern Monument by Doug Kerr via flickr. This story was updated in 2021.

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The Battle of Margaretta, When Pitchforks Beat the British Navy

The Battle of Margaretta, by today’s standards, was really more of a skirmish: a sailing vessel with four guns attacked by woodsmen with farm implements.

But it was the first naval battle of the American Revolution, and James Fenimore Cooper called it “the Lexington of the Seas.”

The victors in the battle would protect Maine’s eastern coast during the Revolution and raid British ships.

And the Battle of Margaretta would have dire consequences for a town 200 miles to the south.

A British Royal Navy sloop-of-war, c. 1831, in the West Indies

The Battle of Margaretta

During the Siege of Boston, bottled-up British troops quickly ran out of wood. They tore up churches and fences for firewood, but they needed lumber to build barracks for their crowded soldiers.

A Loyalist entrepreneur, Ichabod Jones, lived in the lumbering village of Machias in Downeast Maine. He worked out a deal to send firewood and lumber to Boston in exchange for flour, pork and other much-needed provisions in Machias.

But Machias proved a poor choice as a trading partner for the British. Some of the town’s most prominent citizens sided with the patriot cause. They included militia colonel Benjamin Foster and Jeremiah O’Brien.

In the summer of 1775, two sloops carrying provisions sailed into Machias Bay, escorted by an armed British cutter with four guns, the Margaretta. The Margaretta’s captain, midshipman James Moore, circulated a document that he wanted the villagers to sign. The document said they would agree to protect the three vessels in exchange for the provisions they so desperately needed.

Many of the villagers agreed, but Benjamin Foster did not. He gathered militia from neighboring villages. The rebels then secretly plotted to capture the British officers while they attended church services on Sunday, June 11.

Machias in 1777, much as it would have looked in 1775.

Farce, Then Tragedy

There really wasn’t much to the Battle of Margaretta. It might have even seemed comical had it not ended in the deaths of seven combatants.

The Battle of Margaretta amounted to some three dozen woodsmen in a merchant vessel ramming a small, lightly armed cutter that sailed too clumsily to escape. The woodsmen overtook the British with pitchforks, axes and hunting rifles, using melted-down spoons as ammunition.

Hannah Watts Weston by an unknown artist. Courtesy the Farnsworth Museum.

So on June 11, the British officers noticed the Machias rebels coming after them in church. They escaped to their little ship Margaretta amidst a bit of shooting. Midshipman Moore threatened to bomb the town.

The two sides prepared for battle the next day. Two young women, Hannah and Rebecca Weston, traveled 16 miles from Jonesboro with bags of pewter plates, spoons and mugs for ammunition. Hannah, 17 and pregnant with her first child, lived to 97; the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution adopted her as their patron saint.

The Burnham Tavern.

On Monday, June 12, the rebels commandeered two sloops and chased the Margaretta, but the one captained by Benjamin Foster ran aground. The other, with Jeremiah O’Brien as skipper, chased the Margaretta.

As she headed toward the open sea, inept seamanship caused the Margaretta to lose her gaff and boom. That made the vessel hard to sail, and the crew had to capture another vessel for replacements. Then it had to fix the rigging.

That gave O’Brien’s sloop plenty of time to catch up with the Margaretta and ram into her side. The rebels then boarded her. Shooting and hand-to-hand combat resulted in the death of two Americans, four British and a mortal wound to Midshipman Moore.

Aftermath

Jeremiah O’Brien and his men captured two more British vessels, which made up a small privateer fleet.

Americans later staged several futile invasions of British territory from Machias. The British tried to attack the village in the summer of 1777, but broke it off as the aroused populace counterattacked.

As long as Machias held out against the British, they couldn’t seize the territory.

But they could retaliate, and retaliate they did: against Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. A fleet of British naval vessels fired flaming cannonballs into the town, burning down the harbor installations and most of the town’s buildings.

After the Battle of Margaretta, the Burnham Tavern was used as a hospital to tend the wounded of both sides. Moore died of his wounds in the tavern. Today a chest in the tavern said to be stained with his blood.

The Hannah Weston Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution now runs the Burnham Tavern as a museum. For more information about the Burnham Tavern, click here. This story was updated in 2023.

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Nine New England Tax Resisters

Abolition, war and injustice have inspired tax resisters in New England since even before the American Revolution.

And well after the American Revolution, women and people of color took up the patriots’ slogan ‘Taxation Without Representation.’ Immigrants became tax resisters to assert their rights, and

Here, then, are nine New England tax resisters.

1 Vivien Kellems

Vivien Kellems and her brother Edward invented an endless-weave grip that routed and relieved the strain of electric cables. She won a patent for it, and In 1927, she formed Kellems Cable Grips, Inc, in Westport, Conn., to produce and sell the cable grip. The business succeeded.

Vivien Kellems

In 1948, Vivien Kellems refused to collect her employees’ withholding taxes. She said if the government wanted her to be an agent, they’d have to pay her and give her a badge.

Meet the Press interviewed her about her tax resistance in 1948. Eventually she backed down, but from 1965 to her death in 1975 she only sent in blank returns to the IRS.

2 Paul Cuffe

Paul Cuffe was a wealthy mixed race Quaker, the son of a Wampanoag Indian and a free African-American. He lived in Dartmouth, Mass., where he worked and saved and ultimately owned a fleet of ships he used to trade up and down the East Coast.

Before he accumulated his wealth, Paul Cuffe fought in the American Revolution and spent three months in a British prison. In 1780, 21-year-old Paul Cuffe refused to pay taxes to Bristol County because he didn’t have the right to vote. He, his brother and five African-American tax resisters asked the county to end such taxation without representation. In the end he got his taxes reduced.

3 John Wise

John Wise of Ipswich, Mass., had no use for Edmund Andros, the new royal governor over the newly consolidated New England colonies.

On Aug. 22, 1687, John Wise met with fellow citizens of Ipswich and decided Andros had imposed an illegal tax without consulting the General Assembly. Andros had called Town Meeting the next day to select tax commissioners. Instead, Town Meeting self-selected tax resisters. Ipswich issued a declaration against the tax.

Andros had the tax resisters arrested, jailed, tried and convicted. The tax resisters had to pay fines and court costs. But less than two years later, the people of Boston sent Andros packing back to England. They called Andros and the short-lived Dominion of New England a plot of ‘the great Scarlet Whore’ to crush Englishmen under the papist thumb.

4 Abby and Julia Smith

In June of 1869 the tax collector in Glastonbury, Conn., asked two elderly sisters to pay their road tax early, which they did. Abby and Julia Smith were then surprised when the town accidentally billed them for the tax again in October.

Cow Resting in a Meadow, by George Allen Newell

When they asked that the town correct the matter, the tax collector refused. When they tried to enter Town Meeting to raise the issue, they were turned away. Their taxes went up again. The Smiths grew convinced that Glastonbury only raised taxes on properties owned by women, and that they couldn’t delay payment because they were women.

They became convinced that modern women needed a vote, and decided to become tax resisters until they could vote. When the town seized seven cows in lieu of payment, the cows became a cause celebre in the suffragist movement.

5 Henry David Thoreau

Naturalist Henry David Thoreau ardently opposed slavery and blamed the government for it. He called the government ‘an agent of corruption and injustice.’

He believed individuals had the right to disobey the government when it forced them to do something that violated their conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

“I cannot for an instant recognize as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also,” he said.

In July 1846, Thoreau was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax. He believed (wrongly) the tax financed the Mexican War, fought to expand slavery into the Southwest. He’d stopped paying the tax in 1842, but the sheriff held off for a few years. Someone paid his tax, but the sheriff kept him overnight. When he released him, Thoreau didn’t want to go.

Three years later Thoreau published his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, which inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandes Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in their campaigns of nonviolent, passive disobedience to protest unjust government actions

6 Abby Kelley Foster

Before Susan B. Anthony advocated for women’s rights, Abby Kelley taught her how to do it.

Abby Kelley, also an early advocate for abolition, had tremendous organizational and speaking skills. She built a network of regional anti-slavery newspapers and raised the money to support them.

Abby Kelley Foster

People hated her for her uncompromising views and for speaking in public — something respectable women didn’t do in 1838. “She was an outcast from society,” said the minister Theodore Parker in 1855. “Other women hated her; men insulted her.”

Abby Kelley married Stephen Foster, an abolitionist who shared the platform with her in Seneca Falls. They bought a house in Worcester and called it Liberty Farm. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad and a haven for fellow reformers. They refused to pay property taxes on the farm because Abby didn’t have the right to vote, and the county seized the farm. Friends bought it back for them.

Liberty Farm is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

7 25 Greek Tax Resisters

Twenty-five Greek immigrants in the Maine mill city of Lewiston became tax resisters in 1907, probably as a ploy to have some influence over the police department.

The Lewiston police began demanding protection money from Greek street vendors. They also arrested Greeks for violating Prohibition and keeping their businesses open on Sunday.

The Greeks then refused to pay the $2 poll tax. One of the first Greek immigrants to arrive in Lewiston, James Matis, said only a Greek constable could collect the poll tax from the Greek people. “I know all the Greeks here and I am sure that they would pay if I told them to,” he said. Matis received the nomination for constable.

8 Dr. Benjamin Spock

In 1968, 458 writers and editors including Dr. Benjamin Spock became tax resisters when they took out full page newspaper ads refusing to pay a proposed 10 percent Vietnam War surtax. From wiki: In 1970, five Harvard and nine M.I.T. faculty members, including Nobel laureates Salvador E. Luria and George Wald, announced that they would be resisting taxes in protest of the war.

Dr. Benjamin Spock

Dr. Spock had already been arrested, and a court would soon try and convict him for urging young men to resist the draft. A higher court overturned Spock’s conviction.

The surcharge passed, but neither Spock nor the other tax resisters went to jail. In fact, only two people ever went to jail for tax resistance. Most went to court on related charges, such as failure to file or fraudulently claiming too many dependents, according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

9 Isaac Glasko

Isaac Glasko was a successful blacksmith in Griswold, Conn., so successful he at one time employed 10 people. He built a water-powered trip-hammer forge that produced superior farm and carpentry tools.

Glasko was born in Rhode Island to parents of mixed race. Each was part African and part Indian. Because the state classified Glasko as black, he could not vote.

In 1823, Isaac Glasko and a friend asked the State of Connecticut to exempt them from taxes because they couldn’t vote. Unsurprisingly, the Legislature rejected their request. Glasko never did get to vote. He died in 1861, 15 years before an amendments to the Connecticut Constitution allowed black men to vote.

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How Maine’s High and Mighty Enoch Foster Met His Downfall

Born in 1839, Enoch Foster might well be the prototype for a Maine politician of his era. Graduated from both Bates and Bowdoin colleges, during the Civil War he enlisted in the 13th Regiment of the Maine Volunteer Infantry. There he served under Brig. General Neal Dow. Dow would go on to become mayor of Portland and one of the state’s staunch temperance advocates.

But it wasn’t alcohol that would prove Enoch Foster’s undoing. It was women.

When he returned from the war, Foster attended law school in New York state. He clerked and studied under Reuben Foster, his cousin, a lawyer in Waterville, Maine. While in Waterville in 1864 he met and married Adeline Owen Lowe. The marriage lasted eight years, and the couple settled in Bethel near Newry, Enoch’s hometown.

Enoch Foster (from ‘Maine: A History,’ By Louis Clinton Hatch)

Enoch and Adeline had one son, but the boy passed away. Distraught, Adeline killed herself with a morphine overdose. It was at least her second attempt at suicide.

While his family life was in turmoil, Foster had not neglected his political life. In 1867 he had run for election and won the office of county attorney. He won re-election in 1870. He held numerous other offices in town, as well, serving as town clerk, postmaster and justice of the peace.

Rising Star

Approximately one year after his first wife died, Enoch Foster married his second wife, Sarah Chapman. Sarah came from a very prominent family in Bethel, Maine. Her grandfather named the town, and her wealthy father had built many buildings in it. The couple would eventually occupy her father’s home, now the home of the Bethel Historical Society.

In 1873, now a member of the prominent Chapman family, Enoch Foster was a force in town. He ascended to the state Senate and joined a group of men who started the Bethel Savings Bank. He served as an officer of the bank and helped to create the public water system.

In 1884, Foster’s political fortunes smiled on him once again. Gov. Frederick Robie appointed him to serve on the Maine Supreme Court for a seven-year term. By all accounts, Foster was an astute and able judge, his decisions usually finding majority support among his fellow judges. Gov. Edwin C. Burleigh reappointed him to a second seven-year term in 1891. In 1898, reappointment seemed to be his for the asking.

Foster had developed a reputation as a cheerless, pious judge. Cold, dignified, severe, Foster had informed Gov. Llewellyn Powers that he would serve another term. And Gov. Powers appeared amenable. But Foster’s dark side was finally about to catch up with him.

Disgrace Finds Enoch Foster

Polite biographies of Enoch Foster will note that he retired from the bench in 1898 at the close of his second term. Or that he stepped down after making a significant contribution to jurisprudence. But Enoch Foster, like many people who accumulate power, didn’t step away from anything. He left the court in disgrace.

Foster had long been the subject of many rumors. He was something of a dandy. Tall and well-dressed, he wore his hair long and had a theatrical bearing. He often strode about in a tall top hat.

Even his friends said he was too blunt and spoke too freely about his appreciation for beautiful girls. His enemies said he was a home-wrecker who had caused at least one divorce with his philandering. His behavior had very nearly become public during one divorce, but it was smoothed over when the case settled. As he got older, however, Enoch Foster became less discreet.

Main and Church streets, Bethel, Maine 1919

Things finally came to a head in 1894. Hiram Perkins set up shop as a barber at 30 Main Street in Bethel. Just a few short steps away was Enoch Foster’s home — in his father-in-law’s former house. Hiram had an attractive young daughter, E.L. Perkins. By 1896 Miss Perkins had caught the eye of Enoch Foster, though she was but 15 and he was in his 50s.

Enoch’s wife, whose health was never good, would later say it was but the latest example of Enoch’s misbehavior. She tried to persuade him to leave the girl alone. She asked his colleagues on the bench to convince him to stop seeing her.

William Penn Whitehouse, a fellow justice on the court, wrote to Foster. Whitehouse warned Foster his extramarital affairs were damaging his reputation. He asked him to stop, but Foster ignored the letter.

Showdown

Foster was a member of the Congregational Church in Bethel, as were all of his Chapman in-laws. In 1896, the church’s minister determined to take the lead in confronting Foster. The Rev. Israel Jordon, realizing that squaring off against Foster would cause a split in the church, signed a letter of resignation and submitted it. It would go into effect after he had confronted the judge. Rev. Jordon hoped his departure would allow the congregation to heal after what was sure to be a bruising showdown.

In February of 1896, Enoch Foster was twice observed at the home of Miss Perkins, the barber’s daughter. Rev. Jordon confronted him over it. Judge Foster pledged to stay away from the girl and her home. And in March he stood before the congregation, apologizing for his sinful behavior and asking forgiveness.

Falmouth Hotel in Portland, ca 1900

But Foster did not stay away from the girl for long. That very Easter he was seen entering the Perkins house, and the day after Easter he was seen with her at the Falmouth Hotel in Portland. That summer the church summoned him to explain himself again. Judge Foster did not accept the invitation, and the church ex-communicated him for, “Failure to answer charges of notorious conduct of a most scandalous nature.”

The Final Exposure

While the male political leaders of Maine were willing to look the other way from Foster’s behavior, the women in the state were growing disgusted. As 1897 drew to a close, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union threatened Foster. They demanded he leave the bench, and they offered to say nothing to damage his reputation if he went of his own accord.

Enoch Foster circled the wagons. He gathered endorsements from the county bar associations and collected hundreds of signatures from lawyers around the state. Any lawyer who might later do business in front of the judge had strong incentive to sign the petitions supporting him.

It’s not clear whether Foster thought people would overlook the matter or whether he expected the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to back down. Foster challenged the women to come forward and name names. They had kept their accusations opaque. Foster’s friends thought, as one newspaper put it, “there will be no woman who will have the grit to come forward with specific charges and support them with evidence.” They were wrong.

The Temperance Union had documented Foster’s travels with the young Miss Perkins, including hotel stays with her when she was just 15. By 1898 she had been sent away from Bethel and was studying music in Boston.

Grossly Immoral

In a public resolution forwarded to Governor Powers, the WCTU wrote: “…after careful deliberation we are forced to the painful conclusion, based upon reliable evidence, voluntarily brought to our attention, that the conduct of Judge Enoch Foster . . . in spite of the warnings of friends and expulsion from the church still continues to be so grossly immoral and notoriously scandalous as to demand the most public remonstration from all thoughtful and responsible citizens against his reappointment.”

Gov. Lewellyn Powers

Further, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union said they had even more evidence against Foster, evidence that might implicate others in public life, as well. Governor Powers was suddenly less sure about Enoch Foster’s future on the bench. He said publicly that he would be guided by the leading lawyers of the Maine bar as to Judge Foster’s reappointment.

Then, in March of 1898, as Foster’s term on the court was expiring, Gov. Powers reached his decision. He appointed William Folger of Rockland to take Foster’s seat on the court, as Foster had determined it was in his best interest to leave the court.

Enoch Foster After the Fall

The departure from the court did not end Enoch Foster’s career. He formed a law partnership with Oscar Hersey, a lawyer born in Freeport. They would practice as Foster & Hersey in Portland for nearly 15 years. The firm became one of the most prestigious in the state. In addition to performing work for numerous towns and cities in the state, the firm also had a role in several major cases.

The firm represented Rev. Sylvanus Hanscom in his bid to win the sheriff’s post in Hancock County in 1902. Hanscom claimed widespread fraud by election officials kept him from winning. Though ultimately unsuccessful, Hersey and Foster led a spirited fight to have the election overturned in Hanscom’s favor.

Foster & Hersey also represented James W. Brackett in his 1902 attempt to reclaim all of Peaks Island and much of downtown Portland on behalf of his family. The Bracketts had a claim on the title to the property dating to the 1600s. Foster’s role in the case, however, seems mainly to have been to inform the Brackett family that it had no hope of winning.

Foster then made a final appearance in the newspapers for his ownership of an unusually loquacious parrot named Bob Savage, which he had inherited from a sea captain. The article makes clear that despite his marital turmoil, his wife did not abandon Enoch Foster. She stayed with him until the end. He died in 1913.

This story about Enoch Foster was updated in 2023. #MeToo image By Wolfmann – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64697079.

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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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