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Frederick Small Commits the Imperfect Murder of 1916

Frederick Small, an awful little man, thought of himself as an astute businessman. He wasn’t.

An abusive husband, he thought he committed the perfect murder when he killed his third wife in a remote lakeside cottage.

He didn’t.

Florence Small, 3rd wife of Frederick Small

His sister-in-law was afraid of him. She said he used to stretch out his hand and say, “There is a hand capable of anything.”

Except getting away with murder.

Frederick Small, Serial Husband

Frederick Small

He was born in 1869 in Portland, Maine, and attended local schools.

At 20, he married Nettie Davis of Minot, Maine, and set up a grocery business. Nettie died in childbirth and his business failed, so he moved to Boston to try his luck there.

The Boston Globe later described Frederick Small as undersized, crippled in one leg and altogether inconspicuous — but also noted he had figured prominently in the newspapers over a score of years.

Throughout his checkered career, Frederick Small had filed a sensational divorce case and fallen victim to three mysterious fires.

When he first came to Boston he took a series of lowly jobs — as a hotel clerk, a waiter and a chef. In 1893 he finally found his calling and began to dabble in real estate. After he made some commissions, he opened an office and played the stock market with some success.

On July 31, 1899, he married Laura Patterson of Everett, Mass., and moved to the Boston suburb of Somerville.

The next year a farm he leased in Hudson, Mass., burned down after two fires mysteriously started on the premises in one day. Small had insured the property heavily, but investigations found nothing.

Sensational Divorce

In 1909, Frederick Small’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. His real estate debts caught up with him, and to make up for his deficits he sued his wife. Laura Patterson Small had carried on an affair with Arthur Soden, president of the Boston Braves, railway magnate and ex-president of the Boston City Club.

Boston City Club

Frederick Small sued Soden, and after a three-year trial he got his divorce and a $10,000 settlement. The judge excoriated the Smalls from the bench.

The judge said Laura Small needed “no great inducement to be led astray.” He called Frederick Small “an indifferent husband” who knew his wife was cheating on him but didn’t care because he could profit by it.

Smooth, Suave, Agreeable

In 1913, Frederick Small took a rest cure at a farm in Southboro, Mass. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Curry and her two daughters ran the big old place.

Mrs. Curry called him “smooth, suave and agreeable,” and he won the heart of her daughter Florence.

Two weeks after he arrived in Southboro, Frederick Small married Florence Curry. He quickly seized control of the family’s property, turned Mrs. Curry and her other daughter out of the house and took Florence to a lonely cottage in Ossipee, N.H.

The day they left Massachusetts, his Southboro property went up in flames. He was accused of leaving a delayed-action incendiary device behind, but no one ever proved it. Small collected $10,000 in insurance money.

Ossipee

The Small cottage before the fire

In Ossipee, Frederick Small presented himself as a successful retired stockbroker. He spent much of his time tinkering in his workshop, trying to come up with an invention that would make him a fortune.

Florence led a lonely and miserable existence. Her husband cut her off from her family and her religion. Her sister visited once and said she feared him so much she slept with a paper knife under her pillow. Florence told her Frederick Small drugged her.

He once beat her with a bootjack and threatened the doctor who came to tend her wounds. Their neighbors grew accustomed to hearing her screams across the lake.

Ossipee Lake

Florence Small was 12 years younger, three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than her husband. Still she put up with his abuse.

Once, while boating on Lake Ossipee, Florence fell into the water. She felt certain her husband would let her drown until another boater came along. Frederick Small then made a great show of rescuing her. To top it off, he tried to get a Carnegie medal for saving her life.

On Sept. 28, 1916, Frederick Small summoned a coachman, George Kennett, to pick him up at 3:30 pm and take him to the railroad station. Frederick Small said he had to go to Boston to check on his investments. He waited outside for the coach. When Kennett arrived, Frederick Small yelled goodbye to his wife and climbed into the coach.

At the station, Small joined Edwin Conner, a local schoolteacher and insurance agent who had sold him a $20,000 life insurance policy on him and his wife. Conner had insisted that both Florence and Frederick Small sign the policy. He also sold Small a $3,000 policy on the cottage.

Fire

The two men checked into a Boston hotel and Frederick Small mailed Florence a postcard at 8:40 pm. Then he and Conner saw a movie. At midnight they returned to the hotel. The desk clerk told him his cottage was on fire and he should call right away.

Small and Conner raced back to Ossipee in a hired car. When he reached the smoldering ruins of the cottage, Small broke down, apparently inconsolable.

A search party found Florence Small’s head and torso in the basement. The flames had spared them because she fell through the burning floor into several inches of lake water in the basement.

When told, Frederick Small responded, “You mean there’s enough to be buried?”

A Person of Interest

People from Ossipee heading to Small’s hearing

Someone had made sure Florence Small died. The murderer strangled her, shot her in the head and bludgeoned her face into a bloody pulp.

The medical examiner, George P. Magrath, noticed a strange substance on her body that ultimately explained the unusual intensity of the fire. It was slag left by thermite, a welding compound used by railroads. When investigators searching through the burned cottage found a Colt .32 that belonged to Frederick Small, he became a person of interest in the murder.

Arrest and Trial

Small protested he’d been a hundred miles away when the fire broke out. But further investigation produced an alarm clock with wires and spark plugs attached, and the grocer reported he’d delivered five gallons of kerosene to Small’s cottage just before the fire.

Small, hoping the power of suggestion would work on George Kennett, insisted the coachman had seen him kiss his wife goodbye. Kennett firmly maintained he had only seen Small shout goodbye into the house.

Examination of Florence Small found her lunch in her stomach, which indicated she died hours before the fire.

Small was arrested and tried at the brand-new Carroll County Courthouse in Ossipee. On Jan. 8, 1917, a jury found Frederick Small guilty of murder.

Insisting on his innocence, Small sought a new trial. New Hampshire’s attorney general reported, “the facts were too plain and abhorrent to be misunderstood.”

Frederick Small was hanged on Jan. 15, 1918 in Concord Prison.

Photos courtesy Tamworth and Ossipee Historical Societies except for Ossipee Lake, By Ken Gallager at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17976952.. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Amazing Baby Boom of Billerica, Mass.

When the War of 1812 broke out, the Town of Billerica, Mass., was in the middle of an extraordinary baby boom.

The Savage Family, c. 1779, by Edward Savage, courtesy Worcester Art Museum

William Manning, a Billerica farmer, Revolutionary War soldier and author, fathered 13 children with his wife Sarah. But he wasn’t the only one.

Twelve other families in the town had 13 children. Five had 14 offspring and one had 15. Twenty-six families each had 10 children, 20 families had 11 children and 24 families had 12 children. The largest family had 21 children by two wives. That meant 90 families accounted for 1,043 children.

The average Billerica family had an average of 11.6 children per family. The town’s population grew almost exclusively because of its fecundity. In 1810, the population of the entire town grew to 1,289.

Enormous Colonial Families

The large families of Billerica were typical of early New England. The region had the world’s lowest annual death rate, less than one percent. And its birth rate exceeded 3 percent.

William Phips, one of many siblings. Also, governor.

The New Hampshire Historical Society in 1824 cited examples of enormous colonial families. Collections, Historical and Miscellaneous and Monthly Literary Journal, Vol III (1824), edited by J. Farmer and J.B. Moore, referred to Boston doctor Cotton Mather. Mather mentioned one woman who had at least 22 children and another who had at least 23 — by one husband. Of those, 19 survived to adulthood. Mather also mentioned a third woman who had 27 children.

Cotton Mather

The historical journal also cited the mother of Massachusetts governor (William) Phips, who had 25 children, including 21 sons.

Rev. John Sherman, the first minister of Watertown, had 26 children by two wives, included 20 by his last wife. Rev. Samuel Willard, a minister in Groton, Mass., and Boston who served as vice president of Harvard college, had 20 children.

Major Simon Willard, his father, one of the first settlers of Concord, Mass., had 17 children. All grew to adulthood and had families of their own.

Mather himself had 15 children by two of his three wives. (His father, unironically, was named Increase.) Only six lived to adulthood and only two outlived him.

Why the Baby Boom?

New England’s harsh winters have been suggested as a reason for the low death rate, as they killed off disease-bearing insects. New Englanders also had plenty of food and, by then, a high standard of living. Finally, New Englanders were expected to marry young, and they were not expected to practice birth control.

The high birth rate accounted for the uniquely Yankee character of the region. Between 1640 and 1845, immigration to the New England colonies only reached about one percent.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Remembering Wilson Bentley, The Snowflake Photographer

Were he alive today, Wilson Bentley would be likely putting an end to his travels and speaking schedule for the year and turning his attention to the skies, looking for his one true love: Snowflakes.

Snowflake photographs by Wilson Bentley.

Bentley, as Vermonters may (or may not) know, was the keenest student of snowflakes the world will probably ever know.

Growing up on a farm in Jericho, Vt., Bentley became fascinated by snowflakes as a youngster. The fascination never left him as he grew older. In fact, it intensified, it’s fair to say, into an obsession.

Wilson Bentley, Snowflake Man

The obsession began in 1880, when Bentley was just 15. He began examining snowflakes under a microscope. Though he had no training in science, he began a meticulous process of gathering and recording details of snowflakes. He pioneered a technology of photographing them through a microscope, and developed the theories that no two snowflakes were alike and most were hexagonal.

Over 46 years before he died at 66 in 1931, Bentley would create 5,300 photographs of snowflakes, cataloging and analyzing their characteristics.

He had devised a way to capture them in perfect condition. He stretched pieces of black velvet on frames and left them around his farm. Fresh snowfall landing on his velvet capture pads provided the pristine flakes for his research. You can see collections of his work at the Jericho Historical Society and the Smithsonian Institution.

Wilson Bentley

In the early years of his snowflake studies, Bentley was strictly an amateur. He worked at his research on the side while still running his farm and briefly dabbling in teaching music. In 1898, however, he published his first article on his research, and soon he had no more time for farming.

Though he remained living alone at his Jericho farm throughout his life, Bentley’s services were in demand elsewhere. He became a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

His photographs and writings were popular, both in the scientific community and in the popular press. Universities sought out his photographs for research, and he published in National Geographic, Popular Science, Nature and Scientific American.

Jewelers even bought his photos to design jewelry patterns.

Snow Crystals

In 1931 he published his final book, Snow Crystals, written with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau, later the National Weather Service.

Until the end, Wilson Bentley would travel to present his findings at lectures. But each year as winter drew near he would scale back his activities and return to Jericho to await the coming snows. Ultimately, what he loved helped to kill him. He died of pneumonia contracted after walking through a blizzard.

This story was updated in 2019.

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