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Charley Parkhurst, the Gold Rush Legend With a Secret Identity

On Dec. 18, 1879, a short, stocky rancher named Charley Parkhurst lay dying in his two-room cabin in Santa Cruz County, Calif. Several times he beckoned a friend to his side. Charley seemed to want to tell him something, but he didn’t.

After his death, Charley’s friends made an astonishing discovery: Charley was really Charlotte, and she’d had a baby.

Charley Parkhurst and J. Ross Browne in an illustration by Browne for Harper’s magazine

But that wasn’t the astonishing part. Women dressing as men was not all that unusual in the Old West, a place where people came to reinvent themselves. The amazing part was that Charley — or Charlotte — had been a legendary stagecoach driver in gold rush country. To be a stagecoach whip required nerve, courage, coolness, endurance and skill, qualities not associated back then with the fairer sex.

The news that Charley was Charlotte made news around the country.

Charley Parkhurst

Charley had arrived by steamer in San Francisco in 1851, nearly 40 and aiming to be “the best damn driver in California.”

Charley stood five feet tall and had only one good eye after a horse kicked him. He dressed in tailored coats, handmade boots and a broad gray hat. No matter the weather he wore long-fringed, beaded gloves – perhaps to hide small women’s hands. He drank whiskey, chewed tobacco, smoked cigars and talked to his horses. His profane vocabulary sometimes left his passengers spellbound.

At first he drove from Sacramento to the rough mining towns around Sutter’s mill, the gold region known as the Mother Lode. When the roads opened to Virginia City and the Nevada mining towns, Charley drove those. He drove over the big hump of Mount Madonna, in and out of the Central Valley and down to San Francisco. She drove special missions for Wells Fargo, and in his later years drove between San Juan and Santa Cruz. People called Charley “boss of the road.”

Mount Madonna

His proudest accomplishment: never capsizing a stage or injuring a passenger.

Ed Sams in his book, The Real Mountain Charley, wrote that it took a special person to drive a stagecoach during the gold rush. “Only a rare breed of men could be depended upon to ignore the gold fever of the 1850s and hold down a steady job of grueling travel over narrow one-way dirt roads that swerved around mountain curves, plummeting into deep canyons and often forded swollen, icy streams,” he wrote.

Drivers, or “whips,” also faced highwaymen who ordered them to throw down the wooden box that carried payroll or gold.

One-Eyed Charley Parkhurst

Charley was adept with the whip and the pistol as well as the reins of a Concord coach. He shot at least two bandits, and he could cut the cigar from a man’s mouth at 15 paces without touching him.

Hank Monk

“He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the famous California drivers, ranking with Foss, Hank Monk, and George Gordon,” wrote the New York Times on Jan. 9, 1880 (reprinted from the San Francisco Call), shortly after his death. “It was an honor to sit in the spare end of the driver’s seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins of a four or six in hand.”

Clients got into the habit of asking for One-Eyed Charley.

Charley Parkhurst, New England Girl

She was born in 1812 in Sharon, Vt., to Mary (Morehouse) Parkhurst and Ebenezer Parkhurst as Charlotte Darkey (or Durkee) Parkhurst. Her mother died the year of her birth. She had an older brother, Charles D., and a sister, Maria. After her brother died in 1813, Charlotte and Maria went to an orphanage in Lebanon, N.H.

The Providence Journal, just after her death, reported, “While in the poor house he discovered that boys have a great advantage over girls in the battle of life, and he desired to become a boy.”

At the age of 12 she dressed in boys’ clothes and ran away from the orphanage. She ended up in Worcester and got a job in Ebenezer Balch’s livery stables. She cleaned stalls, washed carriages and scrubbed floors. “Charley” had an aptitude for horses, and Balch taught her how to handle them.

She watched the Concord coaches that came and went, and she learned how to doctor the horses that she understood so well.

This Concord Coach ran from Charlestown, N.H., to Springfield, Vt.

Providence

Balch then bought the Franklin House and the What Cheer stables in Providence. Charley followed him. Still young, he drove stage routes along the Boston Post Road to Boston, Providence, Worcester and New York.

He earned a reputation as a skillful hostler handling teams of two to six horses – her favorite, a team of six matched grays.

Once, in Patuxet, he waited outside for passengers at a dance and his hands froze. Ever afterward, Charley wore his signature gloves.

Charley also drove coaches in Georgia, though it isn’t clear whether he moved there or not.

In 1837, the city directory listed Charles D. Parkhurst, hostler, living at “College, corner of Pine and Dorrance” in Providence. Then at 77 North Main, then Central and finally Weybosset streets.

In 1854-55, the Providence directory listed Charles D. Parkhurst, coachman, at Dorrance Street. But the directory got it wrong. Charley lived in California by then.

Westward, Ho!

After two decades of driving in New England, Charley boarded the steamer R.B. Forbes, bound for South America. On board, Charley chatted with his fellow passengers. A San Francisco businessman named John Morton called Charley “an agreeable ‘companion de voyage’.” He told Morton he planned to drive a stage, and Morton, who ran a drayage company, offered Charley a job.

Another fellow passenger may have left a clue to the missing pages of Charley’s story.

While traveling overland in Nicaragua, John Charles Duchow, on May 18 mentioned in his journal a passenger who called himself “Charles Clifton.”

“[P]assengers on board call him ‘Thunderbolt’,” wrote Duchow. “He says the reason for passing under an assumed name was that he was an important witness in a case and wishing to have nothing to do with it, adopted a false name to get out of the way. He told us that he’s married to a Boston merchant where he is keeper of the American’s house…In short, he is a very queer fellow indeed!”

Was “Clifton” really Charley Parkhurst? The San Francisco Call left a further clue shortly after Charley died. A young woman in New Hampshire had been disappointed in love and left her native state “disguised in the habiliments of the sterner sex,” the newspaper reported.

California

Jim Birch, whose mansion still stands in Swansea, Mass., had arrived in California at 21 during the gold rush to seek his fortune. He had worked in a Providence livery stable, where he probably met Charley. In California, he hired him.

Birch started his California Stage Company in Sacramento, the supply center for the gold rush belt known as the Mother Lode. Thousands of prospectors left the town every day in search of riches. Birch started out charging them two ounces of gold for a one-way trip between Sacramento and the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Sutter’s Mill, where the gold rush started

Charley often faced down danger on the job. Once, a highwayman, perhaps nicknamed Sugarfoot, held up Charley’s stage on the road from Stockton to Mariposa. He made off with $100,000 in gold dust. Charley vowed revenge.

Later, on that same road, a band of highwaymen jumped out and seized Charley’s horses. Charley pulled on his reins and called to his horses, who flew through the bandits. Charley then aimed his pistol at the bandit — Sugarfoot — and fired. Sugarfoot, according to the newspaper report, crawled into a miner’s cabin and gave up his sinful ghost.

Later, Charley was urging his horses through mudholes in a Grass Valley creek bed and a highway robber ordered him to put up his hands. Charley cracked his whip across the robber’s eyes, blinding him in one of them.

An Eyewitness

J. Ross Browne, a writer and illustrator of tales of the old West, rode once with Charley from Placerville to Virginia City.

“I was proud and happy to sit by the side of Charlie — especially as the road over which we passed after dark, branches off over hills, and along the sides of hills, and into deep canyons, and up hills again; dark, dismal places in the midst of great forests of pine, where the horses seem to be eternally plunging over precipices and the stage followed them with a crashing noise, horribly suggestive of cracked skulls and broken bones.”

However, he wrote, he had confidence in the old driver. “The way he handled the reins and ppered through the clouds of dust and volumes of darkness, and saw trees and sumps and boulders of rock, and horses’ ears, when I could scarcely see my own hand, was a miracle of stage driving.”

Browne reported that Charley was thinking of retirement.

“I’m no better now than when I commenced. Pay’s small and work’s heavy. I’m getting old. Rheumatism in my bones — nobody to look out for old, used-up stage drivers. I’ll kick the bucket one of these days and that’ll be the last of old Charley.”

Retirement

At least once in the 1860s Charley risked exposure while working for a man named Andy Jackson Clark, according to Sams. Charley came home drunk and Mrs. Clark told her 17-year-old son to put Charley to bed. The boy put Charley to bed and then ran back to his mother. “Maw, Charley ain’t no man, he’s a woman!”

They never told anyone until after he died.

Charley decided during the Civil War to retire to farm life, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

For a while he ran a stage stop on the Santa Cruz to Los Gatos road. He then bought a little spread somewhere between Soquel and Watsonville. Charley built a two-room cabin and planted an apple orchard. In winters he hired out as a lumberjack. Charley joined the local Odd Fellows and registered to vote.

In his will, he left money (either $900 or $4,000) to George Harmon, the 16-year-old son of a neighbor (Sams) because he’d been nice to him.

After she died a little red trunk filled with baby clothes was found in her cabin.

Parkhurst’s headstone at the Pioneer Cemetery in Watsonville

Lots of Charley Parkhursts

in 1859, newspaper editor Horace Greeley took a trip west. He met a young clerk who’d had enough of gold hunting and intended to return home to his parents in Indiana. The next day, his conductor told him the clerk was a woman.

After the Civil War, three separate women in Colorado and Wyoming wore men’s clothes and called themselves Mountain Charley.

Harry Allen, born female, was a petty criminal in the Pacific Northwest who refused to wear women’s clothes. A lumberjack named Sammy Allen died at the age of 80 in Montana, and, like Charley Parkhurst, was discovered to have been a woman.

Historian Peter Boeg was researching the gay West for a book and was shocked to hear hundreds of stories about people who cross dressed.

“They saw the West as a place where they could live and get jobs and carry on a life that they couldn’t have in the more congested East,” he concluded.

Shortly after Charley Parkhurst died, the San Francisco Call reported on her death.

“The discoveries of the successful concealment for protracted periods of the female sex under the disguise of the masculine are not infrequent,” reported the newspaper. “But the case of Charley Parkhurst may fairly claim to rank as by all odds the most astonishing of all of them.”

Images: Painting of Charley’s stagecoach By Avital Shtapura – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110092075. Charley Parkhurst and J. Ross Brown from “Washoe Revisited,” 1865, Harper’s Monthly. Mount Madonna By Wahn – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69836978. Hank Monk By http://www.visitcarsoncity.com/history/people/hank_monk.php, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14924459. Charley Parkhurst’s headstone By Wikicuda – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48349758. This story last updated in 2023.

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In 1919, A Private Detective Nailed the Murderer of Lucina Broadwell

When Barre, Vt., police in 1919 first saw the naked body of Lucina Broadwell in a vacant lot, they immediately suspected her husband. People knew the 29-year-old mother of three had problems at home.

The husband had an airtight alibi, though, and police were baffled. So they called in a private detective, whose investigation and arrest made page one news through the summer and fall of 1919.

The story captivated the people of Barre, a thriving quarrying city, and the surrounding towns. Part of the fascination had to do with the modern forensic techniques used by the private detectives to find her killer. And part of it had to do with the discovery of a little red book that listed the names of prominent Barre citizens who patronized a house of ill repute.

Discovery of Lucina Broadwell

Around 7:30 in the morning of May 4, 1919, 21-year-old Harold Jackson from the country town of Orange, Vt., woke up in the Hotel Buzzell. He couldn’t find any toilet facilities in the hotel, but he noticed a vacant lot across the street. So he walked over to it and did his business behind a woodworking shop. As he returned to the hotel, he saw a woman’s naked body lying on the ground. Badly frightened, he ran to the police station. Officer A.B. Curtis hurried to the lot.

Lucina Broadwell

He found a woman lying face down with her hands tied behind her back. She wore only shoes, stockings and a pair of kid gloves. Curtis saw her shirtwaist tied around her neck with knots secured by a man’s handkerchief.

Police quickly identified Lucina Broadwell, who lived nearby. Curtis had photographs taken of the body before it was taken to the Undertaking Rooms for an autopsy.

Many suspected her husband, a carpenter named Harry Broadwell.

Celebrity Detective

Three days into the murder investigation, police still had no clue who killed Lucina Broadwell. So they called in James Rodney Wood, Jr., of the Wood Detective Agency.

Wood was the son of the first private detective in New England. James Rodney Wood, Sr., had worked as a Boston police officer for 20 years before striking out on his own. He had gotten many convictions through dogged pursuit of criminals. His son took over the agency.

When Wood got the call to investigate the Lucina Broadwell murder, he had a reputation to uphold as the most famous detective in New England. He didn’t always find that easy. In notes he later used in a talk to young detectives, Wood wrote, ‘think of the strain you are under.’

…you, a detective from Boston here, [the] case should be cleared up at once, in short the buck is passed to us — so let’s start and clean up this rotten mess — or in other words, there is a rotten egg, let’s break it wide open and let the “stink” out and find the guilty party.

James Wood’s handwritten notes on the case.

Barre, Vermont

Wood boarded a train and arrived in Barre in the afternoon. The city had started to boom in the 1880s with the success of its granite quarries. Stonecutters and quarrymen from Italy, Scotland, Spain, Scandinavia, Greece, Lebanon and Canada arrived to pull the stone from the earth and to carve it. The city’s population had exploded to nearly 11,000 people by 1910, up from 8,500 a decade earlier.

With the sudden influx of working-age men came speakeasies, dance halls and bawdy houses. One bordello would feature prominently in the death of Lucina Broadwell.

Barre, around the time of Lucina Broadwell’s murder

The Investigation

Upon his arrival in Barre, Wood reviewed the case notes and then stayed up all night observing the Hotel Buzzell. Police thought Lucina had been murdered there, but he concluded the lighting conditions wouldn’t have allowed it.

He then interviewed Harry Broadwell, who had come home from work, given Lucina two five-dollar bills for household supplies, then went off and got drunk with other men in a speakeasy. Harry could account for his movements all night long. He didn’t kill Lucina.

He did give Wood several useful leads, though. First, he suspected his wife was ‘sporty.’ Second, he’d heard Lucina went to the Parker house with a man named George Long. Third, Lucina wrote frequently to a friend in the Boston area, Grace Grimes.

Wood telephoned his Boston office and told them to find Grace.

Then he went to the Parker House.

Freaky Mrs. Parker

Mrs. Isabelle Parker was very careful to explain where her lodger “Long” had been the night of Lucina Broadwell’s murder. Then Long came in, and aroused Wood’s suspicion because of his anxiety to explain his whereabouts that Saturday night.

Wood described Mrs. Parker as 75 to 80 years of age. She might have been termed slightly demented, he wrote. She

…imagined she was a fortune teller, wrote poetry, dressed very freaky, wore a wig of heavy grey hair…

Most people in Barre, he wrote, thought she was a nut, but she was a very shrewd woman.

She would go about Barre and get a line on the different men and women who were inclined to be a little sporty. For example, if she knew I was a married man and liked to step out, she would make it her business to form my acquaintance and eventually tell me that a certain woman, either married or single, was infatuated with me and would like to meet me. She would invite me down to her house at a certain time and tell me to come in the back door and when I arrive, would introduce me to some woman, married or single, whom she had told the same story.

The men would pay her something for the use of the room. Eventually her married customers might tell her they knew their spouse was a little sporty, furnishing her with a new customer.

Grace Grimes

Then Wood heard from his office. They’d found Grace and she’d come in at 9 a.m. the next day. Wood took the sleeper to Boston, staying up all night on the train reviewing notes from the case.

Grace told the detectives she’d received a letter from Lucina Broadwell mailed on the day of her murder. She said she’d been going to the Parker house with George. He told her he planned to buy a new Buick and he wanted her to go to California with him. But she had decided George was full of hot air, that he was no good and she wasn’t going to see him again. She would go to the Parker House that night, ditch George and tell Mrs. Parker what she thought of her.

When Grace finished telling her story, Wood then arranged for one of his female operatives to accompany her to Lebanon, N.H. Grace wouldn’t go to Vermont, because she was wanted by Vermont police. Lebanon, though, was close enough.

Cracking the Lucina Broadwell Case

Wood then arranged for Mrs. Parker to meet with Grace Grimes in New Hampshire. Mrs. Parker admitted she knew Lucina Broadwell, and said she had met George Long at her house on the night of her murder. George had gotten her a veal loaf and bread to eat.

That led to the first piece of circumstantial evidence against George Long: The autopsy found Lucina Broadwell had eaten veal and bread an hour before her murder.

1910 Metz roadster

Wood found other circumstantial evidence:

He had told one of his detectives to ‘work in his own way’ around the crime scene. The detective found tire tracks that matched the Metz car George Long had driven that night.
The handkerchief found at the scene had a laundry mark on it from a local laundry. Wood tracked down the owner, an Eddie Barron, who had left Barre months ago. Wood’s agents tracked down Barron and learned he’d given the handkerchief to Long.
Wood found a hair in Long’s car, and had Lucina Broadwell’s body dug up to see if it matched her hair. It did.

James Wood also found a sensational piece of evidence – a little red book that listed the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of Barre’s most prominent citizens. It also listed George Long’s name coupled with Lucina Broadwell on the date of her murder.

Guilty, Guilty

Long admitted being intimate with Lucina Broadwell, but denied killing her.

Wood arrested both Mrs. Parker and George Long. After a month-long trial, a jury found Long – real name George Rath – guilty of second-degree murder. He served life in prison.

Isabelle Parker was found guilty of running a house of ill repute, and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.

Wood later used the Lucina Broadwell case to explain the importance of circumstantial evidence. It was considered throughout New England as one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried, Wood wrote.

With thanks to the Harvard Law School Library, Historical & Special Collections, Wood Detective Agency records.

Image: Metz car By Florin Chelaru – IMG_1516, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63363677.

This story was updated in 2021.

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6 Stops on the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a network of people who hid fugitives from slavery in their homes during the day. At night they moved them north to free states, Canada or England.

Refugees naturally headed for New England. The region had banished slavery and nurtured a strong abolitionist movement. And people fleeing slavery could also get there easily from the South by rail and by coastal vessels.

The Underground Railroad by Charles T. Webber

People who helped African-Americans escape used railroad terminology as a code to describe their activities in case someone overheard their conversations. People who moved the refugees were called conductors. The buildings that sheltered them were stations and the people who fed and clothed them until they were ready to move on were stationmasters.

Here, then, are six New England stops on the Underground Railroad, one for each of the New England states.

Austin F. Williams House

Austin F. William Carriage House and House

The Austin F. Williams House and Carriage House in Farmington, Conn., played a central role in a major drama before the Civil War: The Amistad Affair.

Williams, an active abolitionist, conducted for the Underground Railroad. In the Amistad case, a group of slaves on board the sailing vessel Amistad managed to free themselves and killed the ship’s captain in 1839.

They were subsequently brought to America and arrested. Abolitionists viewed their case — which resulted in acquittal on the grounds that they acted in self-defense — as an important victory.

Following the trial, Williams built a house on his Farmington property where the freed Africans stayed before returning to Sierra Leone in 1842. The Williams property is not open to the public.

Abyssinian Meeting House

Portland became a northern hub of the Underground Railroad because it was so easy to get to by rail and sea. The city’s 600 or so free blacks clustered in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood. They mostly worked as mariners, on the waterfront or on the railroads.

In the 1820s, Portland’s African-Americans got fed up with shabby treatment by the Second Congregational Church. So they formed their own church, the Abyssinian Religious Society, in 1828. Then they started building the Abyssinian Congregational Church, a wood-frame building on a high brick foundation on Newbury Street.

The meeting house hosted a school for black children, church suppers, concerts and, of course, religious services. Abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke from the Abyssinian’s pulpit.

After the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, the church’s members organized escape routes for fugitives to England and Canada. They found safe houses for escaped slaves, fed them and transported them. Reuben Ruby, a church founder and hack driver, conducted slaves to freedom in his coach.

Portland’s Underground Railroad operated in complete secrecy, and the only written record of a successful escape appeared in the memoirs of a stationmaster’s descendant. The Abyssinian’s Rev. Amos Noe Freeman hid a fugitive from slavery in the meeting house.

After Portland’s big fire in 1866, the Abyssinian Meeting House fell into disuse. The city of Portland seized it for back taxes and in 1998 sold it to the Committee to Restore the Abyssinian for a small fee.

Then the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 brought attention to the old meeting house, and $400,000 in donations poured into the committee. On March 10, 2022, Congress passed a bill that gave $1.7 million to restore the building.

The Abyssinian Meeting House, 75 Newbury Street.

Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties

Quakers Nathan and Mary Johnson harbored Frederick Douglass in 1838 at their home in New Bedford, Mass. The couple were free blacks who married in 1819 and became part of New Bedford’s robust African-American community.

New Bedford, a port city, was attractive to African-Americans because its industries — whaling and the maritime trades – were open to them.

By 1853, New Bedford had the highest population of African-Americans in the Northeast, and 30 percent said they came from the South.

It was estimated that at any one time before the Civil War, 300 to 700 fugitive slaves lived in New Bedford.

Nathan and Mary Johnson owned a confectionery store, several businesses and their home, a stop on the Underground Railroad. They were prominent abolitionists; Nathan, a pharmacist, was elected the president of the 1847 National Convention of Colored People in Troy, New York.

One of the Johnson properties was a residence, the other a Quaker meetinghouse.

The New Bedford Historical Society owns the Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties at 17-19 and 21 Seventh St. in New Bedford. To make an appointment for a tour, call 508-979-8828.

James Wood Farm

On the Croydon Turnpike in Lebanon, N.H., just before the East Plainfield line, the Wood Farm served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

James Wood, a prosperous and industrious Quaker, owned the 800-acre farm. Wood dealt in hay, kept bees and surveyed land.

Wood’s involvement as the station keeper for New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County on the Underground Railroad had scant documentation.

His journal from 1862, discovered by Steve Ristelli in a New Hampshire antique shop, uncovered additional details.

On June 1, 1862, Wood noted: “A fugitive slave? come here abt 10 o”clock this eve to stay all night. I fixed him a bed in wool room,” according to Slavery & the Underground Railroad in New Hampshire, by Michelle Arnosky Sherburne.

There is little additional information about the fugitives helped by Wood. Historians say the slight mention suggests that Wood did not consider the event to be particularly unusual. They say he probably helped others passing through. The Wood farm is not open to the public.

20 High St., Ashaway, R.I.

20 High Street. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Rhode Island had both a sizable number of Quakers who supported abolition as well the densest African-American population in New England. As a result, the tiny state had a busy Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Free blacks and wealthy industrialists both conducted fugitives north to safety.

Jacob Babcock’s house in the village of Ashaway served as the first Rhode Island stop on the Underground Railroad. Babcock, a prosperous mill owner, believed strongly in temperance and in abolition. He hid fugitive slaves in tunnels under his house, then brought them to a Mr. Foster farther north.

Babcock enlisted his 16-year-old nephew, Isaac Cundall, to take the escapees in a wagon to Mr. Foster. Six decades later, Cundall told the Providence Journal about one close call.

A Close Call

In March 1858, Uncle Jacob told him he had to transport a woman fugitive in broad daylight. The sheriff and the slave owner were looking for her in the neighborhood. Jacob knew the sheriff would get a warrant to search his house. So Isaac asked his cousin Sarah Babcock to take a ride with him. She put on a big hat, a veil and a heavy shawl, and they took off in a wagon.

Sure enough, they ran into the sheriff. They made sure to chat with him, made sure he identified Sarah Babcok. Then they rode on for a mile and turned around. They saw the sheriff and told him it was so cold they decided to head back to get warmer clothes.

Back at Uncle Jacob’s house the fugitive woman put on Sarah’s clothes plus another wrap. Then they easily passed by the sheriff. Isaac took her to a minister’s house, and she safely made it to the next station.

Jacob Babcock’s house still stands, though privately owned.

Rokeby

Rokeby in Ferrisburgh, Vt., belonged to Rowland T. Robinson, who openly sheltered escaped slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. Robinson’s extensive correspondence about how the railroad worked provides an important historic archive.

In 1793, Thomas and Jemma Robinson, Rowland’s parents, built Rokeby. He made abolition the cause of his life. Not only did he shelter fugitives, he negotiated freedom papers with slavemasters and found jobs for freedmen.

Today Rokeby, a historic farm property and museum, includes a 1780s farmstead. It also has eight agricultural outbuildings with permanent exhibits, and hiking trails that cover more than 50 acres.

You can find Rokeby at 4334 U.S. Route 7 in Ferrisburgh.

Photos: Austin F. Williams House and Carriage House By Ragesoss – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4674472. Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4384044. Rokeby By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696. Abussinian Meeting House By Dugan Murphy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102430909.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Phineas Gage Gets an Iron Rod Through His Skull — and Survives

Phineas Gage was a foreman on a railroad crew working in Vermont and New Hampshire on Sept. 13, 1848 when an iron rod went through his skull. His crew was blasting through rocks laying the tracks in Cavendish, Vt.

Phineas Gage (From the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus.)

Placing charges required drilling a hole, filling it with black powder, a fuse and sand and tamping it into place with a long iron rod similar to a crowbar. As Gage was tamping a charge into place, apparently his rod created a spark when striking the rock. This touched off an explosion.

Remarkably, the rod was blown from the hole with such force that it went directly through Gage’s head, entering his cheek and passing through the top of his head. Men found it 80 feet away.

It was an unusually smooth and slender rod, one that Gage had made to his specifications. That probably saved his life. Alert and talking a few minutes after the accident, Gage rode in a cart to the doctor in Cavendish.

Phineas Gage Understates His Case

When the doctor arrived, 30 minutes after Gage, he found the patient upright and alert. In one of the great understatements of medical history, Gage said,

Doctor, here is business enough for you.

The doctor dressed his wounds and told him to rest. John Harlow, another physician who had treated brain injuries before, took over his care.

John Harlow

In the days that followed, Gage’s condition worsened as Harlow treated his brain swelling and infections. At one point, the doctor had a coffin standing by and clothes ready in which to bury Phineas Gage.

Over a period of weeks, however, Phineas Gage gradually stabilized and then improved. By November, he returned to his family’s home in Lebanon, N.H. He had lost use of his left eye and had a scar on his forehead, but was otherwise healthy.

Fame, No Fortune

Over the next 12 years, Phineas Gage would become the object of scientific scrutiny, visiting medical conferences and exhibiting his wounds at medical schools. Much of the debate over his case surrounded the effects of his injury on his personality.

Doctors said the injury dramatically altered his personality by making him argumentative and profane.

John Harlow wrote that his friends found him ‘no longer Gage.’ He couldn’t stick to plans, spoke ‘the grossest profanity’ and showed ‘little deference for his fellows.’

Others said that was his personality before the accident, as well.

The railroad company that employed him wouldn’t take him back after he recovered. By 1860, Phineas Gage had relocated to the West Coast and was working as a stagecoach driver in Santa Clara, and that’s where he died.

His injury probably finally caught up with him, as he had begun having seizures. It was during one of these that he passed away.

His family later returned his skull and his tamping rod to the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard University where it remains today as the most sought-after item.

Daguerrotype

At least 35 years ago, a Baltimore couple named Jack and Beverly Wilgus acquired a 19th-century daguerreotype of a handsome young man with a closed eye and scarred forehead. He held a long metal rod, which they thought might be a harpoon.

In 2007, Beverly Wilgus posted the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. She named it ‘One-Eyed Man With Harpoon.’

First a whaling enthusiast emailed her to say the man didn’t hold a harpoon. Then Michael Spurlock, a Montana history buff, contacted Wilgus and said she might just have a picture of Phineas Gage. If so, it would be the only known image of him.

Phineas Gage set off an explosive to create this cut (or one nearby) for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad.

It shouldn’t be surprising that someone would know the story of Phineas Gage, even in the 21st century. His case was famous, the first to suggest a link between brain damage and personality change. Two-thirds of introductory psychology textbooks discuss Phineas Gage, according to Malcolm Macmillan, psychologist who wrote a book about him.

When the Wilguses took a closer look at the daguerreotype, they noticed a partial inscription on the harpoon that read, “through the head of Mr. Phi…”

So in 2009, the Wilguses visited the Warren Museum at Harvard, where they saw the full inscription:

This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.

Reputation Restored?

Phineas Gage’s reputation suffered over the years. People described him as a lout, a drunk and a wastrel. But after the daguerreotype came to light, they began to reconsider. After all, the man in the picture seemed clean, confident, well dressed and sober.

Macmillan, his biographer, pointed out that Phineas Gage held jobs for 11 years after the accident, hardly something a drunk and wastrel could accomplish.

“The facts about the real Phineas may have a slight resemblance to the modern pre-accident representation,” wrote Macmillan. “But he can hardly be recognized in the post-accident picture.”

This story about Phineas Gage was updated in 2022. Image: Railroad cut in Cavendish, Vt., by By Danaxtell at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20811027.

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1913, the Year of the Great Tango Controversy

In April 1913, 90-year-old Henry McHenry walked out of the Chelsea Old Soldiers Home, telling his friends he was going to town – which they assumed meant Boston – and he didn’t come back. Three days later, word arrived that he had surfaced in New York City with a pocketful of cash. McHenry pointedly told police, who wanted to send him home, that he would leave when he had seen what he came for. What enticed this cantankerous Civil War veteran and retired stonemason to travel all the way to New York? He wanted to see this new dance phenomenon everyone was talking about: the tango.

The year 1913, the writer H.G. Wells noted, was “the year of the tango.” This new dance where couples danced cheek-to-cheek, legs and arms pressed close against each other in an erotic embrace, had everyone’s attention.

Chelsea Old Soldiers Home (Boston Public Library Archive)

And New England was no exception. Just like controversial dances today, the tango in 1913 gave rise to fascination, longing, disgust and fury – depending, of course, on your age and point of view.

Tango Travels to America

Where the tango originated is open to debate. But it took firm root in Argentina. Poor people danced it in the slums. At the time, Argentina was a wealthy nation (seventh richest in the world), but there were tremendous inequalities. So while the wealthy danced their sedate steps at fancy balls, the poor danced the tango in bars, brothels and dance halls.

Among the young and wealthy, the tango became a fascination, and they would slip into the ghettos for a taste of the dance craze. As these young people went to Europe to polish their education, they brought the tango with them.

In 1909 and 1910, the dance began popping up. But in 1913, it took the entire world by storm, first sweeping Europe and from there to the rest of the world, including the United States. Among the non-dancers, curiosity turned to outrage as soon as they got a firsthand look at the new dance. It was disgust at first-sight.

Rushing headlong into the First World War, the nations and religions of the world didn’t seem to agree on much. But the tango proved an exception. The people loved it; the leaders did not.

Germany’s Kaiser banned the dance. And England’s Queen Mary also ordered it kept out of any palace functions.

“Tango Tee” from Puck Magazine.

In the United States, ministers, priests and rabbis began speaking out against the immoral dance. The more strident labeled it “unwholesome degeneracy.” They were especially angry at the hordes of adults who tangoed, making it seem acceptable to children. The more moderate clergy saw it as a passing fad; an evil, but a temporary one.

In the summer, towns throughout New England began waking up to the fact the tango being performed in their midst. Town officials began issuing directives to local dance committees to ban it from town and benefit dances.

Banning the Tango

In Lebanon, N.H., the selectmen announced that people attending dances at the town would be expelled for dancing the tango. But it had little effect. The students of Dartmouth College were singled out as the offenders, but the dancing continued until the selectmen finally voted to ban dances altogether.

In the popular summer destination of Nahant, Mass., the police chief learned the dance halls of Bass Point were promoting tango exhibitions to lure customers. He ordered all the posters for the event torn down and announced the police would stop any such dancing.

Opponents also expanded their battleground. “Medical authorities have lately expressed the opinion that these objectionable dances are nerve-wracking, and if persisted in must undermine both health and morals,” they told the newspapers.

And one newspaper editorial bemoaned the state of affairs where citizens would ignore the bills from their dentists and butchers to instead pay for tango lessons.

U.S. Vice President Thomas Marshall, speaking to a Methodist camp meeting in August of 1913, denounced the dance craze. The tango, turkey trot and slit skirts, he said, were all signs that the churches were losing their hold on people: “It is high time that the people were waking up.”

Finding Popular Support

The tango had advocates as well, mostly among dancers, dance instructors and young people. These factions tried a multipronged approach to making the tango acceptable. First, they tried to calm people’s sensibilities. They pointed out that new forms of dance often excited outrage. The polka, they noted, had been widely criticized when first introduced.

Similarly, the waltz scandalized people when it was introduced in America. It was known as the Boston, and a variation was known as the Boston Dip. Both were abhorred by moralists. But both were eventually accepted as proper. The tango was no different, its defenders said.

This line of reasoning did little to persuade the anti-tango factions.

Advocates reached out to their own medical experts, who pointed out the tango helped people lose weight and stay in shape.

But most of their efforts focused on convincing tango dancers themselves to embrace a more modest form of the dance, one that didn’t involve so much physical contact and flamboyance. And no dipping, they instructed. At least not “deep dipping.”

Banning the Tango

In October of 1913, Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald upped the ante.

The Boston Musician’s Protective Union had announced its opposition to “freak dances” that involved “glides, slides and hugs.” While the union didn’t pledge that its members would not play music for these dances if directed to, they would discourage it.

Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, known as “Honey Fitz”

Fitzgerald put the force of government behind their opposition, and he announced a ban on the tango at all city dance halls:

“The prohibition includes all the so-called animal dances such as the turkey trot, bunny hug, bear dance, etc. also the kitchen sink, tango and other extravagances,” the announcement said.

The new rules further stated:

All dancing would stop at 11:45 on Saturday nights.

“No moonlight or shadow lighting effects. The hall must remain fully lighted.”

A police matron would be assigned to each dance hall, and have charge of the ladies room. A police officer assigned to the hall would have the authority to stop the music if necessary.

In November, Pope Pius X declared the tango immoral and off-limits to Catholics. If they partook in the dance, they were instructed to include it in their confessions and would need to do penance. Supporters of the dance fabricated a story that the pope had witnessed a demonstration of the dance and recanted his opinion, but the Vatican quickly shot that down as a falsehood.

With New England’s large Catholic population, the edict had weight. But not enough to kill the tango.

Happy Dance

The fight against the tango finally came to a head in 1914. At English High School in Lynn, Mass., students made headlines by boycotting dances where the principal had banned the tango.

Social and country clubs and hotels came under great pressure to eliminate the tango from the popular dances and “tango teas.” Some did, others did not. And people boycotted charity balls that banned the tango, which prompted a satirical cartoon in Puck magazine. Wellesley College vacillated, first banning the dance and then reversing course.

In the Massachusetts Legislature, Rep. Lewis Sullivan introduced a bill to outlaw the tango across the state. Like Henry McHenry, he traveled to New York to see a tango firsthand. He saw a sedate version of the dance. But he remained opposed to the dance in its more expressive forms.

By now, however, public opinion moved in the direction of the tango as people saw that it did no harm. With little remaining popular support for banning the dance, Sullivan’s proposal died in legislative committee.

Rudolph Valentino dances the tango

The tango soon became much more mainstream in the United States. Then it faded, only to be popularized again by Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 film, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Vice President Thomas Marshall would haul out the tango once again for political purposes. When a rival attempted to replace him on the ticket in 1916, rumors spread that the Missouri rival liked to dance the tango.

Vice President Thomas Marshall.

And in Catholic circles the dance remains controversial. When Pope Francis told reporters that he had danced the tango as a young man and still enjoyed the dance, his critics saw red and called him a weak successor to men like Pius X.

This story was updated in 2022.

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