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New Haven, ‘the Wickedest City’ – The Devil and Man At Yale in 1895

In 1895, hundreds of ministers and church leaders came to New Haven for a conference of the Christian Worker’s Association. Little did the city know the conference would give the city the title ‘wickedest city in the world.’

Image of Yale -- Creator of the Wickedest City

“A View of the Buildings of Yale College at New Haven,” lithograph, published by A. Doolittle & Son, New Haven. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database.

Some of the most high-profile young pastors and religious leaders of the age gathered at the conference to recharge and re-arm themselves in the battle for the souls of America’s young people. And New Haven welcomed them, though the city soon had second thoughts.

The group started a fiery debate around the country about whether New Haven had let Yale college turn the city into the wickedest city in the world.

Wickedest City

Rev. Reuben Archer Torrey of Chicago started the kerfuffle at a reception opening the conference.

Rev. R.A. Torrey

Torrey, himself a Yale Divinity School alumnus, took firm aim at his alma mater when discussing immorality. The sons of the American privileged class were running amok, with devastating impact on the working class people of New Haven. The Christian Worker’s association focused much of its work on reaching out to poor young people and diverting them from lives of sin. But the streets weren’t the only places where Satan did his work.

New Haven, Torrey suggested, must have filled a potter’s field with the corpses of young girls, their downfall and demise brought about by their association with the heathen offspring of the American elite who filled Yale’s dormitories. Many of those despicable youth – now in adulthood – could be found serving in Congress.

Yale, and as a result New Haven itself, were awash with debauchery, earning it the” wickedest city” moniker.

Torrey’s speech found a welcome audience among the assembled Christian missionaries. Also in the crowd, however, was a writer from the New Haven Palladium newspaper. And he dutifully recorded Torrey’s sentiments and published them.

Rapid Outrage

The news coverage incensed New Haven’s business community. Defenders of Yale reacted immediately.

Rev. David Burrill Pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City eventually publicly attacked Torrey for his past behavior. He told colleagues that a week-and-a-half after Torrey arrived at Yale, classmates had to drag him to his room in a helplessly drunken state. For the next year-and-a-half, Torrey lead a “dissipated” life until rescued by Christian students at Yale. Torrey denied this.

Timothy Dwight

Timothy Dwight had only recently taken on the role of Yale president. A religious man who lead Connecticut’s Congregational Church, Dwight had inherited an institution in financial distress. Dwight had taken the unusual step a few months earlier of mailing out a letter declaring that Yale was, in fact, a trustworthy institution of Christian values, a suitable institution for young men to attend.

With no time for distractions, Dwight announced he would offer no opinion on the discussion about morality at Yale. Nor would he take any part in the discussion over the wickedest city. He wanted to do nothing to fan the flames. But the flames hardly needed any fanning.

The Controversy Unfolds

As one newspaper put it: “People in New Haven are recalling and rehashing old stories of the hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents who come to Yale with more spending money than brains, and squander it in dissipation, to the lasting injury of their associates.”

And people didn’t have to cast far back in their memory for examples. The latest scandal had taken place in February of that year when Yale had to expel Elliott Shepard, great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Police had responded to Shepard’s dormitory and found him loudly partying with three women. After questioning, it turned out Shepard had imported a half-dozen prostitutes from New York for him and his friends.

Nevertheless, the pressure mounted on the association to tamp down the controversy. Torrey relented, and agreed to speak out on the matter because he felt it unfair that his words were damaging the city’s reputation.

Backtracking and Fueling The Fire

Rev. John Collins

On the final day of the conference, some 800 to 1,500 in attendance, Torrey and a local minister, Rev. John Collins, secretary of the association, teamed up to try to squelch the furor.

They made a mild rebuke of the Palladium, challenging the accuracy of its reporting and criticizing the newspaper for not checking its facts with Torrey before printing its articles.

“Did you hear me yesterday say that New Haven was the wickedest city in the world?” Rev. Torrey asked Rev. Collins. Collins replied that he had not and assured him that the report must have been an error.

The Resolution

The two ministers then offered a resolution to the conference that attempted to set things right.

“Resolved. That from our own observations and the statements of our president and secretary, the latter of whom has long lived in New Haven and as a city mission worker, had an unusual means of investigation, we believe New Haven to be, in nearly every way, a more than usually clean and moral city.”

Rev. Torrey had questioned the wisdom of the resolution but agreed to go along with it. Turns out he was right to worry. The resolution sparked fierce debate. Many in the crowd said that Torrey had only spoken what many ministers in the city had said about Yale and New Haven privately – often in more vivid terms than Torrey chose. Others questioned why the group should “whitewash” the city.

A stream of speakers rose, some to tell that they believed Yale was an upright institution. Any college had its share of young men who chose to live sinfully.

Mrs. Poteat Speaks on the Wickedest City

Rev. Edwin Poteat

Tucked in the audience were Rev. Edwin Poteat, of New Haven’s Calvary Baptist Church, and his wife Harriet Gordon Poteat.

Harriet Poteat was no minor figure. Her father, Adoniram Judson Gordon, was a well-known minister and missionary who founded Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. When she spoke, people listened. And she was in the mood to speak.

“When I heard Monday that Rev. Mr. Torrey had made these statements about Yale and New Haven, I said, ‘thank the Lord that he has the courage and Christian conviction to stand up and say so,’ she told the assembled crowd.

After seven years in New Haven, Poteat said she and her husband had witnessed a parade of students arriving at Yale. As a courtesy to their parents, the Poteats would ask the young men to dinner. The first year, they showed up and were polite. The second year, they showed up and had taken up smoking. The third year, they didn’t show up at all.

“They go down, down, down and I believe more boys are ruined in Yale University than any other place I know of,” she said. “I would as soon send my sons to Hell as to send them to Yale College.”

Fuel for the Fire

Poteat’s remarks fired up the assembly and members again began queuing up to tell of the tales of barroom wickedness they had observed in New Haven. Torrey and Collins quickly pushed their resolution to a vote.

The resolution passed, but Poteat’s speech had stolen the moment as newspapers across the country carried the news that Hell had been compared favorably to Yale.

Speculation began to grow about fallout from the conference. Reverend Poteat issued a statement that his wife was not inclined to retract her statement, though there was talk he would lose his pulpit. But before any effort at recrimination could build steam, the students of Yale stepped up.

Yale and the Wickedest City

As if on cue, one week after the Christian Worker’s conference, two Yale students, Henry Sage and Henry Bond, decided to have a night of debauchery with two local women, May Wilson and Annie True. Their escapades wound up splashed across the pages of newspapers.

Sage, a relative of millionaire New York financier Russell Sage, and the rest of the party, had spent an evening traveling the back roads drinking. Returning in the early morning hours, they had to summon a doctor when May Wilson collapsed. The doctor revived the young woman at the hospital and determined she had been under the influence of alcohol and some sort of drug.

Sage and other Yale students passed a hat and tried to bribe newspapers into suppressing the story. When that failed, they reached out to family who successfully had some newspapers pull the story. But it was too late. Other, independent newspapers published.

The Aftermath

As quick as it started, the story of the Devil and Yale died out. Rev. Edwin Poteat went on to have a long career, eventually serving as president at Furman University for 15 years. Rev. Collins would continue his work, with his efforts eventually laying the foundation for what is today the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rev. Torrey preached throughout the world and wrote more than 40 books.

Timothy Dwight, meanwhile, developed a reputation as one of Yale’s most important presidents, helping steer the university toward a future in which the institution stressed academics and produced fewer “‘hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents.”

This story updated in 2022.

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The Working Girls of Boston: Immoral Floozies or Honest Toilers?

During the Gilded Age, the working girls of Boston had to contend not just with low pay but with reputations as immoral tramps. In the parlance of the day, they had “forsaken the path of virtue.” Or they “fell” by succumbing to the “temptations” and “perils” of the city.

It wasn’t true, at least for the great majority of the working girls of Boston. But that didn’t stop people from believing it.

From the Civil War to World War I, people accepted that , “Working class women — and especially black women — were freely available for sexual use by upper-class males,” according to Gerda Lerner in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History.

Carroll Wright.

And so a statistician named Carroll Wright in 1884 took it upon himself to investigate the slut shamers’ allegations. As head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, he assigned his small army of field agents to interview 1,032 of the 38,881 working girls of Boston.

Applicants for working papers at the Department of Education Building in Boston, Mass., in 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Two decades later, Lewis Wickes Hine picked up on Wright’s work in a different way. He photographed young people, teenagers and children, working in factories, on the waterfront, in fields and on the street. In the process, he captured many images of the working girls — and they were girls — of Boston.

Together, Wright and Hine reveal in detail what the lives of the working girls of Boston were all about – hard work and low pay.

Fallen Women

After the Civil War, one of the founders of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association, Lucretia Boyd, had a list of the city’s working girls. She told a friend that “she was warranted in saying that nearly one half of the girls on the lists would be led astray unless something could be done to place some additional protection about them.”

And in 1866, the Ladies Christian Association sent out a flier saying, “Intelligent Christians among us have long deplored the dangers that beset this class of persons.”

Sadie Singer, 15, racking flowers at the Beston Floral Supply Co., in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine

By 1884, men were coming to the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics office to complain the streets were crowded with working girls in the evening. They ‘were in the habit of soliciting men to accompany them home,’ wrote bureau chief Carroll Wright. “These gentlemen have expressed themselves as greatly astonished that in a city as well regulated as Boston, girls should come out of stores and shops and ply their vocation as night walkers on the streets in the evening.”

And so Wright had the BLS investigate the working girls of Boston ‘to determine whether the ranks of prostitution are recruited from the manufactory.’

The Working Girls of Boston

Boston in 1884 had a thriving manufacturing base that employed working girls in bookbinderies, shoe and boot factories, bakeries, distilleries, print shops and, most of all, clothing manufacturers.

Textile and clothing manufacture was a huge industry in New England, and by far the biggest in Boston. In 1855, the clothing industry generated $8.5 million in annual sales, more than twice as much as the next biggest, distilleries. Many Boston girls found employment as coat makers, custom tailoresses, coat basters, pantaloon stitchers, machine pressers, dressmakers, milliners and bustle makers.

The Pay Is Too Low

But they didn’t earn enough to live on. Most of the working girls of Boston earned less than $5 a week (about $133 in today’s dollars), according to Wright’s Fifteenth Annual Report about the working girls of Boston.

“The pay is too low,” complained the girls, who earned between $3 and $6 a week making men’s clothing, the report said. A 13-1/2 year old working as a canvas baster reported earning $1.25 a week.

The clothing industry nearly doubled in Boston over the next 50 years. In 1909, Hine’s photographs show young girls learning the skills needed in the needle trades.

Working Girls learning dressmaking in the Free Evening School in 1909. Photo By Lewis Wickes Hine

But wages didn’t grow with the clothing industry. In 1884, the working girls were complaining that employers suppressed their already meager pay. One reason: they faced competition from piece workers.

Piece Work

“Girls used to make better pay before the [piece workers] came,” one worker told the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The girls who did piece work, like the hourly employees, also faced declining wages. Bustle makers used to get 65, 75 and 85 cents a dozen, but price cuts reduced their earnings by 15 cents, reported the BLS. Then demand for bustles slackened off and bustle makers earned only 25 cents for 12 bustles – as much as a girl could make in a nine-hour day.

A nine-year-old girl carrying garments down Blackstone Street in 1912, to a Hanover Street home. She finishes eight pairs of trousers a day and gets eight cents a piece. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Men did piecework, too, but they got paid more for it. In printing, work that paid male compositors 35 cents paid females only 25 cents. A girl compositor, noted the BLS, ‘by over-exertion in trying to make good wags at 25 cents per 1000 brought on paralysis of one-half of the body resulting in permanent injury.’

No New Clothes

Because of the low pay, many working girls lived at home. But in some cases, reported the BLS, mothers made their daughters quit. It cost more to feed and clothe them than they earned.

Restaurant workers, for example, earned an average of $4.06 a week.

A 14-year-old waitress, Delia Kane, at the Exchange Luncheon in South Boston in 1912. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Clerks earned an average of $5.02 a week, bookkeepers $6.12.

Malvina Amundsen, 15, working as an office girl at the Eastern Talking Machine Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“It is said that many of the girls get discouraged, as they hardly earn enough to pay running expenses, and are obliged to practise the most rigid economy,” the BLS reported. “One girl says she ‘turns her clothes upside down, inside out, and outside in, not being able to make enough over living expenses to buy new clothes’.”

Shop Girls

Mary Creed, 14, selling cigars in the store of Mrs. Breslin in 1917. Lewis Wickes Hine

People especially viewed shop girls as floozies likely to turn to prostitution, according to Wright.

They made the “vile charge” that a saleswoman or shop girl has to become the ‘intimate friend’ of the proprietor or department head to get a job, he wrote.

People commonly wondered, “How can they dress well when they earn so little?” he continued. Many live at home, he argued. And he observed that a girl working all day for $3 or $4 a week couldn’t fall into evil.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“Girls cannot work hard all day and be prostitutes too,” wrote Wright.

A Boston police captain endorsed that argument. “He said that people, who charge the working women with walking the streets at night for evil purposes, do not know what they are talking about,” wrote Wright. “Night walkers are all of them hardened convicts or prostitutes; some of them may have been hard working women, but no working woman ever walks the streets as a prostitute.”

The Honest Working Girls of Boston

Wright then concluded the working girls of Boston were making “an heroic, an honest, and a virtuous struggle to earn an honorable livelihood.” Rarely did they live a life “other than one of integrity,” he concluded.

“It is easy to be good on a sure and generous income; it requires the strongest character to enable one to be good and respectable on an unstable income of five dollars per week,” he wrote.

And about those men who complained about the working girls of Boston walking the streets?

Wright had a tart response:

“It does not speak well for them and indicates to our mind that the first offence was on their part,” he wrote.

With thanks to The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Nancy Seasholes, and Jennifer Cote, “Class and the Ideology of Womanhood: The Early Years of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association.” You can read the Massachusetts BLS Fifteenth Annual Report, The Working Girls of Boston, here.

Lewis Hine photo credits: National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This story last updated in 2023.

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In 1919, A Private Detective Finds 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 2024.

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When Massachusetts Abolished the State Police

In 1875, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished the state police department. It was only 10 years old, the first state police force in the country, but Massachusetts had had enough.

Attitudes toward a centralized police force were very different in the 19^th century than they are now. Americans generally preferred a vigilant citizenry rather than a standing army to control disorder and crime. They distrusted powerful authorities, especially in rural areas.

And in Massachusetts, they didn’t like the state police seizing their booze.

Some of Massachusetts’ first state police officers: John Gilman, Charles Hair and William King.

The Constabulary

On May 16, 1865, Gov. John Andrew signed a bill into law creating the Massachusetts State Constabulary. By then the temperance movement had taken hold in Massachusetts, but people brazenly flouted the laws governing alcohol. And so that first state police force had as its mission the enforcement of the alcohol laws, as well as suppressing gambling and houses of prostitution.

Up until then, cities and towns left crime control up to local constabularies and police. The state had little to do with the local police and the local courts.

But local constables tended to be part-time, unsalaried officials who served for a year. They didn’t get paid much, but did get rewarded for making arrests, serving warrants and producing witnesses. Constables often had to collect taxes, which made the officeholder unpopular and the office undesirable. As a result, inexperienced men who wanted to avoid trouble got the job, but they tended not to keep it for long.

Private crime-fighting associations filled the gaps left open by the amateur constables. Property owners formed such associations to prevent theft and pursue horse thieves. Banks formed them to go after counterfeiters and temperance organizations formed them to rampage against rum.

During the 19^th century, New England had at least 72 protective societies — like the Worcester Association for the Protection of Fruit or the Pownal Association to Counteract and Detect Horse Thieves and Robbers — in more than 100 towns.

state-police-society-for-the-mutual-aid-against-thieves

The Worcester society for the mutual aid against thieves at work.

The State Police

But times were changing. In 1855, Massachusetts passed a version of Maine’s dry law, which banned alcohol — except for medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes. It was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

So shortly after the Civil War, Massachusetts established the state constabulary to crack down on purveyors of alcohol. Andrew appointed Gen. William Sterling King, shot 21 times at the Battle of Antietam, to head the first state police force in the United States.

Over the next 10 years, about 360 state police constables served an average of 2-1/2 years. Most had fought in the Civil War. They came from all walks of life and from all over the globe.

Booze Busters

The state constabulary got off to a fairly good start. They had to protect attendees at the Methodists’ annual meeting in Wesleyan Grove on the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Ground in August 1865. Five constables received the assignment and won praise for their performance.

Martha’s Vineyard Campground Tabernacle in the Wesleyan Grove, Oak Bluffs

But they also began to shut grog shops, saloons and rum mills. During the first six months of their existence, they won convictions for 1,404 liquor sellers. Many more liquor dealers agreed to cease operations, but they anticipated (correctly) the Legislature would repeal prohibition.

They also started to seize large quantities of alcohol. In December, 1869, for example, Deputy Constable Amasa H. Tolman was involved in the seizure of 80 gallons of ale and three-and-a-half gallons of spirits in Boston.

They didn’t win many friends, though, for grabbing people’s booze.

Someone shot at Constable William McKay from a wooded area in North Adams because he seized so much liquor. McKay once confiscated 60 barrels of beer and stored them in his barn, butthen someone tried to blow up the building with nitroglycerin.

Adding to the unpopularity of the state police was the shooting death of a brick-thrower in Westfield, Mass., in 1867. The constables had raided a gambling den, which started a riot, and a constable shot a rioter about to throw a brick at him. When the rioter died, the sheriff arrested the constable, but he was not prosecuted.

In 1870, the Legislature cut the state police budget, and 72 constables were suspended from duty. Many of the laid-off constables agreed to work for half pay.

Local Sovereignty

For the first decade of its existence, in fact, the Massachusetts General Court repeatedly tried and failed to abolish the state police. It wasn’t just the controversy over liquor seizures and prosecutions, though. People did not want a police force controlled by a powerful centralized government.

On May 18, 1874, the Boston Post wrote an editorial against the state police.

The whole system of a State Police is extraneous to the spirit of true local sovereignty. That a power from without should be imposed upon the people … is fatal to the soundness of the theory from which such a police force draws its life.

Ten years after the state police force began, the Legislature abolished it. They replaced the booze-busting constables with a small detective force and charged it with quelling riots and helping prosecutors find evidence. Then in 1879 lawmakers abolished the detectives and replaced them with ‘district police.’ Two men in each district had only limited duties.

It wasn’t until 1921 that the Massachusetts state police force began to take its current shape. That year, the Legislature enlarged the agency to 50 officers stationed in barracks across the state. Their job: to enforce the law in rural areas that didn’t have adequate police forces.

With thanks to State Police in the United States: A Socio-historical Analysis by H. Kenneth Bechtel; Stop, Thief! Private Protective Societies in Nineteenth-Century New England, by Ann-Marie Szymanski in The New England Quarterly; and The First To Serve by Ronald J. Guilmette. Images: Wesleyan Grove By LisaHendricks – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2847459.7. This story was updated in 2023.

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Fanny and Oliver, The Unlikely Pair Who Secured the Legacy of Walt Whitman

On July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was first published – to widespread shock and awe. Today’s literary classic was 1855’s obscenity. Amid the furor over Walt Whitman’s explicit sexual imagery, two New England powerhouses conspired to make sure it was never forgotten.

Fanny Fern strongly defended Whitman’s collection of poems. Fern was not a force to be ignored. Born in Portland, Maine in 1811 as Sara Willis, she had plenty of grit. She fought her way out of the poverty that enveloped her after her first husband’s death.

Walt Whitman at 35

Fern became a widely read columnist in the New York Ledger, proving her brother wrong. He was a magazine publisher who rejected Fern’s writing as too provincial. For good measure, she published a best-selling roman-a-clef that pilloried her brother. Her main character ignored any responsibility to a struggling sister while actively working to inhibit her career.

So when Leaves of Grass created a hubbub, Fanny Fern couldn’t resist getting into the thick of it.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman published the book because of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem that called for a new voice to examine American culture and mores.

Leaves of Grass shocked proper society. Emerson praised it, but many others did not. According to some accounts, the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw the book in the fire. Critics decried it as filth. They called Whitman a hack. One even hinted in print that Whitman was homosexual.

Walt Whitman was employed at the U.S. Department of Interior at the time of the initial publication. The Secretary of the Interior thought the work pornographic and summarily fired him. (Whitman would recover with another government job).

Unspeakably Delicious

All this noise focused Fanny Fern’s firepower on the topic in May of 1856:

Fanny Fern

“Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious,” she wrote. “Walt Whitman, the world needed a “Native American” of thorough, out and out breed—enamored of women not ladies, men not gentlemen; something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing; it needed a man who dared speak out his strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadying, republican aristocracy; dictionary-men, hypocrites, cliques and creeds; it needed a large-hearted, untainted, self-reliant, fearless son of the Stars and Stripes, who disdains to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage …”

The praise from Fern and other critics helped give publishers the spine-stiffening they needed. They kept Leaves of Grass in print as Walt Whitman revised, expanded and reworked his masterpiece for decades.

Oliver Stevens

Thirty years later, Bostonian Oliver Stevens would give Leaves of Grass another needed boost – but in a very different way.

Stevens was the district attorney for Boston. He rose to prominence in 1875 in the trial of the notorious “belfry murder case.” Warren Avenue Church janitor Jim Piper had killed a young girl, Mabel Young, in the church belfry. The girl’s body and the baseball bat used to kill her were hidden in the belfry.

The case against Piper was a difficult one to prove and the attorney general, who usually prosecuted murders, was ill and unable to handle the case. Stevens, the young Suffolk County district attorney, stepped in. He masterfully procured a conviction that launched his 30-year career.

A fixture on Beacon Hill and his summer estate in North Andover, Stevens was part of a movement to clean up the out-of-control crime in Boston at the time. Liquor, prostitution and vice was severely squelched during his time.

Watch and Ward

Stevens worked closely with the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization formed in 1879 to reduce crime and immoral practices in Massachusetts. It would later change its name to the New England Watch and Ward Society and have a 100-year run as the morality watchdog in Massachusetts.

A who’s who of Brahmin society made up the group’s membership. In 1882 the group persuaded district attorney Stevens to intervene with the publisher and censor Leaves of Grass. So Stevens wrote to the publisher and condemned it as obscene. He insisted that the publisher remove the poems “A Woman Waits for Me” and “To a Common Prostitute.” He also demanded revisions to several other poems.

Whitman’s publisher, feeling the heat, asked the author to approve the changes. Whitman refused, and the publisher backed out of the project. But another publisher stepped in. The “Banned in Boston” label and controversy would step up sales, Whitman’s new publisher theorized. And that’s exactly what happened.

The title found new life, and the 1882 version went through five printings. By then, critics warmed to the work. Walt Whitman would continue to revise and republish it up to his death in 1892.

The book again received a boost when the government distributed it to troops serving in World War II as a celebration of the American way of life for which they fought.

This story about Walt Whitman was updated in 2022.

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Fan Jones, The Madame Who Reigned Over the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor

When Penobscot logging was at its peak, lumbermen flocked to the bordello run by Fan Jones near the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor, Maine. Rivermen in red shirts and tasseled sashes swaggered into town looking for the Sky Blue House of Pleasure, their pay burning a hole in their pockets.

A saloon in the Devil’s Half Acre

According to legend, Fan Jones was handsome, gracious, slender and shrewd, the proverbial madam with a heart of gold. She was well-kept and so was her house. Folk songs dreamed up by her satisfied customers, mostly sailors and lumberjacks, spread her fame:

Fan Jones, She ran a cathouse
Way down on Harlow Street
If you’re a woodsman
Head straight there
And your friends you’ll surely meet.

Wild and Boisterous Play

Fan Jones was known as a good businesswoman who took full advantage of the opportunities presented by the booming little city on the frontier. At its height in 1860, Bangor shipped 250 million board feet of lumber, and more than 3,000 ships moored in its harbor. You could walk across the river on their decks from Bangor to Brewer, people said.

The ships came from around the world: China, Europe, Australia, but especially the West Indies. Timber was traded for molasses and rum, which the loggers imbibed with enthusiasm.

Bangor’s homage to the lumberjack, Paul Bunyan.

Though Maine had gone dry in 1851, Bangor stayed resolutely wet. In 1890 the city had 142 saloons, many of them in the Devil’s Half Acre. Under ‘the Bangor Plan’ (described as ritualized bribery of politicians and policemen), the city flouted Maine’s Prohibition law.

Robert Pike described the appeal of the saloons and whore-houses that lined the plank sidewalks of the Devil’s Half Acre in his classic book Tall Trees, Tough Men:

Reveling in work that permitted him to display his splendid strength and skill, the riverman also liked to throw himself into wild and boisterous play. … The songs he roared out as he strode boldly from one Haymarket Square dive to another, or as he approached Fan Jones’ noted Skyblue House of pleasure on Harlow Street, were not of the Sunday School type…

Voluptuous Experience

And, noted Pike, entrepreneurs like Fan Jones could count on repeat customers, especially around the Fourth of July. River drives were usually over by Independence Day, when the men went into Bangor and celebrated with a vengeance.

The logger came into Bangor for a good time, and he had it. True, he often woke up in jail with a splitting headache and bruises on his noggin, but after he had paid or worked off his fine he put a final bottle or two of the squirrel into his turkey and headed back up the river. There the passage of months and frequent re-telling to his colleagues made his Bangor adventures take on the aura of a wonderful time, and by the time spring had rolled around again he was ready and anxious to repeat the voluptuous experience.

A log drive on the Penobscot near Bangor

Fan Jones

Fan Jones was born in Brooksville, Maine, sometime in 1830, to Eliza and Benjamin Jones. She worked as a seamstress and possibly a servant for a wealthy family.

It isn’t clear how or why, but she became a prostitute in Bangor by 1850. In 1858 police arrested her for operating a house of ill-repute. She moved to another house at 233 Harlow St., a short walk from the riverfront and the Devil’s Half Acre. Shrewd with money, she bought the building around 1867. It earned the nickname the ‘Sky Blue House of Pleasure,’ supposedly because she had the chimney painted that color though no evidence exists that she did.

It was the most successful, longest running brothel in Bangor.

Fan Jones usually had eight seasoned women working for her; unlike many of Bangor’s brothels, she didn’t employ young girls. The house had as many as 12 bedrooms that could be used for commercial purposes.

233 Harlow Street today. Image courtesy Google maps.

The State Fair

She not only survived, but she did well enough to help others along the way. She adopted 16-year-old Caddie Graffam.

Fan Jones was fined a few times for running a disorderly house and for serving liquor. She served a few months in the Bangor House of Corrections in 1861. In 1870 a grand jury indicted her, and she tried to get out of town on the Maine Central Railroad. Marshals intercepted her in Fairfield and brought her back.

“[Imagine] Fan’s feelings at such disregard of women’s rights as would not let her choose her own direction to travel in,” commented the Whig & Courier.

Once a year she dressed her employees in lavish gowns from Paris and seated them in an open coach-and-six. They then rode in it in the parade that opened the Bangor State Fair. She set up a large tent near the fair for a week where her girls could ply their trade.

By the mid- or late 1860s, an ex-con named John Thomas moved into the Sky Blue House of Pleasure, and Fan jones started to go by the name ‘Mrs. Thomas.’ John Thomas may have been her real or common-law husband.

Bangor’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

The Sky Blue House of Pleasure survived the Great Bangor Fire of 1911, but Fan Jones, then 81, had probably retired by then. She died of tuberculosis, like many in Bangor, in 1917 and was laid to rest in Mount Hope Cemetery.

With thanks to Rogues, Rascals, and Other Villainous Mainers by Trudy Irene Scee and Tall Trees, Tough Men by Robert Pike. This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Bangor, Bangor, Maine. Penobscot River Bangor Maine, 1800. [s] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2020637508/. Paul Bunyan By Dennis Jarvis – https://www.flickr.com/photos/archer10/4447762402/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22033451/

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