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John William Sterling, a Well-Respected Man With a Secret

John William Sterling was a corporate lawyer during the Gilded Age, a conservative, upper-class businessman, the kind of man the Kinks describe as “a well-respected man about town.”

John William Sterling

In 1911, his name and resume appeared in Distinguished successful Americans of our day. From it we learn he graduated with honors from Yale College and Columbia Law School. He advised railroad barons in building and dismantling railroads, and he served on the boards of nine large banks and gas companies. Appropriately for a man of his stature, he devoted his time to philanthropy—prestigious charities, the kind people noticed. Eminently clubbable, he belonged to the exclusive Metropolitan, Union and American Yacht clubs.

Like the Kinks’ well-respected man, John William Sterling lived in a world built around punctuality. A Wall Street Journal correspondent described him as, “almost taciturn, and excessively devoted to his profession. He sat before his desk every morning, not later than eight o’clock, and was usually the last one in the office to close the desk and go home.”

That same correspondent also noted he had an unusual relationship that was ‘often spoken of and commented upon.’ That relationship was with a cotton broker named James O. Bloss.

John William Sterling

He was born in Stratford, Conn., on May 12, 1844. His father, also John William Sterling, was captain of the Splendid, one of the largest clipper ships during the China Trade. His mother, Catherine Plant, belonged to a prominent Stratford family; her father, David, served as a U.S. congressman and as the state’s lieutenant governor. His parents both had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.

Sterling Homestead

He studied at Stratford Academy, where he probably knew another young man who would lead his entire life as a bachelor, James Buchanan Mitchell. Graduating as class valedictorian, he entered Yale as the Civil War broke out.

Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of human sexuality, notes in an essay that Sterling slept with Mitchell at Yale. His journal in September-October 1862 records: “I slept with Jim Mitchell last night an.” Katz suggests they had an ongoing relationship, as Sterling and Mitchell both chose to attend Columbia Law School.

Sterling and classmate at Yale.

His sleeping with Jim Mitchell may not have aroused much comment, wrote Katz, or at least it didn’t arouse much suspicion about what went on.

At Yale, Sterling belonged to Skull and Bones. He graduated with honors from Yale in 1864 and then from Columbia Law School in 1867 as class valedictorian.

Soon after his admission to the bar that year, he met a young cotton broker about his own age, James O. Bloss. Bloss also came from an old New England family, though he grew up in Rochester, N.Y.

Three lines of poetry clipped from the New York Times and pasted into the back of his Commonplace Book suggest Sterling’s feelings toward the man he called “Blossy.”

Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in his poem “In Guernsey / To Theodore Watts.”

In 1872 John William Sterling and James O. Bloss went house-hunting, and they settled on 21 West 25^th St. They would live together for nearly 50 years.

Partners

John William Sterling rocketed to the top of the then-burgeoning corporate world. He went to work as a clerk in a New York law firm and made partner in 1870. Three years later he had his name on the door as a partner in Shearman & Sterling. He advised another close friend, James Stillman, chairman of the board of National City Bank, then the nation’s largest. (Stillman’s great-grandson, Whit Stillman, is an Academy Award-nominated film director.)

Sterling also advised William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil and H.H. Rogers, whose firm merged with Standard Oil, as well as railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

He once said the ideal client is ‘a very wealthy man in very great trouble.’ His clients paid him handsomely for his advice, and he made a fortune.

The Sterling mansion, now a community center

In 1886, Sterling built a stately mansion, Sterling House, in Stratford, presumably a weekend house he shared with his sisters. Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Sterling mansion, now the Sterling House Community Center.

By 1890 he and Blossy moved uptown to 221 East 47^th St., where they had four servants. Eventually they moved to 912 Fifth Ave., overlooking Central Park.

Neuroticism

Sterling clearly valued his reputation as a man of means and prominence in society. And so as Katz points out, ‘his contravention of society’s marital standard, and, perhaps, its sexual proprieties, would have been a profound source of conflict and anxiety.’

His mother was said to be happy her son didn’t inherit his father’s love of the sea. Actually, he had more than a touch of hydrophobia. He had a ‘deep-rooted antipathy to the ocean,’ wrote John Anson Garver in a biographical sketch of Sterling. He didn’t even like to take ferries, and never traveled abroad.

Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary to Yale after 1899, recalled that Sterling wouldn’t go to bed until the housekeeper poked the closet with a stick and looked under the bed to make sure there were no burglars. He had iron bars on his bedroom window and an iron door with an electric lock he controlled with a button by his bedside. Bloss slept in the room with him and his valet in an adjoining bedroom.

In Harriman vs. Hill, author Larry Haeg describes Sterling as a chain-smoking, fast walker with a fear of public speaking and a penchant for scheduling meetings at odd minutes, like 3:17 p.m. He ate dinner in the same chair at the same table six nights a week at the Union Club.

He also locked his office at work and always paid for his investments in cash. That made him a very wealthy man.

A Strange Postscript

John William Sterling died suddenly in Canada on July 5, 1918. He left $18 million to Yale and the rest to Blossy, who he named as executor of his estate.

That caused a bit of trouble. Bloss died five months later, on Dec. 15, 1918, without having completely executed the will.

Further, Sterling had died before he could execute the will of another wealthy man, his friend James Stillman, who died March 15, 1918. And Stillman had been named executor of the estate of James Gordon Bennett, who died May 14, 1918.

The first three men who died left $75 million.

Eventually Yale got its money, the largest bequest to a university up to that time.

Sterling’s gift was used to build Yale’s Law School, the Divinity School quadrangle, a School of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Memorial Library. He also endowed the Sterling professorships, who have included such notables as William O. Douglas, Wilbur Cross, Harold Bloom, Edmund Morgan and Paul de Man.

With thanks to Jonathan Ned Katz, “An Understanding…Held Them Together“

NRHP: Sterling Homestead By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/6439034575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44722867; Sterling House Community Center By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/all-towns-and-cities/stratford-ct/stratfordsterlinghouse.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29522854. This story was updated in 2023.

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John C. Colt Kills a Man, Boxes Him Up and Sends Him to New Orleans

Too bad John Colt didn’t use one of his brother Sam’s revolvers to kill Samuel Adams in 1841. If he had, Samuel Colt probably would have capitalized on the tremendous publicity surrounding the murder. Because Sam Colt not only made millions making guns, he was one of the first Madison Avenue ad men. Any publicity was good publicity, and Colt was an easy name to spell.

Unfortunately, John Colt had killed Samuel Adams with a hatchet. Then he had cut him up, stuffed him into an oblong box and hired a cartman to take the gruesome cargo to a ship bound for New Orleans.

It might be a story of good brother-bad brother. But the murder of Samuel Adams and its aftermath suggests the two Colt brothers were both very gifted and very flawed. They may have been married to the same woman – at the same time.

And John Colt only killed one person. Samuel Colt’s guns killed many.

Samuel Colt

John Colt

John Caldwell Colt was born March 1, 1810, in Hartford, Conn. His brother Samuel arrived four years later. The boys started life with a privileged childhood and an indulgent mother who came from one of the city’s leading families.

But then their mother died and their father lost his money in the financial panic of 1819. Shunned by Hartford’s social elite, their new stepmother made the boys go to work.

John Colt was a reckless, adventurous boy who meandered through life as an adult. He chose one career then veered off to another. He had been a riverboat gambler, a drinker, a runaway, a womanizer, a thief – as well as a brilliant accountant. In 1838, he published a textbook on double-entry bookkeeping, which went into 45 printings.

He moved to Manhattan and hired a printer named Samuel Adams to print his textbook. He had an apartment in a fancy building. In May of 1841, his beautiful young mistress moved in with him. By September she was very, very pregnant.

Samuel Colt

Sam, unlike John, had a fixed purpose in life from an early age. He wanted to make guns and explosives. His father backed his early attempts to make guns, but Sam needed more financing for development. So he toured the country lecturing on the virtues of nitrous oxide, ending his talk with a fireworks show.

He saved enough money to go back to developing his gun, a revolver with a rotating cylinder. In 1835, he sailed to England to obtain a patent for it. While there he met a beautiful, illiterate 16-year-old named Caroline Henshaw. He then married the girl.

Or did he? Historians disagree. According to some, he brought her back to the United States with him, but never admitted he’d married her. Others make no mention of her marriage to Samuel Colt.

In 1836, Sam borrowed enough money, mostly from relatives, to start making guns in Paterson, N.J. However, hardly anyone bought them. Then his financing began to dry up with the Panic of 1837, one of the worst in U.S. history. Colt entertained prospects for sales and backing as if he had plenty of cash. His cousin, a principal investor, scolded him for the enormous liquor bill he’d run up.

In September 1841, Samuel Colt went to New York City looking for more investors. He was drinking in a bar at the City Hotel with a couple of prospects when his distraught brother John came looking for him.

Horror Story

What transpired on Sept. 17, 1841 was worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe story. In fact, Poe did modify a version into a story, The Oblong Box. And Herman Melville mentioned it in his short story, Bartleby, The Scrivener.

At 4 pm on that day, a Friday, Samuel Adams called on John Colt at his office on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. Adams demanded $71.15, which he said Colt owed him. Colt disagreed, saying he only owed Adams $55.85. They began to argue, and then they fought. According to Colt’s confession, Adams shoved him against the wall and twisted his neck handkerchief so that he could hardly breathe.

…[W]e came to blows. We then grappled and as he was overpowering me, I reached for a hammer, which was on my desk, and I struck him over the head until he released his hold and fell unconscious. He expired shortly afterward. Blood flowed in torrents from the wounds and after washing it up, I decided to notify the authorities.”

But then he decided against it. He didn’t want to besmirch the reputation of his family – his wealthy relatives, his brother the judge in St. Louis, his other brother the up-and-coming arms manufacturer.

He went to find his brother, staying at the City Hotel. Sam Colt, drinking in the barroom with prospective investors, told his brother to wait upstairs. But John Colt couldn’t wait more than a few minutes, so John Colt returned to his office.

Finding the body in the box

Mr. Gross

Colt had a long wooden box in the corner of his office. He decided to ship the body in the box to another city. It wasn’t easy. He stripped Adams’ clothes and tied him up, but his knees stuck out. So Colt stood on top of the box until it closed and nailed it shut. He threw Adams’ clothes into a public outhouse, washed his clothes in a public bathhouse and addressed the box to a fictional Mr. Gross in New Orleans.

The next morning he hailed a cartman from the office and paid him to take the box to the Kalamazoo in the East River. The box was put aboard the steamer, but the weather turned stormy. The Kalamazoo couldn’t sail.

The Arrest

Unbeknownst to John Colt, his neighbor had heard a sound like foils clashing and a violent fall on the floor. The neighbor notified the landlord and the police, and he kept a close watch on John Colt. When he read in the newspaper that Samuel Adams had gone missing, he reported his suspicions to the mayor, Robert Morris. The mayor then ordered the head of the cartmen to investigate. They quickly figured out where the box had gone, and the Kalamazoo was unloaded. The cartman who took it from Colt recognized it immediately.

Morris joined police in arresting John Colt. He confessed and pleaded self-defense. Brother Sam paid for his high-priced defense with shares in the company.

The Trial

During the trial, witnesses testified that the wounds on Samuel Adams head included a small round hole. They suggested John Colt killed Adams with his brother’s new invention. In one of history’s more bizarre product placements, Samuel Colt put on a marksmanship show with his revolver.

John Colt’s sinful living arrangements with his mistress didn’t help his case. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to hang.

Then things got really strange.

John Colt asked to make an honest woman of Caroline, who had given birth to a son named Samuel. On the day of his execution, he married Caroline in New York’s Tombs prison with Sam and John Howard Payne (who wrote Home Sweet Home) in attendance. His jailers left them alone for an hour for a conjugal visit.

As the moment for his execution approached, the Tombs roof burst into flames. Prison guards ran to put out the fire. When they returned to Colt’s cell, they found him in a pool of blood, a knife protruding from his heart. They presumed his wedding guests had slipped him the knife.

The Tombs

Rumors

For years afterward, people claimed to have seen John Colt alive and well. They believed his friends or maybe his brother had set the fire, substituted a corpse with a knife in it and spirited him away.

New York’s police chief wrote a book claiming he’d fled to California with his wife.

And historians speculate that John Colt’s mistress Caroline was really Caroline Henshaw, Mrs. Samuel Colt.

Samuel Colt ultimately succeeded in his arms business. He struggled for another five years after his brother’s death until the Texas Ranger bought a thousand revolvers for us in the Mexican War. He built a factory in Hartford, and married the well-born Elizabeth Jarvis in 1856. They had four children, but only one made it to adulthood and then drowned at the age of 35.

All along he sent money to Caroline, who had moved to Europe with her son. Samuel Colt referred to the boy as his ‘nephew,’ always in quotation marks. As a young man, he went to work in the Colt arms factory, where Hartford knew him as Sam Colt’s favorite nephew.

The arms business prospered, and Samuel Colt become one of the richest men in the United States. However, he died from complications of gout, however, in 1862 at the age of 47. His wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to their stillborn child after he died.

In his will, Samuel Colt named his nephew as one of his heirs, bequeathing him $2 million in today’s money. Elizabeth Colt contested the will in court, and Samuel Colt produced a valid marriage certificate proving his mother had married her husband in Scotland in 1838.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Texas-Size Story of William Marsh Rice

On September 23, 1900, William Marsh Rice lay down to sleep, and he would never wake up again. He had an upset stomach from medications he’d taken. At 5-foot-4 and 90 pounds, he made an easy target for Charles Jones, his valet and quasi-secretary.

Jones clamped a rag soaked with chloroform over the 84-year-old Rice’s face and killed him. The murder ended a rather remarkable life that began from humble beginnings in Springfield, Mass., wound through Texas and back to Manhattan. There Rice was murdered by Jones and A.T. Patrick, one of his lawyers.

William Marsh Rice

Patrick and Jones had plotted for months, looking for a way to get at Rice’s fortune. When they killed him they thought they had succeeded. In the end, however, police uncovered the plot to murder Rice and steal his estate. Ultimately the money went to establish Houston’s Rice University, named for the Massachusetts entrepreneur. But it didn’t happen without a lot of effort and misery.

William Marsh Rice

William Marsh Rice was born in Springfield on March 14, 1816. His father, David, worked at a forging shop at the Springfield Armory making rifle barrels and bayonets. His mother, Patty, raised their family, which consisted of 10 children (William was second oldest).

David was active in town and church affairs, serving as tax assessor and donating land for the Methodist Church, which he and Patty avidly supported. They named William for a Methodist Minister, William Marsh.

Springfield Armory

As a child, William was not much of a student, and he left school at 15 to clerk in a grocery store run by a retired whaling captain. At the store he began mastering the art of making money. Within three years, he had established his own store. He was so young that his father needed to co-sign for him to start the business, but William soon made it a success, adding $2,000 to his name.

In 1838, like many young men seeking their fortunes, Rice headed west for Texas. He initially faced some headwinds. First he tried to establish a store, but he lost of shipment of goods to bad weather. Then a speculative bubble caused a recession that dampened the economy. But soon, Marsh prospered. He sold a little bit of everything and had his hand in many businesses. He shipped cotton, started a railroad, loaned money for mortgages, bought and sold land and timber, made bricks, ran a hotel and refined vegetable oil.

Leaving Texas

By 1860, he probably ranked as the second wealthiest man in Texas, with a fortune of $750,000. The Houston-based William M. Rice and Company name was becoming well known. Though he didn’t oppose slavery (he owned several at one point, received as payment for debts), he never owned a plantation. He didn’t like the boom and bust of cotton prices. Rice most likely opposed the Civil War, seeing it as harmful to trade.

Nichols-Rice-Cherry House, where William Marsh Rice lived from 1856 and 1873

Following the war, his railroad and other business interests began expanding rapidly. He also dabbled in selling insurance. But he saw another change sweeping the country. Just as going west had made sense in the 1830s, going north made sense following the war. That’s because northern financiers would have a lot more influence in the South.

In addition, a Yankee in the South was always suspect in the harsh years that followed the Civil War. So Rice removed himself from Texas and moved to New York in 1866.

William Marsh Rice Gets Married

He married his second wife in New York. His first wife Margaret Bremond died in 1863. His second, Elizabeth Brown, died in 1896. Her death ultimately led to his own.

The Rices had no children, and William had planned for years to leave a share of his fortune to an orphanage in his adopted home state of New Jersey. The bulk of it he would leave to establish Rice University.

But in the last year of her life, Elizabeth suffered several strokes. During that time, she met an unscrupulous lawyer and signed a will separate from William’s and unknown to him. The will would have distributed parts of the estate to family, as well as the orphanage. It also provided for 10 percent payment to the lawyer to distribute the funds.

It wasn’t until after she died that William learned of the will. A court battle ensued in Texas to invalidate it on the grounds that Elizabeth was not a resident of Texas, as the will claimed. It’s not clear how much of the will was Elizabeth’s idea and how much was the lawyer’s, but it seems unlikely she would have claimed Texas as her residence.

Rice University administration building in 1913

Schemers

With the lawsuits underway, Rice returned to New York from Texas. But before he left he hired a new valet, Charles Jones. In New York Jones began to scheme to get part of the Rice fortune for himself. A.T. Patrick, a local lawyer, managed to ingratiate himself with Rice, probably with Jones’ assistance. The two began manipulating the old man, all the while slowly poisoning him with mercury.

Then in September of 1900, the two men saw their chance. Patrick had already forged a will that left the Rice estate to himself. But he didn’t know how much Rice actually was worth. That month a hurricane and fire destroyed a vegetable oil plant that Rice owned in Louisiana. Rice decided to use his available cash to rebuild it. He had checks drawn up for $180,000 to pay for reconstruction.

The size of the amount alarmed Jones and Patrick. They managed to get Rice to sign the checks, but made them out to pay the funds to Patrick. Soon after, they murdered Rice.

The scheme began falling apart almost immediately. Among other problems, Jones had misspelled Patrick’s name on one check. When Patrick attempted to cash them, the bank decided to investigate before making payment.

When it came to light that Rice had died, suspicions grew. And then Patrick produced the forged will.

As police began asking more questions, Jones learned about the content of the will – including the fact that he was not named in it, just Patrick. He then began cooperating with prosecutors.

Rice University

Throughout his life, William Marsh Rice sent money and gifts to his Massachusetts family, at one point buying his parents a house. He visited often, but his heart was not in Massachusetts. Nor was it in New York, but in Texas where he had made his fortune.

Rice University Houston Texas

Lawyers for the budding university successfully wrestled his estate from not one but two sets of lawyers who had tried to abscond with it. By the end, more than $1 million was spent on legal fees. But $4.6 million remained to found the university of Rice’s dreams.

As for the men who killed him, Jones was allowed to return to Texas in exchange for his testimony. Years later he would kill himself.

Patrick was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Later his wealthy family managed to win him a pardon. He ended his life practicing law for an oil company.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Nichols-Cherry-Rice House By little black spot on the sun today – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9432797. William Marsh Rice statue By Ed Schipul – https://www.flickr.com/photos/16638697@N00/10213400874, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94640453.

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Columbus Smith Found Fortune Abroad, Sadness at Home.

Columbus Smith, a Vermont lawyer, found in 1844 he could make a fortune by researching old deeds to locate the rightful heirs of English estates. For the next two decades he pursued other peoples’ inheritances, taking a cut for himself. He married, built an eye-popping mansion in Salisbury and collected antiquities. Part I of this story is here.

Columbus Smith

Columbus Smith seemed to set his life on a safe and sedate course, returning to live in Salisbury, Vt., after years spent in New York and Europe. If there is a lesson to his story, perhaps it is to never slow down because you don’t know what may be chasing you. In Smith’s case, he was chased by a series of calamities.

His first serious setback occurred in 1881. Columbus and Harriet’s son William, then 14, died of meningitis. The couple constructed an ornate mausoleum on their property, with glass shelves to hold its residents encased in glass-topped coffins. William was the first to occupy a space in the building.

Lost Hope

The death rattled Columbus Smith. His children’s former tutor, Irving Bacheller, by then living in New York, returned to Salisbury for a visit. He found Smith’s grief over the death of his son – “the main hope of his life” – had taken a harsh toll. It aged Columbus Smith and softened his mind.

After William died, Smith remained active in business and charitable affairs. He continued investing and building. He and Harriet spent one winter in Los Angeles, and he traveled to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition.

Mary (Smith) McDowell

But daughter Mary was a growing concern. There are hints that during this time Mary, affectionately known as Pinky, was not well. She travelled to the American desert in the Southwest for health reasons. In 1896, however, it was announced that she would be married to Dr. Alexander McDowell of Bowling Green, Va.

McDowell was the son of Gen. Irvin McDowell, who led the Union troops in their ill-fated battle of Bull Run in the Civil War. Alexander had first followed in his father’s footsteps, enrolling at the West Point military academy. He completed his education at the Medical School of Columbian College, now George Washington University, and entered the Marine Corps.

Another Blow

The wedding would, of course, be a grand celebration. First scheduled for St. Stephen’s Church in Middlebury, the ceremony was performed at Shard Villa, and it was the talk of the county.

A little more than a year later, Mary died of tuberculosis. Seeing his last child join her brother in the family mausoleum apparently pushed the elderly Columbus Smith into depression.

Decline and Delusions

Columbus Smith grew acerbic and less attentive to details. His wife would later say that 1897 was the year she had to ‘get into harness’ and begin working to maintain their estate and wealth.

After leading a largely healthy life, Columbus Smith twice checked into sanitariums. Doctors treated him for his depression and Bright’s disease, then sent him home with medication. Harriet believed he would have avoided much misery if he had started taking his medication as soon as his daughter had died.

The decade of decline following Mary’s death was marked by paranoid delusions. Smith believed people were trying to steal his fortune, and he even made allegations against his wife. By the end, he had lost the power of speech, only able to make sounds. Smith died in November 1909.

Once Prominent

His obituaries noted that he was ‘at one time’ a prominent power in Vermont. Originally thought to have millions, he left an estate appraised at $340,000. It included far-flung properties in Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Texas and the Dakotas as well as New England.

In his will, Columbus Smith expressed the intent that Shard Villa should be converted to a nursing home for ‘old Christian women not addicted to drink.’ He stipulated the residual of his estate should fund its operation. Upon Harriet’s death in 1919, that’s what the mansion became – but not without one more legal entanglement. Would Columbus Smith have wanted it any other way?

The Final Probate Showdown

Anna Perry of Gardiner, Mass., and Fred Page of Ludlow, Vt. – a grandniece and grandnephew—challenged Smith’s will, which was written and amended from 1897 to 1903. They argued he was insane when he largely disinherited his family.

They pointed to curious details, such as a bequest of $1 to his brother-in-law ‘to buy a feather for his cap when he played soldier or a whistle and rattle to amuse himself in his declining years.’

To his wife, he left $25,000 ‘or $50,000 if she preferred.’ Such statements could be seen as whimsical, or evidence of mental decline. The Addison County Court heard from 112 witnesses, many of them friends and neighbors divided on the question of his sanity over the last decade of his life. After a hung jury couldn’t decide the matter on the first go-round, the Addison County Court declared the will valid.

Harriet Smith

Harriet, who had considerable wealth of her own apart from her husband’s, could have easily afforded to settle the case with her relatives. She declined to do so, fighting until the end to defend the will.

In 1914, the Supreme Court also upheld the will, which allowed for the establishment of the rest home at Shard Villa.

What happened next…

Shard Villa today remains an active and functioning nursing home. It entered a period of instability, and its board of trustees envisioned closing it in 2008. It has since undergone a revival, however, and is home to 15-to-18 residents.

On the grounds of the mansion, the mausoleum holds four bodies: Columbus, Harriet, William and Mary. A place for Mary’s husband Alexander B. McDowell remains empty.

In another tragic twist to the story, Alexander McDowell slit his own throat in 1908 while living in New York City. He had continued his relationship with the Smiths, traveling to Vermont to see them. And had he outlived Smith, he was to receive $2,000 from the estate, a room in perpetuity at the Shard Villa and the option to be resident physician at the facility if he wished.

Collections of haunted house stories also include Shard Villa, claiming Columbus Smith remains unsettled and still wanders the grounds from time to time.

Images: Photographer Don Shall’s Flickr Album; Middlebury College Special Collections; Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History’s Shard Villa and its People Exhibit.

This story about Columbus Smith was updated in 2022.

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