On Saturday evening, Sept, 28, 1895, Georgetta Dalby received a letter from her husband postmarked Boston saying that he 
could no longer go on living. He was facing financial ruin and had embarrassed himself with his friends and could find no other way out. When she received this letter, it read, George Dalby would be dead.
Frantic, Mrs. Dalby accompanied by a policeman, left her home in West Newton, Mass., to search her husband’s known haunts in Boston. He was nowhere to be found. They even paid a midnight visit to the Boston and Maine train station to see if he might board the Portland train because he had recently expressed a desire to go there.
George Dalby
George S. Dalby sent two other letters that day as well. One was to his neighbor, E.E. Burdon, asking that Burdon take care of Dalby’s life insurance policy to pay for his debts. The other went to his friend Walter Grant also saying that he planned to take his own life.
Word of these death notes spread rapidly. But soon his friends, business associates and his wife believed he did not commit suicide – and that he was very much alive.
George Dalby
George Dalby was well known in Boston and Newton. The owner of a painting and decorating establishment on Chestnut Street in West Newton, he was active in his trade association and in Democratic politics, having been a delegate to the state convention in 1892. His business also had a Boston office, located at 340 Boylston St., across from the Arlington Street Church.
He had a reputation around Boston as a poker player and was a familiar face at hotels around the city where games were held.
The Boston Globe building along Newspaper Row
Dalby’s disappearance dominated the Boston press for nearly a week, as reporters searched for any detail, any clue, that might explain what happened. This story is based primarily on their reporting.
A Busy Friday
In the days preceding his disappearance, Dalby was busy. He cashed checks around town, asked friends to loan him money and even sold the contents of his business, including his horse and wagon. Police estimated that around the time of his disappearance he amassed about $3,500.
His account at the West Newton Bank was overdrawn by $1,000.
He was not at home in Newton Thursday or Friday nights, although he was at work at his business in West Newton on Friday. His foreman described him as being cross, and that he owed his employees “considerable back salary.”
Sometime during the day on Friday, Dalby visited his neighbor E.E. Burdon at Burdon’s office in the Equitable Building at the corner of Milk and Devonshire Streets. This ornate Second Empire building was across Milk Street from the old Boston Post Office, about three blocks from Washington Street.
Boston in 1894
Burdon was an agent for Equitable Life Assurance. Presumably, their meeting was about Dalby’s $15,000 life insurance policy.
Late Friday night, he registered at the Creighton House Hotel on Tremont Street in Boston.
Tremont Street. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
A Fake Suicide
Dalby staged an elaborate ruse that Saturday. Around 2:00 p.m., he purchased a steamer ticket to Rockland, Maine, at the ticket office of the Boston and Bangor Line on Foster’s Wharf near Atlantic Avenue. He told the purser that he hadn’t slept the previous night and wished to stay in his stateroom to sleep the afternoon. The steamship was due to depart at 5:00 p.m.
Dalby never got off the vessel at Rockland, and when the Lewiston docked later at Bangor, crew members forced the stateroom door open. The cabin was unoccupied, the door bolted from the inside and the window was open, although a man of Dalby’s size (he weighed about 200 pounds), couldn’t possibly have fit through.
Investigators found a blue suit, a pair of russet shoes and a brown derby. In his pocket was 75 cents in change. His Masonic pin was among the garments.
They also found a whiskey flask (2/3 full), an empty blue bottle of carbolic acid, identifiable by its sweet and tarry odor, and a glass that contained a mixture of the two.
Early Saturday Afternoon: A Very Tight Timeline
Before purchasing his steamer ticket, Dalby was seen by witnesses rapidly walking in the streets of Boston. The Boston Globe reported he was seen leaving Clark’s Hotel on 577 Washington Street at 1:00 p.m., and that he was unencumbered by any luggage or packages.
George Rice of West Newton saw Dalby at 1:35 that afternoon near the Globe office on Washington Street. Rice greeted him as Dalby bowed slightly in recognition, noting that Dalby was carrying several packages that looked like dry goods bundles. Dalby wore a blue serge coat and a brown derby and was walking toward State Street.
Twenty minutes after Rice sighted him on Washington Street, Dalby was at Foster’s Wharf waiting to buy his steamer ticket when the office opened at 2:00 p.m.
What could be in those bundles? A short walk from Clark’s Hotel to the Globe office took Dalby through the heart of Boston’s retail district. Assuming the bundles contained clothing, there were over a dozen possible stops to purchase such items, ranging from the huge R.H. White and Company dry goods at 536 Washington Street to the Washburn Credit House across from Jordan Marsh, where customers could buy clothing on credit. Several establishments offered “dress suits to let,” including J.H. Lewis Merchant Tailor and Farrington and Hall’s.
Dalby bought the acid at Malvin and Badger’s Apothecary on Temple Place just two blocks from Clark’s, which meant he could have purchased it that Saturday just before his sighting at the Globe building.
Significantly, the clerk from whom he bought it said that it was not enough to kill a man.
George Dalby, Last Seen Wearing
Sometime Saturday afternoon after purchasing his ticket, Dalby left the steamship miraculously unnoticed.
At 4:00, Dalby was seen at the Town Club at 40 Boylston Street, where he cashed a check for $100. He told people there, including his friend Walter Grant, that he had to catch a steamer later that night. When he left the club, he was carrying a russet-colored handbag.
At 4:30, he sent the three letters from Clark’s Hotel on Washington Street announcing his impending suicide.
The Boston-to-Bangor steamer departed from Foster’s Wharf at 5:00 p.m.
Shortly after 5:30 p.m., Dalby was seen by Martin Laffie near Brattle Street. Laffie, an acquaintance from West Newton, had taken the 4:30 train from Lowell to Boston arriving at Union Station on Causeway Street (where North Station is today) at 5:30. Laffie was headed to the Boston and Albany Station (near today’s South Station) to catch the local train to West Newton.
Dalby turned away when he saw Laffie, passing hurriedly on in the direction of Union Station, away from the steamer at Foster’s Wharf, away from downtown Boston, away from his wife and his business in West Newton — away.
He was wearing a black sack coat (loose fitting, hanging straight down), dark trousers and a black derby! And he was not carrying a russet handbag.
Bird’s eye view of Boston Harbor with steamboat routes.
Aftermath of the George Dalby Disappearance
Dalby was never heard from again as far as is known. Most people speculated that he left the country, probably to Canada to start a new life.
Rumors ran rampant. That his business was failing, that he was in debt for gambling losses, that there was another woman. His home life also leads to much speculation. Mrs. Dalby said that he wasn’t home Thursday night, Friday night and, of course, Saturday night. Was this unusual behavior for him?
There also was heartbreak in their marriage. The Boston papers reported that they had no children, and certainly that was true at the time of Dalby’s disappearance. Three years earlier they lost their son Philip to pneumonia at the age of 10 months. Who knows what toll this tragedy might have had on the couple?
There are a few mentions of Georgetta after the sad affair of her husband’s disappearance. She visited New Hampshire in 1899, traveling with friends to The Balsams and the Crawford House, popular resorts in the White Mountains.
In 1900, she was living with her sister in Everett, Mass.
Although there is no record of George S. Dalby’s death, or of their divorce, Georgetta eventually remarried in 1908 to Nathaniel Dill. They then lived in Harvard, Mass. They married in Connecticut and, apparently, she had reverted to her maiden name of Tufts before this marriage. She died in 1917 of abdominal cancer at age 54 and is buried in Everett.
End Notes
James F. Lee, the author of this story, is a freelance writer and blogger whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and AAA Tidewater Traveler Magazine. He can be reached at www.jamesflee.com.
Images: Dalby image, The Boston Globe, Wed. Oct 2, 1895, p. 5, (accessed from newspapers.com. (7/5/2024); Boston map, Geo. H. Walker & Co., 1894, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:7h149v16j (accessed 7/4/2024); Boston Globe Building, Washington Street, Boston circa 1906, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-det.4a13546; Globe headlines, The Boston Globe, Oct 3, 1895, p. 5, (accessed from newspapers.com 7/9/2024).
Bird’s eye view of Boston Harbor: By http://maps.bpl.org – Bird’s eye view of Boston Harbor and south shore to Provincetown showing steamboat routesUploaded by tm, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807196
Sources:
Boston Evening Transcript, Oct 9, 1895, and Sept. 1, 1899. Newspapers.com (accessed 6/27 and 7/7/ 2024).
The Boston Globe, Mar 30, Sept. 30, Oct 2,3,4, 1895. Newspapers.com (accessed June 22, 23, and July 8, 2024).
Boston City Directory, 1895, Courtesy of Boston Atheneum Digital Collections.
Newton City Directory, 1895, City of Newton, Massachusetts.
U.S. Census, 1900 and 1910 (accessed via Ancestry.com, 7/8/2024).
Massachusetts Death Records, Sept 1917. (accessed via Ancestry.com 7/8/2024).
Connecticut Genealogy Index. List of Marriages, Orange, Connecticut, 1908. www.connecticutgeneology.org.
