“Movember” or “No-Shave November” is a new tradition dating only back to 2003, when a group of Australians started growing “Mos” (Australian slang for “‘stache”) to raise awareness of men’s health issues, especially prostate cancer and depression. As many cancer patients lose their hair, some men this season are paying homage to the golden days when spectacular whiskers grew wild and free.
There’s more than a little five-o’clock foreshadowing, then, in that mustachioed dandy from 1900 pictured above. “Nervita pills” were one of many old-time panaceas that purported to relieve some of the more difficult masculine ailments, though this one, of course, wouldn’t cure one of the worst, cancer. Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the American public really did talk about sex-related issues back then — not necessarily on the front page, but certainly in the ads section, which was often full of treatments from doctors and drug store owners.
Since Hoosier State Chronicles often highlights episodes of American medical history, here’s our tribute to “No-Shave November.” We waded through a plethora of debonair mustachios and culled some worthy ones. Many yet remain for your discovery.
Amazingly, as an Indianapolis barber feared in November 1902, these bold bristles would soon enough go out of style. The Hoosier State’s own Benjamin Harrison was among the last generation of unshorn presidents. Since William Howard Taft in 1913, no president has sported facial hair, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, whose disastrous five-o’clock shadow contributed to his loss to JFK in 1960. Even the boldest and most unconventional candidates in the coming election year don’t appear prepared to change this.
The following image from the cover of The Jewish Post (a national paper first printed in Indianapolis in 1933) isn’t Santa Claus, but a rabbi. The paper’s Rosh Hashanah or Jewish New Years’ edition came out in September 1939, just a few weeks into World War II.
(“A mix-up in bicycle polo,” Fort Wayne Daily News, August 29, 1896.)
Some native Hoosiers were known to sport impressive facial — or overgrowth, depending on your point of view. Lew Wallace, the Crawfordsville native who became colonel of the 11th Indiana Infantry (a Zouave regiment), Civil War general, territorial governor of New Mexico, author of the novel Ben Hur, and U.S. Minister to Turkey. Wallace’s Ben Hur came out on “this day in history,” November 12, 1880.
(Major General Lew Wallace.)
(A younger Benjamin Harrison, Indiana’s only president.)
Lawrenceburg’s James Henry “Jim” Lane became one of the most famous Jayhawk border fighters in Kansas during the run-up to the Civil War. A fiery abolitionist, Lane served as Lieutenant Governor of Indiana before he became a U.S. Senator from Kansas and a Civil War general. Wracked by depression, the famous wild and unkempt Hoosier Plainsman committed suicide in 1866 by shooting himself in the head while jumping out of a carriage.
(Jim Lane, Hoosier native and Kansas “Jayhawk.”)
In 1852, Lane was part of the welcoming committee at the State House when one of the most famously hairy men of his time, Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, paid a visit to Indianapolis. Kossuth — after whom a town in Washington County, Indiana, and a county in Iowa was named — had just escaped from Hungary via Turkey, been carried into exile on the USS Mississippi, and was touring the U.S., where crowds hailed him as a hero of democracy. Kossuth also inspired some Indianapolis men to become “hairy-faced bipeds.”
(Lajos Kossuth, photographed in Washington, D.C., before he traveled west to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis in early 1852.)
(Madison Daily Banner, Madison, Indiana, March 3, 1852.)
One famous mustachioed American who often showed up in Indiana was the great boxing champion John L. Sullivan. Sullivan was from Boston but often came to the small-town Midwest for championship matches and general showmanship. He and his whiskers showed up in Logansport, Fort Wayne, and other towns in 1896.
Yet even the athletic Sullivan could have paid more attention to his own health. A heavy drinker for most of his life, the boxer later gave up the bottle and turned Prohibitionist Yet his overindulgence in food and booze led Sullivan to an early death at the age of just 59. It was said he died with “barely ten dollars in his pocket.”
(John L. Sullivan, 1858-1918.)
(The Fort Wayne News, August 22, 1896.)
Here’s another wild but lesser known visitor to the state. The famous shagginess of Polish pianist and composer Ignaz Jan Paderewski, “Wizard of the Keys,” was something that newspapers often noticed and editorialized.
In April 1902, Paderewski performed at Tomlinson Hall (above the “city catacombs”) in Indianapolis. This performer led a life as wild and varied as the direction of his hair. In addition to his global career as a concert artist, Paderewski later become a wine-grower in California and a politician who helped re-establish Polish independence after World War I. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1940, he became the head of the Polish parliament exiled in London. Paderewski died in New York in 1941.
One last forgotten visitor worthy of note for his ‘stache was the spectacular Captain Jack Bonavita (real name John F. Gentner). The Indiana Tribüne announced Bonavita’s visit to “the Zoo” in 1901. This wasn’t the Indianapolis Zoo, but the old Zoo Theater, a vaudeville venue that once sat next to the Cyclorama across from the State House.
A famous animal trainer in New York and Hollywood, Captain Bonavita also worked with the silent film industry. Not long after this photo was taken, he was bitten by one of his trained lions in Indianapolis and spent some time at the City Hospital. He recovered from that bite in 1901. Tragically, in 1917, Bonavita was killed by a polar bear he was training.
Hoosier State Chronicles has just uploaded over 3,500 issues of The Jewish Post, a historic weekly (now biweekly) published Indianapolis since 1933. Here’s a bit of the paper’s history — and of Jewish journalism in the Midwest.
While the center of American Jewish culture has always been identified as New York, the Ohio Valley saw the birth of one of the first Jewish-run periodicals in the U.S. This was Cincinnati’s The Israelite.
Founded in July 1854, and today printed under the title The American Israelite, this paper is the oldest surviving Jewish news organ in the country. After the London Jewish Chronicle, begun in 1841, it is the second oldest in the world. Cincinnati’s The Israelite was the brain child of pioneer Austrian rabbi Dr. Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), who was also one of the founders of Hebrew Union College, the oldest Jewish seminary in the Americas. During World War II, HUC attracted one of the great Jewish theologians and Civil Rights leaders, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who called the Midwest home for a few years while serving on the school’s faculty.
The Israelite, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 15, 1859.The Jewish Post, July 16, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Before 1900, small towns in the Midwest and South were often home to much larger Jewish communities than today. Even seemingly far-flung rural places like Woodville, Mississippi; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Harlan, Kentucky, had sizable Jewish populations. With the plantation economy of the South closely tied to the shipment of products up and down the rivers between New Orleans and the Midwest, Jewish merchants settled all over the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. Though most Jews later left for opportunities in cities, the Institute of Southern Jewish Life has documented the fascinating history of Jews in small-town America.
Some settled in Indiana. One of the first European Jews to come here was Louis (Ludwig) Dembitz, an immigrant from Prussian Poland who practiced law in the thriving river town of Madison, Indiana, around 1850. When the great Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth visited Madison in 1852, Dembitz translated his speech (given in German). He later edited a German-language newspaper in Louisville, the Beobachter am Ohio. Louis Dembitz was also the uncle of Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. Brandeis, who died in 1941, changed his middle name from David to Dembitz to honor him. In 1855, the judge’s parents were married at a now-defunct synagogue in Madison, Indiana.
Even tiny towns like Ligonier in Noble County occasionally had small Jewish populations early on in their history. One of the first Jews in the Wabash Valley was the Vincennes trader Samuel Judah (1798-1869). Descended from a family of Spanish Jews who moved to Canada and New York, Judah bought land in Terre Haute in the 1820s and went into politics. In 1840-41, he served as Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Before Chicago grew into a huge metropolis after the Civil War and before trains eclipsed river traffic, life in the Midwest was largely focused on the Ohio Valley. Indianapolis’ Jewish Post, in fact, began in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1930.
Expanded and printed in several different state editions, this paper was created by long-time owner and editor Gabriel Murrel Cohen (1908-2007). Born in Louisville, Cohen earned a Bachelor’s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1930 — the same year he went home to Kentucky to start The Jewish Post at age 22. Though Cohen moved his editorial offices moved to Indianapolis in 1935, he kept a printing office in Louisville into the 1940s and often carried ads for businesses in “Falls City.”
Advertised as “A Journal for Indiana Jewry,” in fact for years this was really a bi-state paper.
Kentucky-born, North Carolina-educated Gabriel Murrel Cohen moved the Jewish Post to Indianapolis in 1935, when he was 27. He died in 2007.The Jewish Post, September 14, 1939. Hoosier State Chronicles. This issue celebrated the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. “Falls City” was one of the Ohio Valley’s most popular brews from the end of Prohibition in 1933 until the original brewery closed down in 1978.
The year 1933 was a momentous one for beginning a Jewish newspaper in the Midwest. The state had only recently been freed up from the grip of the powerful Ku Klux Klan, which dominated Hoosier politics until about 1927. In a battle spearheaded by newspapers like the Indianapolis Times — which urged Hoosiers to remember that “Indiana is not Russia” — the Klan had just fallen from power when the first issue of The Jewish Post came out. A decade earlier, the KKK’s mouthpiece, The Fiery Cross, was printed in the Century Building, under the editorship of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson — a professional anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, racist, and one of the most powerful men in America. A mainstream organization in the Twenties, the KKK touted “100% Americanism,” Protestantism, anti-immigrant attitudes, and female purity, as well as the federal prohibition of alcohol.
Franklin Roosevelt repealed Prohibition in 1933, the year The Jewish Post was first printed under the editorship of Leonard Rothschild. In late 1935, Gabriel Cohen’s Spokesman Company bought Rothschild out. Originally based at 505 West Washington Street, the editorial offices briefly moved to the East Side by 1936, when Cohen was based at 2101 East Washington Street in a building that later housed the dingy California Nite Club. Cohen and his staff were back downtown in 1937, operating in the Majestic Building and Meridian Life Building.
While the new 4-page paper carried local news of Jewish interest from Indiana, Kentucky and the U.S., during the 1930s and 1940s its front pages focused on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the plight of European Jews.
Yet The Jewish Post didn’t only announce the perils of anti-Semitism overseas and at home. The paper also affirmed Jewish identity in Indianapolis and helped Hoosiers get to know themselves and their neighbors better.
A regular feature in early issues of The Jewish Post was a series of biographies of prominent — and promising — Indiana Jews. The paper typically ran these profiles ran every week. One focused on Ed Rose, a 20-year-old staff writer on the Indiana Daily Student at IU-Bloomington, in July 1937.
In 1937, Gabriel Cohen also serialized “A History of the Jews of Indianapolis” by Harry Dale, a story that begins in 1856, when fourteen men began looking for a site for a Jewish cemetery. Split between several local congregations, these officially separate burial grounds are known colloquially as “Kelly Street” and located just off South Meridian in a part of the Old Southside that was once heavily German, with some Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Greek households among them.
Gabriel Cohen’s Jewish Post also gave attention to the development of Zionism, the effort to set up a homeland for Jews. After World War II, that place turned out to be Israel, but Zionists once considered spots as far away as Saskatchewan and South America, as well.
Over the years, The Jewish Post took up the cause of interfaith unity. In its early days, it also covered the concern loss of Jewish identity in the face not just of the Holocaust, but of Americanization. Cohen’s paper ran occasional articles that document both the evolution of American Jewish identity and the struggle of Jews to stay true to their historic roots.
One interesting example came with the extremely rare production of a Yiddish play in Indianapolis. In March 1934, Maurice Schwartz, father of the “Golden Age of Yiddish Theater,” performed on stage at English’s on Monument Circle downtown. Schwartz was a Ukrainian-born actor raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1918, he founded the Yiddish Art Theatre At English’s Theater, Schwartz played a lead role in the Yoshe Kalb, which told the story of a Hasidic mystic. Before Schwartz’s death in 1960, he went on to work with a struggling young Jewish actor named Leonard Nimoy, who came from a Ukrainian Jewish family in Boston spoke Yiddish fluently. The man who played Star Trek’s Mr. Spock remembered Schwartz as his “theatrical father.”
Indianapolis didn’t have the only Jewish newspaper in the Midwest in those years. An even earlier paper, Chicago’s The Sentinel, dated back to 1911. In 1921, Milwaukee saw the birth of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (digitized on Newspapers.com). The Ohio Jewish Chronicle began in Columbus in 1922, followed by the Detroit Jewish News in 1942 and the St. Louis Jewish Light in 1947.
In 1948, Gabriel Cohen expanded his paper nationally. In addition to the original Indiana edition, he ran a special Missouri edition from 1948 until 1992. Along with its Indiana edition, the National Jewish Post & Opinion is still in print today.
Shapiro’s has long been the cornerstone of Indianapolis delicatessens, though it’s the last of the Jewish businesses of the Old Southside. The Jewish Post, June 18, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.The Jewish Post, November 2, 1962. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Based on West 86th Street in Indianapolis, the newspaper is now a biweekly. In addition to its longstanding commitment to interfaith dialogue, The Jewish Post & Opinion defines its mission as “To support Israel and to fight anti-Semitism. To heal and repair the world (tikkun olam). To protect, promote, and preserve time-honored Jewish values such as ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
In cooperation with IUPUI’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the staff of The Jewish Post & Opinion, Hoosier State Chronicles has brought 73 years of this historic journal’s Indiana edition online — from the very first issue in 1933 all the way up through 2005.
Around two o’clock on the morning of Saturday, September 5, 1891, Crawfordsville ice delivery men Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray prepared their wagon for morning rounds when suddenly a feeling of “awe and dread” overcame them. Peering heavenward, the men saw a “horrible apparition.” The Crawfordsville Journal described what they witnessed:
[It was] about eighteen feet long and eight feet wide and moved rapidly through the air by means of several pairs of side fins. . . . It was pure white and had no definite shape or form, resembling somewhat a great white shroud fitted with propelling fins. There was no tail or head visible but there was one great flaming eye, and a sort of a wheezing plaintive sound was emitted from a mouth which was invisible. It flapped like a flag in the winds as it came on and frequently gave a great squirm as though suffering unutterable agony.
McIntyre and Gray observed the phenomenon hover three or four hundred feet in the air for nearly an hour before they retreated to the safety of the barn. They then quickly finished harnessing their horses and left the vicinity.
McIntyre and Gray weren’t the only witnesses that night. Perhaps the most reputable witness was G.W. Switzer, pastor of the First Methodist Church. Shortly after midnight, Rev. Switzer stepped out of his door to retrieve some water from the well when he espied the apparition. He woke his wife and they gawked as the thing “swam through the air in a writhing, twisting manner similar to the glide of some serpents.” As the Switzers watched, the mystery apparition seemed at one point as though it might descend on the lawn of Lane Place — home of late U.S. Senator Henry S. Lane’s widow — before it re-ascended and continued its circuitous route above the city.
When Crawfordsville residents heard of the sighting, ridicule came quickly to the eyewitnesses. On the heels of Professor Burton, “Keeley’s Institute for inebriates” in Plainfield reportedly wrote to Rev. Switzer and invited him to visit — obviously to seek a cure.
However, reports of the sightings also generated a number of believers. The Indianapolis Journal picked up the story, as did other newspapers across the country, including the Brooklyn Eagle. Mail regarding the sighting deluged the Crawfordsville postmaster. Some correspondents thought the sighting indicated that Judgment Day was near. A St. Louis woman, fearful of the spook’s western migration, wrote and asked if the apparition could be seen in the daytime, what color was it, and if the apparition had previously been in Ohio?
So what exactly did people see in the Crawfordsville sky that early September morning in 1891? Was it an apparition? UFO? A “rod,” like a 2008 episode of the History Channel’s Monster Quest implied? Or was it, as many internet sites suggest, an atmospheric beast!?!?
Fortunately, two eyewitnesses tracked the creature. John Hornbeck and Abe Hernley “followed the wraith about town and finally discovered it to be a flock of many hundred killdeer.” The many birds’ wings, white under-feathers, and plaintive cries contributed to the belief of many eyewitnesses that the creature(s) originated from the otherworld. Low visibility due to damp air likely compounded the misidentification. The Crawfordsville Journal hypothesized that the town’s newly installed electric lights caused the birds to become disoriented, hovering and wreathing their way above the city.
(Killdeer Plover, watercolor by John James Audubon.)
If that explanation does not satisfy, there is an alternative one. During the prior week, newspapers circulated another story from Crawfordsville. This one was about a “balloon parachute craze” taking hold among the town’s boys. While that could explain the billowing, sheet-like apparition, it fails to account for the “wheezing plaintive sound” emitting from the aerial monster. Well, the same report about the parachute craze also mentioned that the boys also liked to send cats up in their balloons. Could this have been what McIntyre, Gray, and the Switzers saw and heard instead?
As anti-climactic as these conclusions will be to modern readers — they’re also, no doubt, disappointing to cryptozoologists and ufologists — it is the complete story of the Crawfordsville monster as the Crawfordsville Journal reported it in early September 1891.
Incidentally, Crawfordsville published three newspapers in addition to the Journal. These were the Review, the Argus, and the Star. None of those papers so much as hinted that anything happened that September morning. This leads one to conclude that while a few citizens likely did see something unusual in the nocturnal sky, the Crawfordsville Journal overstated the incident to make an extra buck. And the nineteenth century was no more “gullible” than our own age. In other places around the world — like Fernvale, Australia, in 1927, and of course Roswell, New Mexico, since 1947 — reports of weird avian or other airborne visitors would pour in during the 20th century.
The Journal’s century old marketing ploy continues to generate lively discussion in the dark recesses of cyberspace and on late night radio talk-shows, where the Crawfordsville monster occasionally still goes out flying through the sky.
The best-known maritime disaster of 1912 was obviously the loss of the Titanic. Yet that winter had been fierce in the Midwest. From January to March, ice floes and so-called “icebergs” on Lake Michigan caused more than the usual disruption to shipping, and large parts of the lake froze over.
On March 11, with the great passenger liner’s doom still a month out, Chicagoans got something of a comic omen of that disaster. Afterwards, in late April, fishermen on the lakeshore near Gary, Indiana, made a surprise discovery — a find both morbid and funny.
The short-lived cargo freighter Flora M. Hill had been outfitted in 1910 at Kenosha, Wisconsin, just north of Chicago. Until its demise in March 1912, the ship hauled goods and passengers between Milwaukee, Green Bay and the Windy City. A steel steamer weighing over four-hundred tons, the vessel belonged to the Hill Steamboat Line of Kenosha and was captained by Wallace W. Hill, son of Ludlow Hill, a commercial fisherman who worked out of Drummond Island, Michigan.
This vessel hadn’t always been a freighter, though. Originally, the Flora M. Hill was a U.S. government-owned lighthouse tender named the Dahlia. Built in 1874 by the firm of Neafie & Levy in the Philadelphia shipyards, then put into commission at Detroit, during the 1880s and ’90s the Dahlia was used by the U.S. Lifesaving Service to carry out annual lighthouse inspections up and down Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. The crew set out iron buoys near the treacherous shoals around the Straits of Mackinac and the rocky reefs off the northern U.P. They also submitted ice reports.
(The lighthouse tender Dahlia, later re-outfitted as the Flora M. Hill, in Chicago harbor, during the winter of 1891.)
The “ancient” Dahlia wasn’t considered a reliable vessel, though. Mariners even complained that she had “to run for shelter every time a slight breeze springs up, and is totally unfitted for service in early spring or late in the fall.” In summer 1903, the Lifesaving Service replaced her with then newer Sumac. Then in 1909, the Hill Steamboat Company of Kenosha purchased her outright from the government, turned her into a cargo vessel, and gave her a new name.
Almost as soon as she went back into service, as a ferry between Chicago and points north, the Flora M. Hill figured into an unexplained “wireless hoax.”
In August 1910, Chicagoans were thrown into panic by the report of a passenger ship on fire several miles out. The wireless operator aboard the Christopher Columbus picked up a distress signal sent in Morse Code. With summer vacationers traveling over the lake to Saugatuck, Michigan, and Indiana Dunes, folks ashore feared a passenger liner was going down. Reports then came in that the former lighthouse ship, the Flora M. Hill, was the burning vessel. Fire tugs went out to find it. As the Flora M. Hill cruised into Chicago, however, she reported no mishaps. The hoax was blamed on a radio prankster in the city.
(The Inter Ocean, Chicago, August 12, 1910.)
In January 1912, the freighter had a early foretaste of its icy fate. She left Waukegan on January 13, then went missing. Volunteer search crews lined the lakeshore from Grant Park to Evanston to watch out for them, as well as to keep an eye on the tugs Indiana, Alabama, Iowa, Georgia, and Kansas, all of them stranded in the thick ice but within view. Yet the twenty-five crew members from Kenosha, feared lost, soon showed up at Chicago harbor.
Two months later, however, the Flora M. Hill came to its end. Sailing from Kenosha with a load of brass bedsteads, automotive supplies, leather goods, and a bunch of ladies’ silk underwear — all produced at Wisconsin factories — the ship got stranded in heavy ice floes just two miles from the Carter H. Harrison crib in Chicago.
Captain Wallace Hill hadn’t judged the floe dangerous. Yet when jammed a hole through the iron, and with his propeller jammed, he had to send out distress signals. By noon on March 11, the captain and crew of thirty-one, including a 72-year-old pilot and a female cook, had to abandon ship.
Fortunately, unlike the crew and passengers of the H.M.S. Titanic, they managed to get to safety — by walking, crawling, and jumping over “ice islands.”
(The Inter Ocean, March 12, 1912.)
Like Ernest Shackleton’s crew after The Endurance was crushed in Antarctic pack ice, the crew of the Flora M. Hill struck out for terra firma. The water underneath them, in fact, was just thirty-seven feet deep. The cook, Mrs. Sanville, hadn’t even wanted to leave the ship behind — she loved her stove — and she as the men manned the pumps, she continued cooking food and brewing fresh coffee for them. Yet as the group headed for shore, they helped protect Sanville and the elderly pilot, Theodore Thompson, from exposure to the wind. They had been caught in a blinding snowstorm.
Not far out, the crew were met by the tug Indiana, which had sped out as fast as possible to their rescue after getting the distress call.
(The tugboat Indiana carried the crew to Chicago’s Dearborn Street landing.)
(The Inter Ocean, March 12, 1912.)
What was left of the vessel, sunk in shallow water, was dynamited by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1913 as a navigational hazard. In 1976, a diver rediscovered the wreck’s remains, still used as a “beginner’s dive site” for recreational underwater explorers. Some divers have even brought up automobile headlamps, vestiges of the early days of Wisconsin’s long-disappeared auto industry.
Not all the wreckage of the Flora M. Hill, however, went to the bottom of Lake Michigan.
On April 21, 1912, a week after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, fishermen at Miller Beach, Indiana — now part of Gary — reported some unusual finds there. Investigators confirmed the identity of this cargo when a couple of life jackets bearing the name Flora M. Hill turned up amid the wreckage. This story came out in Hammond’s Lake County Times on April 22 — directly beneath a report on the recovery of Titanic victims.
Comically, the morbid coffins — probably empty ones in transport — weren’t the only objects found to have washed up on the Indiana shore.
Taking out an ad to find a marriageable mate long pre-dates (pun intended) the days of the internet. While American men, especially out West, were more likely to have to resort to “mail-order brides” and the advertising columns of newspapers, a surprising number of women were also willing to do something unconventional to reel in a good husband. Chicago marriage bureaus in the 1880s had more female clients than male.
In the mid-1800s, before newspapers were able to print photographs alongside “Wife Wanted” or “Husband Wanted” ads, a witty writing style was essential to vintage seekers of Cupid. And while Americans back then certainly ranked each other according to social standing and wealth — as they still do today — money, physical beauty, and professional promise weren’t always absolutely required in a partner.
Some of the most highly valued traits, in fact, were common sense, practicality, and a good sense of humor. Many prospective spouses — male and female — made no secret about their preference for “no-frills” applicants. Heart palpitations, “foppery,” “extravagance,” and “a pocket full of musk”? No, thanks!
Some of what follows was probably meant as a joke, but these caught our eye, anyway.
Here’s some of our favorite historic “lonesome hearts” ads — from the Hoosier State and all over. If you can find a time machine, this may be your chance.
Here’s our personal comic favorite, originally printed in a St. Louis, Missouri, newspaper. The ad even went “viral,” appearing all over the South in 1866.
One of the most long-winded “matrimonials” was actually written up by the staff of the Lake County Times in northwest Indiana. Sam Crow, who was out looking for a wife on March 6, 1914, brings us up into the twentieth century.
Sadly, Sam Crow never found a wife — and no little crows ever “hopped and skipped over that splendid western land of his.” He died in Greencastle in January 1916, still unmarried.
When the fiery abolitionist John Brown, “The Meteor” who tried to ignite a slave rebellion in the South, was hanged for treason, authorities turned the body over to his family. In December 1859, Brown’s remains traveled north by train from the hanging grounds in Charles Town, Virginia, to the family farm in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Around Christmastime, he was laid to rest next to a huge chunk of Appalachian granite.
Twenty-three years later, a Hoosier geologist who studied such rocks for a living helped ensure that one of John Brown’s fellow raiders at Harper’s Ferry — his son Watson, who was gunned down during the raid — would finally be buried next to his father. In the meantime, Watson’s bones went on a long odyssey out to the Midwest.
Watson Brown was born October 7, 1835, in Franklin Mills, Ohio. His father, the great abolitionist, moved back and forth between northern Ohio and his native New England several times. After John Brown went out to “Bleeding Kansas” to fight the extension of slavery into the West, Watson left home, too, though he apparently didn’t join in the combat on the Plains. His father and brothers, however — considered terrorists by some — waged war on pro-slavery factions with guns, fire and on one occasion, with broadswords used to brutally murder their enemies to death. A letter from Watson to his mother Mary, written in Iowa in 1856, mentions that on his own way west with a team of emigrants — armed with “Sharp’s rifles and cannon” — they met with ex-slave Frederick Douglass and the reformer Gerrit Smith. Smith, a failed presidential candidate, secretly financed the later raid on Harper’s Ferry. Watson himself may have helped carry caches of firearms out to the Great Plains, guns paid for by New England anti-slavery committees.
John Brown in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1846.Watson Brown, circa 1859, courtesy of West Virginia State Archives.
John Brown traversed the Midwest many times on trips back East to win the support of reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Henry David Thoreau. In 1859, Brown and a small band of followers — sixteen white and five black — tried to pull off their most spectacular assault on slavery yet, an attack on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry, where the Shenandoah flows into the Potomac. The target: 100,000 muskets, to be handed over to slaves for use in a massive insurrection.
Harpers Ferry, Virginia, now West Virginia, 1865, courtesy of National Archives, accessed Wikipedia.
Optimistic supporters in the U.S. and Canada originally planned for 4,500 men to participate in the raid. Instead, just twenty-one attacked Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859. After cutting telegraph wires and taking hostages on nearby farms, Brown’s band moved into town. Local militia, farmers and shopkeepers, opening fire, quickly pinned down the abolitionists, driving them into a brick engine house. Under siege, John Brown sent his son Watson and another man out with a white flag. The crowd shot them. Watson, aged twenty-four, with a bullet just below his stomach, struggled back to the engine house, fatally wounded. He begged his father and comrades to “dash out his brains,” then tried to commit suicide.
The Liberator, Boston, Massachusetts, November 18, 1859.Brown’s son Oliver was also killed in the raid, while Watson lay in agony. “With one son dead by his side, and another dying, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other.” (James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, 1860)
The outbreak of the Civil War was still a year and a half away. In fact, the raid was put down by Colonel Robert E. Lee — of the U.S. Army. John Brown was hanged for treason in December. Spectators at his execution included Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, and the poet Walt Whitman.
Ten of Brown’s men died in the raid, including two sons. What became of their mortal remains is a fascinating and rarely told part of the tale.
Eight of the bodies were gathered up by townspeople of Harpers Ferry. The locals didn’t want the raiders buried in the town’s cemetery. They gave a man named James Mansfield five dollars to take care of the corpses.
Packing eight men into two large wooden store boxes, Mansfield buried them along the Shenandoah River about a half-mile from town. The grave, half forgotten, remained there until 1899, when Dr. Timothy Featherstonehaugh, Captain E.P. Hall, and Orin Grant Libby, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, exhumed the corpses for transfer to the Brown family farm in upstate New York. Professor Libby took femur notes while examining the skeletal remains, comparing them for size against his own leg. On August 30, 1899, the mingled raiders’ bones were re-interred at the Brown plot — in a single silver-handled casket.
This wasn’t the first time, however, that a box of old bones was brought to North Elba, New York, to lie next to John Brown’s. Two of his followers were never initially buried at all. One of them was his son Watson.
Remarkably common in the nineteenth century, body-stealing was a feature of reality at a time when medical schools had trouble acquiring corpses for anatomy classes. Rarely able to do so legally, they had to steal them, giving rise to the “resurrectionists” who nabbed the dead out of fresh graves.
Yet other examples of body-theft involved mere curiosity seekers and bogus scientists. During the heyday of phrenology — the long-discredited pseudoscience of bumps on the skull, which, it was believed, actually determined one’s personality, creative genius, or propensity to crime — “cranioklepty” (the theft of skulls) was far from rare.
The more famous the head, the better. When the composer Joseph Haydn died in Vienna in 1809, wealthy robbers paid a cemetery attendant to open up the new grave and cut off his head, which “scientists” later examined. Until 1954, the famous skull remained on display in a glass case in Vienna, when it was reunited with the rest of Haydn’s bones. After the coffins of Beethoven and Schubert were exhumed for relocation in the 1860s, their skulls were also examined, as was the entire mummified body of American naval hero John Paul Jones, unearthed in subterranean Paris in 1905 — a hundred-and-thirteen years after he died.
Watson Brown and Jeremiah Anderson — two Midwesterners gunned down at Harpers Ferry — were considered “fine physical specimens.” Southern doctors took them to Winchester Medical College in Virginia, where, like Joseph Haydn, they had (most of) the flesh stripped off them. John Brown’s 24-year-old son, who had left behind a widow, Isabella, and a young child who died in 1863, was turned into a model skeleton for the instruction of future Southern medical men.
Dr. Jarvis Johnson, surgeon of the 27th Indiana Volunteers.
Yet Winchester, Virginia, just thirty miles from Harper’s Ferry and the Potomac River, changed hands several times during the Civil War.
In the spring of 1862, two and a half years after Watson Brown’s death, the 27th Regiment of Indiana Volunteers marched into town with the Union Army. Among them was regimental surgeon Dr. Jarvis Jackson Johnson. Born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1828, Johnson practiced medicine in Martinsville, half way between Indianapolis and Bloomington. He would have been 34 when he walked into Winchester Medical College and found out what doctors had done to the remains of Watson Brown — an action for which, Virginians believed, Union troops burned down the college, the only case of arson during Winchester’s military occupation.
In 1882, the Indianapolis Journal printed the most widely-accepted version of the tale. It came in the aftermath of a visit by John Brown, Jr., who visited Morgan County, Indiana, with several other investigators to examine a set of human remains there.
Dr. Johnson had stated that while serving as commander of a military hospital in Winchester, he acquired Watson Brown’s body from the museum of the medical college — then shipped it on a train to Franklin, Indiana, the nearest railroad depot to his home in Martinsville. Like the Virginia doctors, Johnson kept the body in a case at his medical office. For twenty years, the raider’s bones were a strange part of the life of a Hoosier country town.
Indianapolis Journal, September 11, 1882.
In 1882, word of the skeleton’s whereabouts came to John Brown, Jr., Watson’s elder brother and the abolitionist’s oldest son, after Jarvis Johnson put a notice in the Chicago Tribune looking for family members. The doctor claimed, probably disingenuously, that he hadn’t realized any of the Brown brothers were still living, and he hadn’t wanted to upset Watson Brown’s mother. Though John Brown, Jr., had fought in “Bleeding Kansas,” he in fact wasn’t part of the raid on Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War, he helped recruit troops for the famous “Jayhawk” border fighter James H. Lane. (Before Lane became an anti-slavery senator from Kansas and a famous target for Confederates, he had been the lieutenant governor of Indiana.)
Brown, Jr., visited Indiana in September 1882, having already moved back east to Ohio, where he grew grapes for the wine business on South Bass Island in Lake Erie and took an interest in geology.
John Brown, Jr., accessed Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society.
The other main forensic investigator to come to Martinsville that September was one of Indiana’s most prominent scientists, the impressively-bearded State Geologist John Collett. Remembered as a beloved “Santa Claus” figure, Collett was a Wabash Valley native who lived in Indianapolis and often weighed in on scientific and agricultural questions — from the study of caves and killer meteorite hoaxes to how to improve celery crops. Collett traveled to Martinsville with several doctors to look over the badly-treated remains of the bygone Harpers Ferry raider.
Hoosier geologist John Collett, who drew the first maps of Wyandotte Cave, helped Watson Brown get back to New York.
The Indianapolis Journal printed this description of the scene at Dr. Johnson’s office:
The body has received careless treatment during the last few years. It has been carted about from place to place, and has been doing duty in all the anatomical exhibitions about town. During the first few years it was in the possession of Dr. Johnson it was in a remarkably fine state of preservation, but ill usage has ruined it. For several years, it has been lying in the Knights of Pythias hall, and, it is whispered, was used in the mystic ceremonies of the order. The best of care had not been bestowed upon it, and it was infested with worms and insects. Knowledge of its ill-usage was sedulously kept from Mr. Brown. When he intimated that he would like to see the body, he was considerately kept in waiting until it could be removed from the lodge-hall to the residence by way of a back street, and there placed in better condition for the examination.
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether the skeleton was that of Watson or 22-year-old Oliver, John Brown’s other son killed in October 1859. Watson and Oliver looked alike. Both stood six feet tall.
An office assistant of Dr. Jarvis’ showed John Brown, Jr., a “coffin-shaped box standing against the wall.” Then he removed a cloth covering, exposing “a bare and hideous skeleton.”
“Gentlemen, if it is either of my brothers, I am now inclined to think that it is Oliver,” Brown exclaimed after picking up and poring over skeletal fragments and examining the shape of a half-missing skull. Yet the more he looked, the more he came to think he was looking at his other brother, Watson.
Geologist John Collett wasn’t a qualified expert in forensic facial reconstruction, a process that would actually be pioneered in the next decade. After comparing all the forensic evidence available, however, including written descriptions of Watson Brown’s gun wound, it was John Collett’s opinion that the cadaver standing before him in Martinsville, Indiana, was, in fact, the man in question.
True to the often bogus science of the time, though, some of the “professor’s” statements expose how ludicrous phrenology was.
The Inter Ocean, Chicago, September 14, 1882.
Then came a fascinating insight. Dr. Jarvis Johnson’s written affidavit, notarized by Morgan County lawyers, also shed light on why doctors in Virginia wanted to preserve Brown’s corpse in the first place.
When he was put in charge of local Union Army medical operations, “A number of the prominent citizens of Winchester called upon me at the hospital, and each and all declared that [these were] the remains of a son of John Brown.” Amazingly, the doctor who “prepared” the body, whom Johnson never identifies by name, also stopped by — and pleaded with Johnson to give him back this “exceedingly valuable piece of property.”
Like the medieval Europeans who condemned criminals to be drawn-and-quartered, Virginia doctors held up the corpse as a warning to their state’s enemies. Sic semper tyrannis?
(The Inter Ocean, Chicago, September 14, 1882.)
Who was this doctor, then?
He was surely on the faculty list — and it’s a small one. Founded by Dr. Hugh Holmes McGuire, Winchester Medical College had only four instructors in 1859, including the founder’s son, Hunter Holmes McGuire (1835-1900). At age 24, Hunter McGuire, already a professor anatomy at his father’s school, would have been an exact contemporary of the “fine specimen” killed at Harpers Ferry.
Hunter McGuire, however, was probably not the culprit. In late 1859, he was studying medicine in Philadelphia. The young doctor was even there during the famous walk-out of Southern medical students, which occurred after John Brown’s body was paraded through the streets by Northern admirers. Insulted, McGuire led an exodus of about three-hundred Southern students from Jefferson Medical College, who dropped out, went down to Richmond, and re-enrolled at the Medical College of Virginia. Some sources say that he financed the trip of all these students with his own savings.
Dr. Hunter McGuire later enlisted in the Confederate Army and even served as Stonewall Jackson’s personal surgeon, amputating the general’s arm after Chancellorsville. He went on to become the president of the American Medical Association. In the 1890s, McGuire would contribute to the debate over eugenics, racial purity, and the castration of rapists, especially African Americans — arguments that eventually led to Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924, a major victory for the controversial eugenics movement and one of the worst misapplications of science in history. He also strove to ensure that Southern school textbooks “would not poison the minds of Virginia schoolchildren” by teaching a northern revisionist history of the Civil War.
The Medical Pickwick (1918) states that Watson Brown was “dissected by students.” McGuire, as stated, was in Pennsylvania in the aftermath of Harper’s Ferry. But did he have anything at all to do with this man’s bizarre fate?
It seems that he did. Mary Greenhow Lee, a famous diarist in Winchester during the Civil War, wrote that when Union soldiers torched the medical school on May 16, 1862, “They buried in the yard what they supposed were [Oliver Brown’s] bones, but the genuine ones had been removed by Hunter McGuire, thus foiling their malicious designs.” Were the bones buried those of Jeremiah Anderson, a native of Wisconsin who fought with John Brown? Lee might have been mistaken about the identity of the bones. It’s harder to believe she was mistaken about Dr. McGuire. After all, he was fighting in northern Virginia and may have been the doctor who approached Jarvis Johnson.
Twenty years later, Johnson willingly handed over to the Brown family the cadaver he claimed to have shipped by train from the Shenandoah Valley to the Midwest. In October 1882, Watson Brown’s strange post-mortem odyssey finally came to an end. On an autumn day in the Adirondacks, he was laid to rest in a patch of soil near his famous father, who — as the old Union song put it — had long lain “mouldering in the grave.”
Courtesy of Watkins Museum of History, accessed Bleeding Kansas.
Isabella Thompson, aged just 22 when the Harpers Ferry raid left her a widow, married Watson’s cousin, Salmon Brown. For decades, the couple lived in Kilbourn City, Wisconsin — later renamed Wisconsin Dells. Isabella may have died near Traverse City in northern Michigan in 1907. Her second husband died in neighboring Antrim County, Michigan, in 1921. “Bella” was buried at Wisconsin Dells with Salmon, far away from her first husband, his final whereabouts pinned down at last.
John Collett passed away in March 1899 and was buried in Terre Haute. Dr. Johnson died that September, just a few weeks after the mass re-interment of Brown’s other missing men, among whom was his son Oliver, who had lain in a merchant’s box on the Shenandoah for forty years. Johnson rests at East Hill Cemetery in Morgantown, Indiana.
Nineteenth-century American newspapers overflowed with medical ads. Many touted quack panaceas, remedies for everything from dropsy and tuberculosis to STDs and impotence. At a time when even “scientific” medicine was often little better than the variety promoted by “snake doctors,” folk medicine and spurious innovators actually helped keep newspapers afloat — as underwriters paying for ad space.
Six years before the Civil War broke out, the editors of the Brookville Indiana American put in some clever medical commentary. Rather than feed your kids candy — a potential medical and dental no-no — why not buy them “toy books,” ancestor of the “pop-up” book?
A few months later, candy sales must have still been trumping sales of movable toy books at Dr. Keely’s. The editors reissued their advice: buy your kids candy for the brain, not sugary venom that “injures the health.”
Was this the dry, brutal utilitarianism of Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind? (The satiric Hard Times, which included an overbearing schoolteacher named M’Choakumchild, came out in 1854.)
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
What were these “toy books,” competitors of the sugary destroyer?
Modern readers might imagine that the movable revolution in children’s literature is a new phenomenon. Yet the earliest books incorporating retractable parts date back to the 13th century. Spanish philosopher Ramón Llull, who tried to demonstrate God’s existence through numerology, put spinning paper wheels in his books. These helped the reader understand the mathematical charts illustrating Llull’s theories about the universe as a thinking machine.
Cosmologists’ use of movable book parts was complemented by Renaissance-era medical men. One example was Dutch doctor Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body), printed in Switzerland in 1543. Readers of this anatomical manual could lift flaps covering Vesalius’ illustrations to get a peak at the human innards and even watch a child being born.
Eighteenth-century London publisher Robert Sayer made a different kind of “interactive book.” Around 1765, Sayer was making books with movable flaps revealing the “inside story” of everything from children’s tales and folk ballads to the story of Adam and Eve and the metamorphoses of Harlequin, a stock character in Italian comic theater. Sayer’s “Harlequinades” were hugely popular in England and Europe. Some must have showed up in colonial America.
(Robert Sayer, Harlequinade of Adam & Eve, circa 1770. A short history of the origins of death.)
By the 19th century, book makers were taking movable illustrations even further. In England, Stacey and William Grimaldi published a title in 1821 called The Toilet Book or just The Toilet. The Grimaldis — father and son — promoted the traditional idea that feminine beauty was a mark of virtue. (“Toilet” referred to beautification, washing, and maintaining one’s health at a time when poet John Keats emphasized that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”) The Grimaldis’ illustrations of mirrors, perfume bottles, etc., could be lifted up to reveal fortune-teller-like revelations.
In addition to “peep show” and “tunnel” books — paper cut-outs depicting theater scenes — some of the best-known and most successful examples of the “interactive book” before the Civil War were those of Dean & Son, English publishers. These were probably available at Hoosier bookstores before the Civil War — copies were advertised for sale in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1860. Paper images were connected to paper tabs that, when levered back and forth, moved the cut-out characters around the page or flipped the entire illustration over to reveal a development in the story.
One of the Deans’ most popular titles was Dissolving Views. A kind of 3-D forerunner to the stereoscope, which allowed readers to travel to places they would never see in person, some of its illustrations showed exotic landscapes, such as volcanoes erupting — succeeded by fire’s elemental opposite, cascading water. Others depicted folktales or comic scenes with a didactic message.
(Dissolving Views, publishing house of George Dean, London, 1862.)
With the invention of cameras, improvements in optics, and the advent of more sophisticated magic-lantern projectors (first developed in the 1650s), “dissolving views” became a synonym for early, “phantasmagoric” versions of the cinema. During the days of Dickens, these motion pictures were big entertainment. Eventually, they evolved into silent film.
(The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 21, 1841.)
Contemporary newspaper advertisements show that several Hoosier booksellers stocked “toy books” in the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, they don’t list the titles. Yet as Brookville’s Indiana American shows, as early as 1831, just fifteen years after Indiana achieved statehood and with much of it still wilderness, even small country towns had access to these children’s books.
In Lawrenceburg on the Ohio River, toy books were sold alongside such things as thermometers, spy glasses, tooth picks, mustard seed, cough drops, and… tweezers:
In December 1868, a weary Indianapolis father trudging home in “a half dreamy state” after fifteen hours “at the office” was surprised by a man standing on his roof when he got home. Santa Claus, whom he insulted as “You confounded Dutch idiot,” was greeting him with a “Hi! Hello! Stop! Hold on!”
Santa showed the man a sneak preview of what he was bringing his children. This windy story — in reality, an ad for Indianapolis’ Bowen, Stewart & Co. — might rank as one of the longest ads for a bookstore in the annals of American journalism. Fortunately, Santa wasn’t hauling around a bag-load of candy:
It’s been a couple months since our last project update. We’ve just uploaded a ton of new titles for you. These include a few major newspapers, like the Indianapolis News; a few “niche” titles from the Indiana Socialist press; and a plethora of small-town journals dating from 1804 up to the 1960s — some with colorful titles, but one of which may have the most boring title of any newspaper in American history. (We hope that makes us famous.) Scroll down to see what it is.
At the end of July, Hoosier State Chronicles had brought 362,926 pages online. Ten weeks later, we now have 541,618 — an increase of 49%. . . with another 100,000+ to be added in a fortnight.
Check out our additions over the last two months. And enjoy.
Yesterday’s post sent a few heads rolling, but we can’t get enough this October. Here’s a follow-up from medical science.
Contrary to popular belief, Washington Irving didn’t invent the tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman from scratch. Said to have been a Hessian mercenary decapitated by a cannonball during the American Revolution, the dark rider was left to roam the Catskill Mountains near a Dutch settlement in New York called Sleepy Hollow.
Written while Irving was living in Europe, the story actually drew on German and Irish folklore, where similar specters haunt the realm of the living. There’s also a long list of early Christian saints (known as cephalophores) who according to hagiographic legends, picked up their own heads after execution and walked away — or at least uttered an important message before going silent at last. Saint Gemolo, who probably came from Germany or Scandinavia, was even said to have grabbed his head in his hands and ridden away on horseback.
Germans told of Der Kopfloser Reiter, a shadow figure that rides out of the forest, hunts down malefactors, warns the living, and — like his cousin the Irish banshee — announces the approach of death. Irish folklore includes reports of the dulachán or dullahan, a specter that also rides a dark horse, but he comes with some frightening accouterments: a whip made from a human spinal cord, a funereal bone cart. . . Like the screaming banshee, the apparition of a dullahan portends encroaching death. And like Washington Irving’s horrid creature, the dullahan carries its own severed head, believed to look like moldy cheese. Don’t look at the specter to find out: he’ll throw blood in your face.
With the mass emigration of Irish peasants overseas, especially after the brutal Famine of the 1840s, these stories got carried to the U.S. Some were twisted into hyper-literary forms. But apparently the actual banshees didn’t care for transatlantic sea voyages and stayed home in their native terrain. Headless horsemen, though, weren’t totally fictional.
In 1870, doctors in England offered a rational explanation for what were actually real sightings of decapitated equestrians. These sightings, of course, occurred in war zones.
Readers of the Terre Haute Weekly Gazette encountered the following clip from The Lancet, a famous London medical journal. Founded in 1828, just nine years after Irving’s Sleepy Hollow came out, The Lancet was the brainchild of Thomas Wakley, a crusader against “incompetence, privilege, and nepotism” in British society — and flogging. The doctor was also a radical Member of Parliament. Wakley’s sons edited The Lancet until 1909.
The medical clip sought to explain a bizarre event during the Franco-Prussian War. On August 6, 1870, at the Battle of Wörth in the Rhine Valley, a headless French horseman was spotted “going at full speed” across the battlefield. The Lancet’s explanation came out a month later on September 3.
A letter to the editor sent as a follow-up and signed by Logan D.H. Russell appeared in the British magazine in January 1871. Dr. Russell gave a few examples of “life-like” rigidity in death witnessed by doctors, nurses, and soldiers during the American Civil War.
Scientific investigation into these aspects of post-mortem physiology continued during the 20th century. Though farmers and any homeowner with poultry in the back yard knew that “headless chickens” were no myth — the skeletal anatomy of chickens really do allow them to live briefly after decapitation — newspaper readers in 1912 were surely surprised to hear that a French surgeon in New York City had successfully performed experiments allowing headless cats to survive for another three days.
This surgical revolution was the work of Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), one of the more unusual and forgotten pioneers of surgery. Oddly, before he began experimenting on cats, Carrel’s scientific work took him into the realm of what most scientists consider superstition and folklore: divine healing.
Raised in a devout Catholic family, Alexis Carrel fell away from religion as a young medical student. In 1902, however, pressured by a colleague, he traveled to Lourdes in southwestern France to see something unusual.
Lourdes was a mountain town in the Pyrenees made famous in the 1850s by apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who allegedly came and spoke to a French shepherd girl there for weeks on end. French scientists and secularists, calling it a fraud, tried to have Lourdes shut down under public hygiene laws after thousands of suffering believers came in search of a cure — which, incredibly, they often found. For decades, reports of miraculous healings attributed to mineral waters from the caves and to divine intervention plagued, even embarrassed, European doctors and intellectuals.
In 1902, Alexis Carrel saw one of these miracles as it was happening: the sudden and complete healing of a tubercular patient given up for dead. Decades before the discovery of antibiotics, Marie Bailly, the patient, was soon declared totally free of her disease, which she was expected to die of at any moment. She became a nun and lived for another thirty years. Carrel, an agnostic, claimed that he actually watched her body undergo a healing transformation at Lourdes.
Alexis Carrel, 1912.
The young doctor delivered some of the main eyewitness testimony about the miracle — which led to his being banned from working in French hospitals and universities. With his reputation destroyed, Carrel emigrated to Canada, where he became a cattle rancher and farmer. Later coming to the U.S., he taught at the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Over the next few decades, Carrel became a pioneer in the field of vascular suturing techniques. Helped by aviator Charles Lindbergh, he invented the perfusion pump, used to preserve organs during transplantation.
For his work in human physiology — partly involving experiments on headless cats — Carrel won a Nobel Prize in 1912. Still baffled by the bizarre cure he witnessed at Lourdes, Carrel never retracted his belief that Marie Bailly was healed by a supernatural force, an event so strange that one writer believed it drove him mad. His book about the Lourdes miracle, written in 1903, was only published in 1949, five years after his death.
Lourdes Grotto, scene of some mysterious medical phenomena.
Science and religion both have their dark sides. Tragically, Carrel’s went beyond cutting up cats. By the 1930s, the French-American surgeon had become a major proponent of eugenics, the forced sterilization of “inferior” human beings and the poor. (Carrel was no pioneer here. Back in 1907, the Indiana Legislature instituted the world’s first eugenics law. Over 2,300 Hoosiers were sterilized in an effort to eliminate “degeneracy,” under a law only repealed in 1974.)
As a prelude to the Nazis’ perversion of science, Dr. Alexis Carrel went on to publish a bestselling book, Man, the Unknown (1935). The Nobel Laureate even joined an anti-Semitic French fascist party, the PPF. During Hitler’s occupation of France, Carrel helped put eugenics laws into place under the Vichy collaborators. If he hadn’t died in 1944, the doctor would probably have been put on trial as a traitor or war criminal.
All of which is further proof that scientists — like Hessian horsemen and everybody else — can lose their head.
Here’s a tale about Native American gold, the botched suicide of a pioneer medical man, things that scurry through the attic, and a horseman riding up out of the ground.
We owe this one to W.H. Blodgett, a veteran writer for the Indianapolis News, who published the piece on November 2, 1901. Blodgett typically covered politics and was the News‘ correspondent in California during the sensational trial of John and James McNamara, union men who dynamited the Los Angeles Times in October 1910. He also took an interest in Hoosier folklore, traveling around the state looking for its spectral, mysterious past.
In October 1901, the Indianapolis News correspondent showed up on the 160-acre farm of “Gus” and Mollie Burgess along what he calls the “National Road” between Yorktown and Daleville, Indiana. (This must be State Road 32, which runs along the White River west of Muncie.) Blodgett had been playing cards with another reporter in Indianapolis and talking about an old haunted house that once sat on “old Mississippi Street” (Senate Avenue) when they decided to drive up to Delaware County and try to see some paranormal activity firsthand.
Charles Augustus and Mollie Burgess, both in their twenties, lived in the old farmhouse with their six-year-old son, Payton Burgess. They told Blodgett they’d been living there for six years. Two earlier tenants hadn’t stuck around, including one “who moved into the house one day and got out the next.” The house sat back from the road a little and was “partly hidden by a small grove of locust trees. . . It was a lonesome-looking place on the outside, in spite of the bright lights that shone out from the windows. . . The whole place seemed to be cut off from the outer world by an invisible wall.” The location was near a spot called “the Kilgore neighborhood, a half a mile, perhaps, from the Pike’s Peak schoolhouse, where many a good citizen of Delaware County received his early training.”
A Native American graveyard was also located “close by.” “Even to this day, bones, arrows and crude implements of the chase are plowed up,” wrote Blodgett. Central Indiana farmers back then sometimes kept barrels full of bones that cropped up in their fields, tumbled out of decaying burial mounds, or even showed up in the hollows of ancient trees.
As Blodgett told it, two legends converged on the Burgess’ White River Valley farm. The first involved a “famous Indian chief known as Wa-Sa He-To — The Fox.” Wa-Sa He-To, according to this story, had traded with white pioneers and “in his wigwam he had $5,000 in gold.” After The Fox died in a wolf hunt, his gold disappeared.
By the 1890s, Spiritualists from nearby Camp Chesterfield — ground zero for paranormal investigation in the Hoosier State — were said to be conducting seances to locate the lost gold, thought to be cached near a great rock along the White River. Blodgett never mentioned how “The Fox” died — was he eaten by a wolf? — only that his spirit might have found a new home in the “boggy swamp” next to the river. At some point in fact or fable, The Fox turned into a headless horseman, riding out over area farms, out of barn doors, and even straight up from the soil.
The other ghost lurking around the Burgess property — “this house of gibbering ghosts” — was rumored to be the phantom of Dr. George Washington Slack, a former inhabitant. Slack had come to Delaware County from Pennsylvania in the 1830s as a 12-year-old settler with his parents. After studying at Rush Medical College in Chicago, Dr. Slack went on to practice medicine in Yorktown and apparently became well known in central Indiana. His eight children probably lived in the house with him — which might have been the original log cabin his parents built. Slack died in January 1886, aged sixty. Burgess misidentifies him as “Cyrus Slack,” then tells the story (perhaps imaginary) of his botched attempt to end his life.
Here’s the tale.
An article from the Indiana Herald in Huntington suggests that Dr. Slack died of apoplexy. Yet it’s always possible that folklore got the facts correct, since in the case of the suicide of a respectable country doctor, the family might not have shared the full tale with the press and neighbors. The truth about the doctor’s demise remains a mystery. But it seems that like Wa-Sa He-To, he, too, was a candidate for the status of “Headless Horseman.”
Indianapolis News correspondent W.H. Blodgett slept easy that night, at least until he was awakened by an “unearthly noise” in the neighboring bed. His traveling companion and fellow ghost-hunter, “Dick,” had started choking, gurgling, and gasping, “a muffled call for help.”
“Guess I had the nightmare,” said Dick, finally awakened. Had the horse come after all? “Nightmare” is partly related to Old Norse words for a “night ride,” a “night horse,” or a “mare dream” — and the demon that rides them.
I thought a ghost without a head on a headless horse was chasing me and made me jump over a high cliff, and just as I struck, a fellow all in white was trying to crowd three fingers down my throat. Have you heard any ghosts?
The Night Mare, based on a painting by Henry Fuseli, 1781.
“Gus” Burgess later became the postmaster of Yorktown. His brother Clyde — a spitting image — ran a Shell Station there in the 1930s or ’40s.
Inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, William H. Blodgett, born in Illinois in 1857, died in 1924. He is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
(The Greencastle Democrat, January 26, 1900.)
(Indianapolis Recorder, January 15, 1910.)
(The Greencastle Democrat, October 30, 1903.)
(The Greencastle Democrat, January 16, 1897.)
(Indianapolis Recorder, February 19, 1910.)
(Indianapolis Recorder, July 30, 1910.)
(Indianapolis Journal, July 7, 1891.)
(Major General Lew Wallace.)
(A younger Benjamin Harrison, Indiana’s only president.)
(Jim Lane, Hoosier native and Kansas “Jayhawk.”)
(Lajos Kossuth, photographed in Washington, D.C., before he traveled west to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis in early 1852.)
(John L. Sullivan, 1858-1918.)
(The Fort Wayne News, August 22, 1896.)
(Indianapolis News, November 6, 1900.)
(Plymouth Tribune, March 5, 1903.)
