USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 16
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The particular concern of this brief history, however, is Laura Bridgman's relationship to Hanover and to her family there. After she had been at the Institution a year or so, her mother came to see her. The mother watched her as she played about the room, at last bumping into her and feeling her hands, her dress, but finding only a stranger. The stranger gave her a string of beads, which she recognized, she showed Dr. Howe, as coming from home, but she still repelled her mother's caresses. Even after her mother had given her another article from home, she still remained indifferent. But after a while, as her mother persisted in holding her hand, a vague sense of her identity seemed to dawn on the child:
She became very pale, and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and never were contending emotions more strongly painted upon the human face. At this moment of painful un- certainty, the mother drew her close to her side and kissed her fondly; when at once the truth flashed upon the child, and all mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as with an expression of exceeding
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joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of her parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces.
The second year after her arrival at the Institution Miss Drew took her to Hanover for the three weeks of the annual vacation. She could not wait to take off her bonnet and cloak, but led her teacher through all the rooms of the house, upstairs and down, touching the familiar objects and asking their names. During this visit she taught her mother the finger alphabet and wandered with Uncle Asa, who came to see her soon after her return, over the old haunts to which he had first introduced her.
But she had outgrown her old friend. Though still devoted to him she chided him for his letters, written as Dr. Howe put it, in defiance of every rule, containing the most extraordinary rig- marole about all manner of things, but especially about the vanity of book-learning: "We could not understand your letter, for you did not write it very good and the words were very funny and I wish that you could write much better, as we do." But she grieved deeply for his death in 1847 at the age of sixty-three: it marked her first serious realization of death, even more mysterious to the blind, perhaps, than to those who see.
After her first visit she returned to Hanover for the annual va- cations, always accompanied by her teacher or, as her formal edu- cation was ended, by a companion. In 1849 she was twenty; in his annual report-the last in which he wrote of her at length-Dr. Howe raised the question of her financial support. He noted that, though she cared little for the display of rich shawls, fine lace, and precious stones, she had begun to desire money, not for the posses- sion of these luxuries, but as a means of independence; she had asked Miss Bremer: "Do you think, if I should write a book, it would pay well?" Her father would gladly give her shelter but, though she loved her family, she could not find in their remote village the means of culture and improvement which had now become to her the bread of life. By making bags and purses she had earned some money, but not enough to make her independ- ent. The doctor suggested that perhaps money enough might be raised to buy her a life annuity, to secure for her a companion who might be to her what Miss Wight had been.
The money did not seem to be forthcoming and a year or two later some members of her family conceived the scheme of taking her about the country to give exhibitions and to sell her auto-
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biography. This idea being repugnant to the doctor, he sent Miss Paddock to Hanover to bring her back and to try to dissuade the family from pursuing this plan. When her father told Miss Pad- dock what they had "got in their heads about Laura" and asked her opinion as to what Dr. Howe would think, Miss Paddock re- plied immediately: "Oh, I know that doctor would disapprove of any such plan." That was enough for Mr. Bridgman: "Dr. Howe has made Laura what she is, and we have no right to do anything contrary to his judgment."
The question of financial support, however, remained still unsolved. When, in Laura's twenty-third year, Dr. Howe decided it would be wisest for her to return to Hanover permanently, it precipitated a crisis. Life at the farm was too quiet for the girl accustomed to the manifold activity of Perkins Institution. More- over, none of her family had time to give to her. She quickly got herself into a nervous state-once she became so impatient with her mother for not taking time from her household affairs to talk with her manually that she struck her. Her appetite failed, she went into a decline. Dr. Howe was summoned; he diagnosed her trouble as homesickness and prescribed a return to Perkins Insti- tution. Miss Paddock arrived in midwinter to bring her back. The roads being blocked with snow Miss Paddock was obliged to spend four days in Lebanon. When she at last arrived in Etna she spelt the news into Laura's listless hand: "I have come to take you home." "When do we start?" whispered the thin fingers. "As soon as you can eat an egg." To the father the departure seemed like turning his child out of doors; he sobbed aloud as he tucked his frail daughter into the sleigh. But Harmony Bridgman reproved him: "The child will be happier and better off in Boston." Per- kins Institution was to be henceforth her permanent home, though she returned periodically to her family.
It is not surprising that such a sensitive organism as hers should be subject to occasional irritable moods and tempers, though ordinarily she was gay and cheerful. As the doctor observed, she wore her nerves on the outside and yet was usually uncomplain- ing and happy. Aware of disturbing the delicate equilibrium, Dr. Howe as a good Unitarian had been careful to keep her religious instruction wholesome and free from unsettling influences.
Her family were good Baptists. In 1860, when Laura was thirty, her sister Mary died and she was overwhelmed with grief. The next summer she made a visit to a cousin in Vermont where she
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met a connection of her father's, a pious and devout woman who urged her to join the Baptist Church. Her father's pastor, the Rev. Mr. Herrick, and his wife completed her conversion and as a result of this "religious experience" she was baptized in Mink Brook on a visit to Etna in 1862, though her father apparently viewed this act with some reluctance.
Indeed the effect of this emotional experience upon the young woman was not a happy one: for the first time since the haunted dreams of her childhood, her biographer says, "a new and awful fear darkened her soul, the fear of an angry God" and the fears "of those human inventions, Hell, Damnation, and the Devil," from which Dr. Howe would have spared her. But as time went on her usual tranquillity returned. A Congregational minister, who called on her in Etna years later, when she was forty-seven, found her untroubled by doctrinal differences: "We cannot com- mune here," she said, "but we can in heaven." The Bible re- mained her most valued book, especially the 14th chapter of St. John: in her Father's house were many mansions. . . "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
Her remaining years were tranquil. Spectacles had long ago re- placed the green band across her eyes. She continued to knit and crochet ladies' collars, lamp mats and other articles, which she sold for her partial support. Her father died when she was forty, leaving the homestead to his son John on condition that he should give a home to her and her mother as long as they lived. Her brother interpreted this provision narrowly, relegating his mother to a single room which she was obliged to share with Laura on her visits. "I have been disinherited!" Laura said to Mrs. Howe, when she met her shortly after her father's death. Dr. Howe was equally incensed. Aside from what she earned she had the interest on two thousand dollars bequeathed to her by friends and a home at Perkins Institution during the cold weather, but these pro- visions were not enough to secure for her the dresses, bonnets, and trinkets in which she took a feminine delight. He appealed for further contributions to the Loring fund and made a provi- sion for her in his will so that she could be independent and still live at the Institution.
In January 1876 her benefactor died, to her great sorrow. She lived on at the Institution, whose director was now Mr. Michael Anagnos, a young man whom Dr. Howe had brought back from Athens in 1867, when he had gone there to aid the Cretans in
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their rebellion against the Turks, and who had married the Howes' oldest daughter. She had already moved from the main building into one of the four cottages which Dr. Howe had built to house the inmates; she divided her time for the rest of her life among the four cottages, living for a year in each.
On December 21, 1887 her fifty-eighth birthday was celebrated at the Institution. Mrs. Howe presided; the kindergarten children hailed her with a song and laid at her feet an offering of the flowers she loved best; there were many speakers, including Bishop Phillips Brooks; she listened eagerly through an inter- preter as they told her story. She herself re-told the story, in the third person, paying her final tribute to her benefactor in the first: "I loved Dr. Howe as well as an own father. He was a pre- cious gift from above for my youth. He is more worthy than fine gold." She spent the last summer of her life at Hanover, returning to the Institution where, after a brief illness, she died on May 24, 1889 in her sixtieth year.
The living Laura still lingers in the memory of the eldest genera- tion: one Hanover citizen remembers the guttural inarticulations of her voice which frightened her as a child; another, the slender figure lightly fingering the clothesline about the farmhouse put up for her guidance. Above all her memory lives in the career of her illustrious successor in the annals of the blind. In 1888 Anne Sullivan, who had lived with Laura in one of the cottages, brought to Boston from Alabama the blind Helen Keller, whom Miss Sul- livan had been teaching according to Dr. Howe's methods. She too was a child of seven-the same age at which Laura came down to Boston from Hanover. The elderly blind woman kissed the little blind girl kindly but would not let her touch the lace she was crocheting-"I'm afraid your hands are not clean." The little girl wanted to feel her face, but "she shrank away like a mimosa blossom from my peering fingers." Laura told Miss Sullivan: "You have not taught her to be gentle," and adjured the little girl not to be forward, when calling on a lady, not to sit on the floor, because she would muss her dress: "You must remember many things when you understand them." Helen Keller grew up to "remember many things," not least this tall woman who seemed like a statue she had once felt in a garden, so motionless, her hands so cool, like flowers grown in shady places.
So Laura's fame persists. Only a year after her death she was
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mentioned in William James's Principles of Psychology, an epochal book in the history of the subject. In 1919 La Symphonie Pastoral was published. Does one detect in André Gide's simple story of the blind girl and her pastor in the French Alpine village an echo of the relationship between Laura and Dr. Howe? At any rate, the village doctor brings to the pastor's attention an account, from a psychological review, of a blind child named Laura B. whom a doctor-"from I do not know what county in England"- led to the light; and the pastor was thereby encouraged to under- take the tutelage of the blind Gertrude. At Perkins Institution, now in Watertown, Laura's name is perpetuated in the Bridgman Cottage of brick and stone. And in Etna, before the story and a half house, stands the granite boulder with its tablet of bronze.
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14 The Christie Warden Murder by Robert P. Richmond
A LTHOUGH a graph of Hanover's emotional climate over the years would show some outstanding peaks, it is prob- able that none has ever matched the crest of 1891, caused by the slaying of pretty young Christina Warden in the Vale of Tempe, and the subsequent capture of her murderer, Frank Almy.
It was a murder more brutal than most. Yet, if brutality had been its only distinguishing feature, it would long since have been consigned to the limbo of yellowing newspaper files. Instead, the tale has been repeated with increasing frequency through the years until it now has gained the dubious distinction of becoming New Hampshire's most famous murder.
The reason for its continuing attraction lies in the personalities and situations involved, which might have been lifted from a dime novel of the period. The cast of characters featured Chris- tina Warden, nicknamed Christie, an innocent farmer's daughter; the murderer, Frank Almy, her father's handsome farmhand with a sinister past, who fell in love with Christie; a teen-age sister, Fanny, who dared Almy's bullets in a brave attempt to save Chris- tie's life.
The tale supplied melodrama in good measure: a mysterious face peering in the windows of the Warden farm; a widespread hunt for the murderer, while he hid in the Warden barn; Almy's nocturnal visits to Christie's grave; finally a climactic search in the barn.
To set the scene for a detailed account of the murder, it should be helpful to establish the location of several mute reminders of the crime that still remain in Hanover. The gleaming lights of a gas station and of its next-door neighbor, a combination bowling alley and restaurant, mark the intersection of Lyme Road and Reservoir Road. A short way up this latter road stands the de- serted Warden farmhouse and the famous barn. They were owned by the Garipay family from 1903 until 1957, when the land and buildings were sold to Dartmouth College as a site for future de-
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velopment. Raymond Garipay and his family now live across the road from the old buildings in a snug new house.
"You can still see the marks of what some say are bullet holes in the barn," Mr. Garipay remarks.
The Vale of Tempe, a classical designation for the general area where the murder was committed, is now part of an eighteen hole golf course, and boasts a sizable landmark-the Dartmouth ski jump.
Christie Warden's grave is located in the old Dartmouth ceme- tery near the rear of Thayer Hall-not too far from Hanover's bustling main street.
The Grafton Star Grange still meets in the building on Leba- non Street, near the center of town, where Christie attended Grange meeting just before her murder.
Perhaps such tangible reminders of the past will help us to as- sociate ourselves with a July day in 1890, when thirty-three-year- old Frank Almy, an escaped convict, wandered up the Lyme Road toward the Andrew Warden farm, just as a summer thunderstorm was about to break. Heavy clouds churned overhead and light- ning flecked the sky in the distance. Certainly, the powers of dark- ness that controlled Almy's life outdid themselves to provide a suitable setting for his appearance on the Hanover scene.
He asked Mr. Warden for work, and was hired on the spot for $1.25 a day, as the farmer needed help badly. He went to work immediately, helping to get as much hay as possible into the barn before the rain began.
Almy lived with the Warden family in the big farmhouse from that day until he was discharged nine months later. He worked hard, hoping to ingratiate himself with the family. The cause of Almy's good behavior for such a prolonged period can only have been the love he felt for Christie, the Warden's oldest daughter. She was a smart, bookish girl of twenty-eight with a pleasant dis- position, "fine rounded form and discreet manners." At the time Almy entered her life, she was doing part-time office work for Prof. Charles H. Pettee, of the State Agricultural College, then located in Hanover.
Other members of the Warden household at the time of Almy's appearance included Christie's father and mother; her four sisters, Alice, Myra, Fanny, and Susie, the latter being of pre-school age; and two brothers, Bert and Johnny. Soon after Almy's arrival, Alice and Myra left to take teaching positions out west. Fanny, a
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muscular fifteen-year-old, expressed an active dislike for Almy soon after he entered the household. Bert, the sixteen-year-old brother, worked with Almy in the fields. Johnny, twelve, took an active part in the events that followed. He later attended Dart- mouth College, graduating in 1900 and later from the Medical School in the class of 1903. Bert also attended Dartmouth, gradu- ating with the class of 1896, and became an electrical engineer.
Almy's courtship must have been a highly proper one, from all we can learn in the newspaper accounts of the period. The couple went on sleigh rides, attended church events and small gatherings at neighboring homes, and played whist. Fanny, who suspected with good reason that Almy was a card sharp, became upset dur- ing these whist sessions.
Christie, lecturer at the Grafton Star Grange, frequently read aloud to Frank from the sentimental novels of the period. At Christie's insistence, Almy manfully tried to improve his mind by reading The Last Days of Pompeii. "The Mocking Bird" was Almy's favorite tune, and Christie obligingly would play it for him on the piano. Frank helped Christie with the household chores, wringing out the family wash, waiting on table, and mak- ing fried fritters for breakfast. She in turn mended his clothes and cooked special dishes for him. Four gifts that Almy claimed Chris- tie gave him during this period he treasured to the end-a lock of her hair, her photograph, her glove, and a necktie case orna- mented with hand-painted pansies.
In January 1891 Christie left to take shorthand lessons in a Manchester, New Hampshire, commercial college. Almy wrote her longing letters. Christie's reply, stilted though it was and in- fluenced by the style of the period, nevertheless denotes a degree of affection, and also some knowledge of Almy's past misdeeds.
"Dear Friend: I don't know as you expect an answer to your letters, and perhaps you do not require one, but to be honest with you and true to myself, I think you should know how I feel toward you. You already know, for I have told you, the sort of man I wish to love. . . . You have set yourself in defiance of God and man. I believe you have suffered the misery that must follow. You surely would not wish me, whom you love, to share that misery.
"Since living with us, you have not gained my highest regard or respect, nor that of my relatives and friends. Your conduct at the card table has given me more insight into the dark side of
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your character, of which you have spoken, than any other one thing. ... I would never think of marrying a man to reform him. The reformation must come first. I am free to confess that should a man with a clear record desire my love, he would stand a much better chance than yourself. But there are none such that I know of.
"Frank, I shall test the strength of your love. Can you open your heart to all good influences, practice a rigid self-control, and wait patiently? If it is ever so, I believe you must win in the end, for you have many fine qualities which I admire and cannot help liking you with all your faults. I fear I am not worthy of such a love, but I cannot be satisfied unless the man I love is able to help me to become better, for I am weak, rather than drag me down. Hoping you will take this as I wish, I am in all sincerity, Truly your friend, Christie."
When Christie returned home from school in March she began working full time for Professor Pettee. Almy became increasingly jealous during this period, particularly of the professor, who was a married man of good reputation. Transportation was not readily available in those days, so Christie boarded in the Pettee house, 1 North Park Street, at the corner of East Wheelock Street. This building is now an apartment house, owned by Dartmouth.
A final break in Frank and Christie's relationship occurred dur- ing a Grange box party. Against her wishes, Almy bid for the box lunch Christie had made. Her anger kindled his own. The feel- ings Almy displayed as he walked Christie to the Pettees' home that night frightened the girl.
On April 2, 1891, Mr. Warden decided to discharge Almy. Evi- dently the farmer did not say goodbye in person to his hired hand. He quoted his young son Johnny as telling him that "Almy bade all those who were at the house goodbye, and when he went out of the door there were tears on both his cheeks."
Almy went further than this in describing the scene. At his trial he said, "When I left I kissed Christie goodbye and she re- turned the kiss."
It is certain that no kiss marked his farewell to Fanny, whose original dislike had grown with continued association. Fanny's feminine intuition was well founded, for this man was George Abbott, whose lawless deeds were even then becoming a legend on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River. The fact that he could live unrecognized so near the scene of his former crimes
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testifies to the stay-at-home habits of the Vermonters and Granite Staters of that period. It was not until after his capture for Chris- tie's murder that Almy and Abbott were found to be the same man, although Almy denied the association to his death.
Abbott was born in 1857, left motherless at the age of three days, was adopted by an uncle and an aunt, and lived in Salem, Massachusetts, until he was ten years old. Then his uncle, Israel Abbott, purchased the family homestead in North Thetford, Ver- mont, where Abbotts and Wilmots, on his mother's side, had lived for generations.
Young George's larcenous nature showed itself at an early age, but he managed to escape prison until the age of seventeen, when he was convicted for several robberies in Orford. He was sent to Concord State Prison for four years. On learning of his son's dis- grace, his father committed suicide in Salem by hanging. He un- wisely left his estate to young George, when he should come of age.
After his release from prison, Abbott promptly went through all the money that had been left him, and showed up penniless at Uncle Israel's farm in North Thetford, where he pitched hay for a time. He then disappeared from the farm and began a systematic series of robberies on both sides of the Connecticut River. He hid his loot and lived in a small cave on Thetford Mountain. A posse found Abbott and wounded him after the location of his cave was discovered, following an ill-advised fire- works display he shot off there to celebrate the November 1880 election of President James A. Garfield.
Thought to be in critical condition, with a posse bullet in his leg and two more in his body, Abbott was placed under a sheriff's care in a private home. Although it was a cold November night, Abbott did not hesitate to escape in his nightshirt when he saw an opportunity. He hid under a railroad culvert all night. The next morning he was found by the posse, practically frozen.
He was convicted, and admitted to Windsor State Prison, Ver- mont, to begin a fifteen-year term for burglary on June 23, 1881. This maximum security prison held him for a time, until 1887, when at the age of thirty, he scaled the prison wall with the aid of a homemade ladder. He left his real name behind him there. Henceforth he called himself Frank C. Almy, the name by which he is remembered.
After his dismissal from the Warden farm, Almy worked for
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two months at Lynch the stair builder's shop in Dorchester, Massachusetts, during which time he purchased a pair of Smith and Wesson six-barreled self-cocking .44-caliber revolvers. He ex- plained that he had a prospect of a job out west, and wanted re- volvers that he knew would stop anything at which he fired.
On June 13 Almy decided he must see Christie again. He packed a traveling bag with his clothing, the two new revolvers, and some gifts for Christie, including a box of handkerchiefs, a novel, The Light That Failed, and a box of bonbons.
He boarded a train in Boston for White River Junction. That night he walked over the bridge from Norwich to Hanover and continued to the Warden farm. At 2 a.m. he hid himself in the hayloft of the barn, about sixty feet from the sleeping house.
This was strange conduct for a lovesick man anxious to see his sweetheart again. Almy explained at his trial that he hid himself because he wanted to see Christie alone. If seen first by one of the family he was afraid that he would be sent away.
At that time Almy presumably thought it would be a simple matter to arrange a meeting with the girl. However, it proved to be a difficult problem-maddeningly so. For the next thirty-two days he remained in the barn, emerging only at night to forage for food in the neighborhood. He must have eaten his fill of raw eggs, for he didn't dare build a fire, and many eggs were missing from the Warden farm during this time. Although he had brought shaving equipment with him into the barn, he grew a beard. After the murder he shaved it off, retaining only his famil- iar drooping mustache.
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