USA > New York > Monroe County > Rochester > History of Rochester and Monroe county, New York, from the earliest historic times to the beginning of 1907 > Part 21
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That large and somewhat ornate building, de- voted entirely to the police department, was con- pleted, after a year of labor, in June, 1895, at
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a cost of sixty-tive thousand dollars, exclusive of the land on which it stands. The basement is given up to the boiler room and cellars; on the first floor are the captain's offices, the assembly room, with lockers, and the lockup for males, with twenty-two cells; the second floor contains utlices for the chief of police and the director of the detective bureau, the police court-room, with rooms for the judge and the clerk; on the third fluor are the living apartments for the matron, rooms for the detention of witnesses and the lock- up for females, with thirteen cells; the fourth floor is devoted to the gymnasium, the bath-room and the room of the police patrol operators : these con- trol the police telegraph system, on which more than sixty thousand dollars has been expended and of which there are now some sixty stations, Roch- ester having been the first city in the state to adopt the plan ; the office also operates a duplicate telephone system consisting of two separate switch- boards in direct connection with fire headquarters by means of a central energy telephone, this city being the first in the United States, so far as is known, to apply that invention successfully in this connection ; the two patrol wagons, which are kept in the rear of the building, have lately been equipped with electric power, so that the horses have been discarded.
THE LYMAN MERDER.
Turning now to the purely criminal side it may be as well to record a series of murders. Of these the first within the limits of Rochester-not only then, Imt the first within the present boundaries- was the one that overshadowed all those that came after it and it produced a state of excitement more pervasive and more lasting than any other deed of violence that was ever committed here. On the morning of October 24th, 1837. the body of Wil- liam Lyman was found in an open lot between St. Paul and North Clinton streets, quite near his house, which was on the latter street, a little north of Franklin. He was a respected citizen. who had his office in a sinall building that stood on the southeast corner of East Main and South Water streets, the city terminal of the horse rail- road that ran to Carthage. Horace Hooker & Co. hail extensive grain warehouses at the latter point and held the lense of the road. Lyman being in
their employ, both in the wheat-selling und in che railroad, of which he was practically the treas- urer. Mr. Hooker had sent to him from Hartford two days before this nearly five thousand dollars in bills of the Connecticut Hiver Banking com- pany, which, besides several hundred dollars just received from the railroad, Lyman had put into his pocket that evening to carry home with him. After the discovery of the body a little boy remetn- bered that on the previous evening about nine o'clock he had seen the flash of a pistol near by and by its light had perceived three men standing at the place first mentioned, one of whom wore a glazed cap. It being known that a young man of French extraction, named Octavius Barron, ha- bitnally wore anch a cap, a watch was set upon him and he was seen to go to the Tonawanda railroad station at the corner of West Main and Flizabeth streets, apparently with the intention of getting out of the city, then to turn into a wood- yard and hide something between two piles of lum- ber. Going away for a little distance he soon came back to the spot and was arrested, the hidden package in the meantime having been found to be a wallet known to have belonged to the mur- dered man, which bud in it several Imndred dollars in bank bills and which was wrapped in a handker- chief marked with Barron's name. It transpired afterward that he had been watching outside of Lyman's office on the previous evening and had seen through the window the disposal of the money. after which he followed his victim and shot him in the back of the head, probably killing hum instantly. He then took from the body the wallet containing some five hundred dollars. thonghi he overlooked entirely a pocket-book which had in it ten times as much. Of his two com- panions at the scene of the crime one, named Ben- nett, was noticed in a saloon with him at a later hour, both spending money freely and in a state of great excitement; the other, Fluett, helped to carry his trunk to the station on the following morning; both were taken into custody a little later.
THE FIRST EXECUTION.
Barron's trial was deferred till the following May. when Judge Dayton was the presiding jus- tice. The district attorney, Abner Pratt, conduct-
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ed the prosecution, but the matter was considered sufficiently important to call for the aid of the attorney-general, Samuel Beardsley, who made a powerful appeal in closing the case. For the de- fense Horace Gay, E. B. Wheeler and A. A. Ben- nett appeared, but their efforts were unavailing, for a verdiet of guilty was rendered within an hour after the jury had retired. Barron was hanged on the 25th of June in the jail on the island, hi- execution being the first one in Monroe county. Darius Perrin, the sheriff at the time, performed the repulsive task himself, though he declined to accept the legal fee of five hundred dollars for doing it, whereupon the board of supervisors struck out of his bill at the next settlement the item of one dollar and a half, which he had ex- pended for a new flax rope to be used on the occasion. Up to that time the universal method of hanging, at least in this country, consisted in sim- ply dropping the criminal. with the rope about his neck, through a trap door into a room or pit beneath, but in this case a new method was adopt- ed-which came afterward to be called the "jerk system"-in which the prisoner is raised suddenly to the ceiling of a lofty apartment and is then dropped instantly through two stories, the fall usually resulting in breaking his neck. This was the first use of that method in the United States, where it is now generally practised, though the ancient custom of slow strangulation is still em- ployed in England. This primary execution rousell so much interest, both here and in the vicinity, that the militia had to be called out on that day to keep away from the jail the crowd that had gathered with the hope that they might obtain some glimpse of the ghastly spectacle. The same consideration of fairness that operated to delay Barron's trial caused the postponement of that of Bennett and Flnett till after his execution, and even then it was held at Batavia, so that popular clamor might not influence the verdict. They were both acquitted, not, as was supposed at the time, that there was any doubt of their guilt, but because of a general feeling that justice should be satisfied with one victim.
The contagion of crime is well shown by the fact that before the first murderer was tried the act was duplicated and on the same side of the river, when Anstin Squires, who lived with his wife nt the corner of Lancaster (now Cortland)
street and Mouroe avenue, shot her without provo- cation on the evening of May 4th, 1838. He was somewhat intoxicated at the time and besides that he was so eccentric that many of his neighbors considered him unbalanced, whereby at the pres- ent day he would doubtless have escaped the gal- lows; not so then, for he was hanged on the 29th of November at the age of thirty-five.
THE HARDENBROOK TRIAL.
More than a decade had passed by when the third murder trial took place, in May, 1849. Dr. John K. Hardenbrook, a practising physician, Was accused of having killed Thomas Nott, a hardware dealer, by poison, on the 5th of February preced- ing. The doctor was an intimate friend of the family and his friendship for Mrs. Nott was sup- posed to have impelled him to remove the hus- band, who was suddenly seized with violent con- vulsions, in which, after some temporary relief, he expired two days later. The administration of strychnine was alleged as the productive cause. but the jury evidently gave the prisoner the benefit of the doubt and he was acquitted. The case was tried before Judge Marvin, the prosecution be- ing conducted by William S. Bishop, the district- attorney, assisted by Henry G. Wheaton of Al- bany, who had been detailed by the attorney-gen. cral to represent him; the defense was supported by Henry R. Selden, John Thompson and Leonard Adams, of this city, together with H. K. Smith of Buffalo, who made the principal argument.
A PORTUGUESE MURDER.
Maurice Antonio, a Portuguese, applied to the poormaster in January, 1852, for assistance to re- turn to his home in the island of Madeira. Re- eciving the aid, he started off, together with the wife and children of Ignacio Texeira Pinto, a fel- low-countryman. The husband did not go with them and it was found on inquiry that he had not been seen since the previous November. Search was then made in an old hut that they had occu- pied for three months before that in the town of Gates, and the body of Pinto was found under the earth in the cellar, with wounds on the head that showed how his end had come. His wife and her paramour were followed to Albany, where they
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were found in the almis-house and brought back. Judge Harris presided at the trial of Antonio, with Martin S. Newton, the district-attorney, for the prosecution ; Luther H. Hovey and J. D. Hus- bands appeared for the prisoner, who, being promptly convicted, was hanged on the 3d of June.
Only a passing interest is excited nowadays when a person disappears, but it was different half a century ago, and the most intense excitement was produced in February, 1848, when Porter P. Pierce, a young woolen manufacturer, was lost. and again in November, 1854, in the similar cass of Emma Moore, aged thirty-seven. In both in- stances meetings of citizens were held, commit- tees appointed and rewards offered, with no re- sult; both bodies were subsequently found in the water with marks of violence upon them, but the murderers remained unknown.
In May, 1855, Martin Eastwood was tried for the murder of Edward Bretherton in the north- ern part of the city; after conviction and the death sentence he obtained a second trial and got off with a long imprisonment, as the two men had been engaged in a quarrel and premeditation had Hot been clearly shown.
THE LITTLES MURDER.
The Falls Field tragedy, as it was long known, which occurred in the last week of 1857, warrants a full description, both from the peculiar ciremin- stances of the case and on account of the intense excitement that pervaded the community at the time. Marion Ira Stout (commonly known by his middle name), born in Pennsylvania in 1835, was a wonderfully precocious yonth, who even in early boyhood had obtained considerable knowl- edge of Latin and French, as well as a fair ac- quaintance with English literature, and before he was much older he was well up in metaphysics, be- ing familiar with the writings of Home, Locks and other philosophers. All this was coincident with the very worst possible environment, for from an early age he had been thrown into association with professional criminals, his father being an expert workman as member of a gang of counter- feiters and finally sent to prison for ten years for forgery, soon after which Ira himself spent more than four years in the Eastern penitentiary of Pennsylvania for being concerned in a burglary
On his release he came to Rochester to complete his education, spending his days in a mercantile college and devoting his nights to the study of commercial law, mathematics and general litera- ture. His family, with the exception of his fa- ther, had preceded him and his sister was mar- ried to Charles W. Littles, a practising attorney, but employed at the time in the office of Henry Hunter. There was much discord between the married couple, owing to the intemperance, mar- ital infidelity and general wickedness of the hus- band, and Ira naturally took the part of his sis- ter, between whom and himself a peculiar af- fection existed. He soon formed the determina- tion to murder his brother-in-law, and he made at least one attempt before he was successful, hav- ing tried to induce Littles to walk with him one night over the slippery planks of Andrews street bridge, which was then being repaired, where one blow would have sent his victim into the water and thence over the falls, as the river was run- ning high at the time. Littles was of a jealous disposition, which enabled Stout to convince him that his wife had an appointment at Falls field for the evening of December 19th, and the two men went to the spot on that night, Sarah, who was dominated by her brother, preceding them a little, so as to lure her husband to his doom.
That came soon enough, for when they had got near the edge of the bank Ira struck his victim a sudden blow with an iron mallet, smashing the skull and producing death instantly. Stout then threw the body over the precipice, supposing that it would fall into the river and be swept into the lake before sunrise, but instead of that it struck on a projecting ledge thirty feet below the upper level. Perceiving that there had been some fail- ure in the matter, Irn started to go down a narrow path that led sideways along the cliff, but in the darkness he missed his footing and fell headlong, breaking his left arm in the descent and landing beside the corpse. Summoning all his remaining strength he was just able to push the body again over the bank, when he sank in a dead faint, on recovering from which in a few minutes he called to his sister, who was still above, to come and help him. Starting to do so, the bushes to which she clung gave way, she stumbled, broke her left wrist and fell beside her prostrate brother. But it would not do to remain there, wretched as was their
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plight, and so, after searching in vain for Ira's spectacles, which they had to leave behind them, Int taking with them the fatal mallet, they serani- bled slowly and painfully up the bank and made their way laboriously to their home on Monroe avenue. The first thing was to remove all obvions traces of the crime; the mallet was hidden away on the premises so carefully that it was not found till after the trial, and the blood stains were as far as possible washed away from their clothes. Both were able to bear without manifestation the pain of their wounds, but the swelling and the inflammation of Ira's arm increased so rapidly that the result might have been fatal if surgical aid had not been summoned, dangerons as that step was. So Dr. Rupalje and Dr. Whitheck were called in at a late hour of the night, the limb was set and bandaged, Sarah not mentioning her own injury, and then the household waited for the duwn and for what might come after.
Now, two days before this a man named New- hafer had fallen from the Andrews street bridge and been swept over the falls, that incident, in fact, suggesting to Stout one of his plans for dis- posing of his brother-in-law. The Jewish con- gregation of which Newhafer was a member of- fered a large reward for the recovery of his body, stimulated by which a number of persons engaged in the search and carly on the morning of the 20th they went down the path which Ira and his sister had trodden the night before. Descend- ing to its foot they found, not the object of their search, but the corpse of Littles, which had been thrown back by the rushing water into a shal- low edily, where it remained. It took not long to identify the remains, and within an hour the officers, armed with a warrant, went to the house on Monroe avenne, and there the evidence of guilt confronted them almost at once. Incredible as it may seem, Sarah, misled by her evil genius, had neglected to remove from her cloak and even from her hair ile burrs of the yellow burdock that had elung to her in her frightful fall and that were afterward shown to he similar to those that grew in the fatal field. The culprits were taken at once to the police office, where the coroner was already; a jury was immediately summoned. although it was Sunday, and the inquest proceeded through that whole day, late into the night and for the three days and evenings following. It was,
practically, the trial, the subsequent proceedings before the grand and petty juries bringing out little more testimony than had been already pro- duced. The trial itself of the principal criminal took place in the following April before Justice Henry Welles, John N. Pomeroy being appointed counsel for the prisoner, who was destitute of pecuniary means. Conviction was easily secured. followed by sentence, but an appeal was taken, &) that it was the 22d of October when Ira Stout was excented. During that six months' interval his cell was almost daily thronged by visitors, for the morbid curiosity to see him continned unabated to the end. In the meantime Mrs. Littles was tried for manslaughter, her counsel being Chaun- cey Perry and John C. Chumasero; being con- victed in the second degree, she was sentenced to Sing Sing for seven years, was pardoned before her term expired and subsequently married agair.
THE ROBERTSON TRIAL.
Between the time of the commission of Stout's crime and his trial for the offense there was an. other trial, which would not have aroused the great interest that it excited but for the promi- neuce of the principal parties. John B. Robert- son, the cashier of the Eagle bank and city comp- toller (an office that existed for a few years at that time), was aveused of trying to effect the murder of his wife by inducing a young physician of the city to administer poison in the shape of successive prescriptions, Mrs. Robertson being thea quite an invalid. The doctor testified that Roher !- ron had called repeatedly at his office, urging him to use sanguinaria, and that he (the physician) had given instead the milder remedy of sambucus, of the same color and producing similar effects, though to a harmless degree. These conversa- tions were testified to by several well-known citi- zens, who were concealed in an adjoining room, hut the defense met that by the ingenious hypo- thesis that it was easy to be mistaken as to the identity of a person heard hut not seen, and sup- porting that theory by various tests in the court- room. The jury preferred to believe that the con- spiracy was on the part of the doctor against the prisoner, rather than of the accused against his wife, and a verdiet of acquittal was rendered after a deliberation of three hours. It is not often that
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the attorney-general of the state appears, especial- ly away from the capital, except in cases of the utmost importance, and the fact that he was here in this instance to assist the district-attorney, Cai- vin Huson, was doubtless owing to the imposing array on the other side, consisting of John H[. Martindale, himself afterward attorney-general; Selah Mathews and Alfred Ely, afterward mem- ber of Congress, with Henry R. Selden, then lien- tenant-governor, as counsel. A few years subse- quently it was found that Robertson had been a defaulter with the funds of the Mt. Hope com- missioners, of which he hud charge as comptroller.
STATE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.
One of the most important institutions in this part of the country is the State Industrial school, which is to be officially kuown after April 1st, 1907, as the State Agricultural and Industrial school, but which during most of its existence has been commonly called the Western House of Refuge, its real name for the first twenty-five years and the one under which it was formally opened on August 11th, 1849. Authorized by act of the leg- islature of May 8th, 1846, four thousand two hundred dollars was paid for forty-two acres lying west of lake avenue and fronting Phelps avenue, the state contributing three thousand dollars of that. and the citizens of Rochester making up the balance. Three years was taken up in the con- struction of the building. with its inclosure of the stone wall, under the supervision of the commis- sioners, William Pitkin, D. C. McCallum and Isane Hil's. Room was furnished for only fifty inmates at the outset, but the increasing demand was met by the erection of successive additions till more than a thousand conkl he accommodated, the girls' department with a frontage of two hundred and seventy-six feet, completely separated from the other part, being built in 1826. Even from the outset the reformatory clement existed, but the punitive quality was then predominant, whereas now, owing to the evolution of penology. the rela- tive positions of the two influences are reversed und it has become a sehcol for the training of juvenile delinquents, io whom more than twenty different trades are taught. A change is now in process of making, not only in the congregate sys-
tem that has prevailed until recently, but in the location of the institution. which is being moved to the town of Rush, where the cottage plau will be carried out. To effect this some forty new buildings, including a hospital, have been erected already and about twenty-five more will be put up before the plant is complete and twenty-one different colonies shall be provided for, with qs wide separution from each other as the area of fourteen hundred acres will permit. When that is done the most of the old buildings will be torn down and Phelps avenue extended across the canal. Of the present officers of the school the president of the board of managers is Miss Luma E. Aldridge; vice-presidents, John M. Lee, M. D., and Rt. Rev. Thomas F. Hickey, D.D .; secre- tary and treasurer, Andrew II. Bown ; superintend- ent, Franklin II. Briggs; assistant superintend- ent, David Bruce; Protestant chaplain, Rev. Ar- thur Humphreys; Catholic chaplain, Rev. Michael J. Kreig; physician, Dr. D. Lansing Vanderzee.
Through the instrumentality of an association formed for the purpose in May, 1853, with Wil- liam Pitkin as president and S. D. Porter as sec. retary, the Home for Idle and Truant Children was established on St. Paul street, remaining there till 1877, when it was given up.
THE PENITENTIARY.
Up to 1853 people must have had the mistaken idea that the jail was the proper place of confine- ment for those who had been sentenced to short terms of imprisonment, for there was no other place to put them unless they were sent to one of the state prisons. In the year mentioned a committee of the board of supervisors was ap. pointed, consisting of Joshua Conkey, Samuel H. Davis, Ezra B. True and Lewis Selye, under whose supervision the Monroe county penitentiary was erected in the course of the following year at a cost of $22.707.60. In 1865 it was almost completely destroyed by fire and, having been re- built, suffered a similar loss nearly as great threc years later. After its second restoration a large workshop was added in 1873 and another exten- sive addition was made twelve years after that, with two hundred and fifty cells in five tiers, most of which were occupied at once by convicts trans-
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ferred from their former quarters, which had be- come badly overcrowded. Not far from three hundred is the average number of inmates, though once, about nine years ago, there were five hun- dred and twenty-five there at one time. Only a small proportion of them can be kept at work, most of those in the garden and the farm during the summer months, for an iniquitous provision of the state constitution, dictated to the politicians by the labor unions, forbids the employment of con- . viet labor in the prisons or penitentiaries except so far as the products of their toil can be used in other institutions of the state, which of course is an insignificant amount. The first superintend- ent was Z. R. Brockway, who, after serving three terms, resigned, to take the same position in the House of Correction at Detroit, becoming after- ward the head of the Elmira Reformatory, where he acquired a national reputation. He was suc- ceeded by William Willard, after whom came Levi S. Fulton, then Alexander Mcwhorter, then Charles A. Webster, the present incumbent. The chaplains are Bishop McQuaid and Rev. H. Clay Peepels; the physician is Dr. Henry T. Williams.
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT.
It is time to turn to the police department and see how that is getting along. By a charter amend- ment in 1853 the mayor was authorized to appoint one police constable for each of the ten wards, one of them to be chief of police and an equal number of watchmen, presumably for the night force, one of whom should be captain of the watch. The terms employed were misleading, for the pow- ers of the "police constables" were more restricted than ever, as they could not after that make ar- rests without a warrant; about all they could de was to serve papers issued by the courts, and it was only the "watchmen" who were the real po- licemen as we understand the term. The mayor, General John Williams, exercised his powers only sparingly, probably in the interest of economy, for he appointed only five watchmen, with George Bradshaw as captain, and three police constables besides Addy W. Van Slyck as chief of police, he being the first one to bear that title. In the follow- ing years the force was rapidly increased, almost annually.
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