Friday, January 25, 2019

Murder of Johanna Schollman

The body of twenty-four-year Johanna Schollman was found in the south part of Sedalia on the morning of October 24, 1892. Her body was "frightfully bruised," and her jugular vein severed with a knife. Doctors who examined the body were of the initial opinion that she had also been "horribly outraged." The murder had taken place either late the night before or in the wee hours of October 24. The scene of the crime showed evidence of a struggle between Johanna and her attacker.
Johanna had been "seduced" in St. Louis about four years earlier and bore a child out of wedlock. The father was sued for seduction and paid $125 as a settlement but refused to marry Johanna. Afterward, the young woman began leading a somewhat reckless life, and at the time of her death, it was reported that "her reputation was not good." Recently she'd started staying out late at night and "running with colored men." Many people thought her death might have something to do with the wild lifestyle she'd been leading, but no definite suspect was identified at first.


Interviewed on the 24th, Mayor Ed Stephens of Sedalia said he had employed Johanna for the past six months as a domestic but that he'd let her go just the evening before her death because her imprudent behavior had become too much to put up with.
Described as "very good looking," Johanna had several boyfriends, both white and black. A young man she'd known in Germany before the family emigrated to the United States had been writing to her and wanted her to come to Nebraska, where he lived, and marry him. She was reportedly thinking about taking him up on the offer, and he had even sent her money to make the trip. Two young black men in Sedalia were also vying for her affections. One of them, Dick Robinson, was employed by Mayor Stephens, who'd also employed Johanna. However, Stephens said his "boy" was home when the crime was thought to have been committed, and the mayor vouched for Robinson's character.
An inquest after Johanna's death determined that she was pregnant again and that the fetus was about four months old. One theory of the crime was that Johanna had told the father about the unborn baby, that she and the father had argued, and that he'd killed her in the struggle. This did not tally exactly with the fact that she had supposedly been raped. When Johanna's body was re-examined, it was decided that she might not have been raped after all but had, instead, merely had normal sex.
Despite the mayor's vote of confidence in Robinson, suspicion began to settle on him over the next day or two. Evidence against him was uncovered, and, when he was questioned, his story contained  inconsistencies. It was learned that he, like the white man in Nebraska, also wanted to marry Johanna, and she had consulted her uncle, who lived in Sedalia, about it. The uncle had advised her against it, telling her that "she would disgrace the whole family by marrying a negro." Investigators thought that perhaps Johanna had turned Robinson down in his offer of marriage, and he had reacted violently.
On the afternoon of October 25, Robinson was arrested, and later that evening he was moved to the Moniteau County Jail at California because of rumors of mob violence in Sedalia. The Pettis County sheriff visited Robinson at California the next day, and the prisoner gave a confession. He said he was with Johanna on Sunday night the 23rd and that they got into an argument about Taylor Williams, the other black man whom Johanna had been spending time with. Robinson claimed Johanna called him a son of a bitch, drew a knife, and came at him with it, threatening to kill him. He knocked her down but she got up and came at him again. He knocked her down again, took the knife away, and held her down. Finally he let her up and gave her back the knife, but she came at him with it yet again. She kept saying that one of them would have to die, and finally he took the knife and stabbed her. He denied that he had outraged the young woman or even that they had been intimate.
Robinson was tried and convicted of first-degree murder. His case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but the justices sustained the lower court's decision. He was hanged at Sedalia on December 15, 1893, a little over a year after the murder.

Saturday, January 19, 2019

Dogpatch Opening

Construction of Dogpatch, a theme park located at Marble Falls, Arkansas, about eight miles southeast of Harrison, on US Highway 7, began in 1967, and the park was not entirely finished when it held its grand opening on May 18, 1968, although most facilities had been completed. The theme of the park was based on the fictional town of Dogpatch from the comic strip Lil Abner by cartoonist Al Capp, and Capp was one of the stockholders in the venture.
The park, which was open for many activities even before the grand opening, featured an old-time village with an inn, an old mill, and a hillside stable. Most of the buildings that made up the village were old log structures moved to the park from the surrounding Ozarks. The mill used an old mill wheel that was also salvaged from the surrounding countryside. The mill, put into operation as Mammy Yokum's Grist Mill, let visitors see the old-fashioned method of grinding corn and wheat. The stable offered stage coach rides and trail rides on horses and burros. A narrow-gauge railroad was also constructed to carry passengers around the park.
A cold stream running through the park fed two small lakes that were stocked for trout fishing by visitors. No license was required, and fishing equipment was provided. The fisherman merely paid for the amount of fish he hauled in, and he could also have it cooked at the village restaurant. Picnic tables and benches were scattered throughout the park, and hiking trails wound through the 825-acre complex.
In addition to the park itself, a hospitality center was built at Dogpatch Cavern a short distance to the north on Highway 7 to greet visitors as they approached the park.
On May 18, Al Capp was present to give a dedicatory address, and other dignitaries included Arkansas lieutenant-governor Maurice Britt, US representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Miss Arkansas, and folk singer Jimmy Driftwood.
All shops were open for the grand opening day, and activities included skits by Dogpatch characters, performances by various musicians, square dancing, and a fish fry.
In his address, Capp, reflecting on how his cartoon characters and his fictional town had been transformed into life-sized reality, said, "It is terribly exciting to see everything suddenly arrive real after just being a little sketch on paper." At the conclusion of Capp's speech, a large statue of General Jubilation T. Cornpone, one of the main characters in the comic strip, was unveiled to serve as the centerpiece of the park. Gazing at the statue as the cover fell away, Capp remarked, "Don't that just make you proud to be an American?"
The theme park did pretty well at first, and the name of the Marble Falls post office was changed to Dogpatch. But attendance, even the first year when the park drew about 300,000 visitors, never quite lived up to the expectations of its promoters. Attendance gradually declined during succeeding years, and Dogpatch never seriously challenged Silver Dollar City as the premier attraction in the Ozarks. Lil Abner, Daisy Mae Scruggs, Jubilation T. Cornpone, and company shut up shop for good in 1993, and name of the post office was changed back to Marble Falls a few years later.


Saturday, January 12, 2019

Bois D'Arc

Bois D'Arc, Missouri, in western Greene County is an interesting place, because of its name, if for no other reason. Bois D'Arc was named after the bois d'arc or bodark tree, sometimes called the Osage orange because of the large, inedible fruit it bears, or the Hedge apple, because many such trees were used to form windbreaks or hedges. Bois d'arc is French for "wood of the bow," and the bois d'arc tree was used by the Osage Indians in early-day America for making bows. The tree was used extensively for making hedge rows in the Greene County area and elsewhere in the Ozarks at the time Bois D'Arc came into being. Many such trees had been planted, in particular, in the immediate vicinity of the selected site for Bois D'Arc. Thus the name of the tree was adopted as the name of the town.
According to Perry Mason, a longtime resident of Bois D'Arc in 1956 when he wrote a short piece in the Springfield Daily News about how the town got its name, the name was also selected in part because its residents wanted a name that was in keeping with the neighboring towns of Ash Grove and Walnut Grove, which were also named after trees. Mason said Bois D'Arc was founded about the time of the Civil War. Other sources suggest that there was a post office named Bois D'Arc in the area as early as 1847 but that the town was not actually founded until 1872, when a man named John Bymaster moved to the current site of Bois D'Arc and had the post office, which was located a couple of miles to the southeast, moved to the new town, known as New Bois D'Arc at first to distinguish it from the old post office site. By 1876, however, the exact name of the place had apparently still not been settled, because on that year's plat map of Greene County the town that became Bois D'Arc is identified as Little De Bois, meaning Little Woods.
In 1878, the railroad came through Bois D'Arc, and the place began to grow. By 1883, the town boasted five general stores, two drug stores, two blacksmith/repair shops, a carpenter's shop, a shoe shop, a hotel, a Masonic and Odd Fellows' lodge, and one saloon. The only church and the only school were located a couple of miles outside town, but plans were underway to erect both a church house and a school house in the booming little town.
In fact, Bois D'Arc did go on to have a thriving school system for many years, and the high school's athletic teams were quite competitive during the early to mid-1900s. However, the town began to lose population with the emergence of the automobile as the dominant mode of travel, because Bois D'Arc was located on an out-of-the-way county road rather than a main highway. By 1956, when Perry Mason wrote his piece for the Springfield newspaper, the town had dwindled to one grocery store, one filling station, a blacksmith shop, a feed mill, and a drug store, in addition to the school and a church or two. Within a year or two after this, Bois D'Arc lost its high school, when the district consolidated with Ash Grove. Although an elementary school remained at Bois D'Arc, the loss of the high school hastened the town decline, and today little remains at Bois D'Arc except the elementary school, a post office, a fire station, the United Methodist Church (housed in an old stone building dating from 1886) and a few residences.

Saturday, January 5, 2019

A Killing at Prosperity

Prosperity is a former mining town in Jasper County, Missouri, about seven miles east of downtown Joplin or about four miles southeast of Webb City. Nowadays, it is mainly known for the old, two-story, brick schoolhouse that was abandoned about 1961 when Prosperity School consolidated with Webb City. The building, said by some people to be haunted, served as a bed and breakfast for a while but now sits vacant again. I didn't know about this incident until recently, but Prosperity was also once the site of a somewhat sensational killing.
Somewhere around the early part of 1903, Benjamin Aylor, owner of the Eleventh Hour Mining Company in Prosperity, lent Joplin miner Gordon Allen $1,500, with Allen mortgaging some mining machinery adjoining the Eleventh Hour Mine as collateral. Aylor was the son of J. W. Aylor, who was said to be the wealthiest miner in the district, and 30-year-old Ben Aylor was wealthy and successful in his own right. Allen had once been quite wealthy himself but had lost most of his money through "unfortunate mining ventures."
When Allen had not made any payments on Ben Aylor's loan after several months, Aylor foreclosed on the mortgage and took possession of the mining machinery. Allen, who felt he hadn't been treated fairly, grew angry and started making threats against young Aylor. On October 16, 1903, he drove to Prosperity in a buggy and confronted Aylor outside the office of the Eleventh Hour Mining Company. Still seated in the buggy, Allen directed some angry words at Aylor and then brandished a buggy whip as if he was going to lash Aylor with it. Before he could do so, though, Aylor whipped out a pistol and fired five shots into Allen's body, killing him instantly. After the shooting, Aylor went back to work loading ore without saying a word to any of the bystanders who'd been attracted to the scene. When he finished the task at hand, he went into his office and called the sheriff to turn himself in.
Aylor was arrested and put under guard but not placed in jail. A coroner's jury a day or two later failed to agree, with two members arguing justifiable homicide and the other four holding out for an open verdict (saying that the death was suspicious but assigning no cause). Aylor was eventually charged with second-degree murder and lodged in jail.
At his trial in December, the prosecution paraded several witnesses to the stand who had been at the Eleventh Hour Mine on the day of the shooting. Several testified to hearing shots and seeing Allen lying dead immediately afterward, but none of them had actually been an eyewitness to the shooting. The defense witnesses, on the other hand, were mainly men who testified as to the numerous threats Allen had made toward Aylor in the days and weeks leading up to the shooting.
Aylor took the stand in his own defense. He, too, testified as to Allen's prior threats, and he said that Allen had come to his mine on the day in question in a belligerent mood. He said he pulled his pistol and started shooting when he thought Allen was getting ready to whip him. He admitted that he continued emptying the weapon at Allen even after the man had tumbled from the buggy, but the jury nevertheless acquitted him after only ten minutes of deliberation.  
   

The Story of Ada Lee Biggs

After 20-year-old Ada Lee Biggs was convicted of second-degree murder in November of 1928 in Ste. Francois County (MO) for killing her stepf...