A Lively Case

I recently ran across an article in an 1892 Springfield newspaper entitled "A Lively Case" that I found amusing. It was about a woman named Maggie Langley who was charged with "keeping a bawdy house," with a neighbor named Lucinda King being the complaining witness.
When the case came up in early July, the prosecution brought out the names of a number of men who had allegedly visited the home of the 51-year-old Mrs. Langley at the corner of Lyon and Locust streets. There was "considerable amusement among the crowd when certain names were mentioned," and the judge had to threaten to clear the courtroom unless order was restored.
The 35-year-old complainant, however, proved to be a fairly weak witness for the prosecution. Mrs. King, a near neighbor of Mrs. Langley, admitted that she and the defendant had recently engaged in a dispute, which caused jurors to conclude that her complaint might be little more than a personal vendetta. In an apparent attempt to buttress her own character, Mrs. King also made several "more or less remarkable" statements. She claimed that she always opened the doors and blinds any time a man entered her home, that she'd never seen a married man walking with a girl on the streets, that she'd never seen a young woman "arrange a gentleman's cravat," and that she herself had "received but very little company" when she was young. Whether Mrs. King's own reputation was less than stellar or the jurors simply thought the statements were incredibly naive is not clear, but for whatever reason they found them hard to believe. Mrs. King also added that the property occupied by Mrs. Langley had previously been the domicile of "Madam Bell," whom those in the court remembered as a notorious woman but also a benevolent one.
"The case from start to finish was sensational," according to the newspaper report, "and many men were afraid that allegations would be made which it might be difficult to explain or disprove." However, "the testimony was 'rocky' all the way through," and "was not convincing to the jury," who brought in a verdict of not guilty after a brief deliberation.
In a footnote to this story, Maggie Langley and Lucinda King were still neighbors living near the intersection of Lyon and Locust eight years later, at the time of the 1900 census.

Springfield's First New Car Dealer

This blog post, entitled "Springfield's First New Car Dealer," is about J. E. Atkinson, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that I don't know for a certainty that Atkinson was the first new automobile dealer in Springfield. However, I haven't been able to find anyone who came before him.
What I know for sure is that Atkinson offered an automobile repair service from his shop on St. Louis Street as early as 1905. He had previously sold sporting goods and electrical equipment, including bicycles and phonographs, and he continued to sell these products even after he branched into the automobile repair business.
The next year, 1906, Atkinson became an authorized agent of the Cadillac Motor Company and started selling new Cadillacs from his St. Louis Street store. He still continued handling a variety of other goods as well, as you can see in the accompanying advertisement from a Springfield newspaper in April of that year.

In early 1909, Atkinson moved his place of business to East Walnut Street, but he still dealt in essentially the same line of goods he had sold at the other place, including automobiles. However, sometime during this year or late 1908, he quit dealing in Cadillacs and instead started selling De Tamble automobiles. New De Tambles cost $650, as the advertisement below from a November 1908 Springfield newspaper shows.

In early 1910, Atkinson moved again, this time to 308 S. Jefferson, and started selling R.E.O.s, which cost $1250, almost twice as much as the De Tamble. For at least a short while, he was a dealer for both De Tambles and R.E.O.s.
By 1911, Atkinson had started selling Fords and apparently discontinued selling other makes. At least Ford cars were the ones he mainly promoted in newspaper ads such as the one below from a September 1911 Springfield newspaper.

As a sideline, or maybe it was something more than a sideline, Atkinson also began selling Ohio Electric cars while still hawking the Fords, which he continued to sell until his death in early 1914. Suffice it to say that J. E. Atkinson wore a lot of different caps as a merchant in early 1900s Springfield.

John Hunt's Murder of his Daughter

On the evening of August 29, 1896, sixty-four-year-old John Hunt of Columbia, Missouri, arrived home in a drunken frenzy and , according to initial reports of the incident, shot his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mattie, twice for no apparent reason. He then chased his fifty-one-year-old wife, Mary, out of the house, firing one or two errant shots at her. Then he promptly mounted a horse and rode away. One report of the affair said that Hunt entered the house, starting shooting, and both women went screaming from the home pursued by the drunken man. Mattie fell dead, and her mother fainted in the garden, where she was found a half hour later. A different report the next day said that, when Hunt arrived home, Mattie came out of the house to meet him and the old man immediately drew his revolver and started shooting without provocation. After receiving a single gunshot wound to the side, the girl fled shrieking from the scene. Hunt then entered the house and started shooting at his wife but missed. She fled the house and collapsed outside, while Hunt rushed back out of the house, mounted his horse, and galloped away. The first report suggested that Mattie's wounds were probably fatal, while the second one said that she was in a serious condition but that her wound was not necessarily fatal.

Shortly after the shooting, a posse organized and went in pursuit of the demented man, who according to the second report, had "borne a bad reputation for several years." 

Hunt was captured on the afternoon of August 30 and charged with felonious assault. After Mattie died from her wound or wounds on September 4, Hunt was "re-arrested" and charged with murder.

At the time of his trial in February of 1897, Hunt's son John armed himself and threatened violence against his mother if she testified against the father. However, the son was arrested, and the mother's testimony, which went on as scheduled, brought out additional facts about the shooting. Hunt and his wife had been arguing a lot in the days and weeks leading up to the crime over the fact that Hunt wanted to sell their place in Columbia and move to the countryside while Mary preferred to stay in town. There were other issues as well, and Hunt was especially abusive when he'd been drinking. He had threatened to kill both his wife and his daughter on more than one occasion. On the fateful evening, he came home from visiting an adult son in the country and immediately started arguing with his wife. Mattie soon came home from grocery shopping and found the couple still in a heated argument. When she told her mother, "I would not stand it," Hunt pulled out his revolver and shot her. 

Hunt's lawyers pleaded insanity, but he was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang in late March. His attorneys petitioned for a new trial, and when the motion was denied, they appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, automatically staying the execution. A newspaper report at the time said Hunt was 78 years old, but this is almost surely an error, since he was listed as 38 in the 1870 census and 46 in the 1880 census. Unless both of the census records were drastically wrong, Hunt could not have been anywhere near 78. More likely he was in his mid-sixties. 

In early December of 1897, the state supreme court upheld the lower court's verdict and reset the execution for January 13, 1898. A newspaper report at the time said that Hunt had been accused 40 years earlier of murdering his stepfather but that sufficient evidence could not be gathered for a conviction. However, shortly after this incident, Hunt had been sent to the state pen on a grand larceny charge, and when he got home he "made love to his cousin" and ended up eloping with her and marrying her over the protestations of her family. This was the same wife who later testified against him for killing their daughter, Mattie. 

Before Hunt's execution date, a sheriff's jury was convened in Boone County to consider the question of his sanity. Described as a "mental and physical wreck," he was declared insane, and an appeal for clemency was subsequently made to the governor. In early January 1898, the governor commuted the condemned man's sentence and ordered him committed to the insane asylum at Nevada. 

  

Murder of Haggerty and Hanging of Davidson

An unprovoked murder occurred at a picnic on September 21, 1878, a few miles northeast of Warrensburg, Missouri. A young, single man named Frank Davidson had been drinking throughout the day, and he became very intoxicated and quarrelsome. About five or six p.m., he got into an argument with William Haggerty, a married man who, at 23 or 24 years of age, was about the same age as Davidson. The drunken man ended up drawing his navy revolver and shooting Haggerty. Before the victim fell, Davidson fired a couple of more bullets into his body, and Haggery was dead almost by the time he hit the ground. In the immediate wake of the murder, a report in the St. Louis Globe Democrat conjectured, "It is supposed that jealousy was the cause of the deed, as no other reason can be assigned."
What information the Globe Democrat had to go on in order to draw such a conclusion is not known, but the newspaper's speculation turned out to be right.
After shooting Haggerty, Davidson became frantic as several other men tried to apprehend him. He exchanged errant fire with one man and took a shot at a second man that also missed its mark before the men were able to close in, overpower him, and disarm him. He was taken into Warrensburg and placed in the Johnson County Jail. In the aftermath of his arrest, a dubious report circulated that he was a desperado who had recently moved to Johnson County from Kansas, where he was implicated in or suspected of other crimes. Sometime after his capture, Davidson was moved to the Pettis County Jail at Sedalia for safekeeping. He was indicted for murder at the December term of Johnson County Criminal Court.
At Davidson's trial in May of 1879, the murdered man's widow, nineteen-year-old Lydia Haggerty, testified that she had known Davidson four or five years, because he used live and work on her father's farm. Lydia had married Haggerty a year or so before he was killed, and they already had a baby at the time of the shooting.
At the fateful picnic, Lydia was helping her husband run a candy stand when Davidson approached near the end of the day and wanted to buy some candy for her. Lydia declined the offer, but he insisted. When she told him not to be spending his money on her, he leaned close to her and whispered that he was going to sleep with her that night.
"I guess not!" she exclaimed.
"By God, I will," he said.
Not unless he was a better man than her man, Lydia told him.
Davidson then wandered off, and Lydia went to her husband, who was standing some distance away, and told him what Davidson had said. Haggerty demanded to know where Davidson was, but Lydia said she didn't know. Haggerty went looking for Davidson and couldn't find him at first but then happened to meet him not far from the candy stand as he (Haggerty) was going to see about his horse, which had gotten loose. Lydia saw the two men arguing and saw Davidson pull out his pistol and start shooting at her husband, who was unarmed.
Davidson, who had known and been friends with Haggerty as well as Lydia before the couple was married, testified in his own defense. His testimony largely coincided with Lydia's, even admitting that he'd told her he was planning to sleep with her. Despite this admission, when Haggerty confronted him and demanded an apology, he told the other man that he did not realize he had insulted his wife. Haggerty starting pulling up his sleeves as if to fight and demanded that Davidson take back what he'd said or else he'd "beat his damned head off." Davidson pulled out his revolver, waved it over his head, and told Haggerty to go away or he'd shoot him. A man named Queener grabbed hold of Davidson's arm, but when Haggerty made some other angry remark, Davidson jerked away and shot him.
Davidson was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang on July 9, 1879. His father gathered the signatures of a large number of citizens petitioning the governor for clemency, but to no avail. The state supreme court also refused to grant a new trial. "Well, I'm not the first man ever hung," young Davidson said when given the news.
On June 14, the condemned man was baptized by the Rev. Isham Tanner, the man on whose farm he had been living and working at the time of the crime. Then, on July 9, the execution was carried out as scheduled before an estimated 10,000 people. Drawn by a morbid curiosity, they thronged to a site just outside Warrensburg, where a scaffold had been erected. and they took up positions on the surrounding hills as though for a picnic until the grounds were blanketed by a sea of humanity. Shortly before noon, Davidson was led up the steps of the scaffold. After a brief Bible reading and sermon by the condemned man's spiritual adviser, Davidson was led to the trap. The lever was sprung at exactly 12:00 o'clock, and Davidson fell through the trap into eternity.