New York City At The Start Of The Revolution

Harper's Weekly Magazine published this print of New York City in 1776 in its February 19, 1876 issue. It's a great look at New York City at the start of the American Revolution.

Edgar Allan Poe: Master of Suspense

 

Edgar Allan Poe (Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 1872)

Edgar Allan Poe knew how to make a room feel unsafe.

 

A man hears a heartbeat under the floorboards. Another walls up a body and figures he’s gotten away with murder. A house seems to rot along with the family inside it.

 

Poe didn’t need a monster at the door. He could leave a man alone with his thoughts and wait for him to come apart.

 

Poe’s life gave him plenty to work with. 

 

His father left, and his mother died when he was two. John and Frances Allan took him in, but never adopted him. They fought over money.

 

He did well in the Army. But West Point was another matter. Poe did well in French and mathematics, but he wanted out. John Allan wouldn’t agree to his resignation, so he stopped showing up for classes and duties. A court-martial dismissed him in 1831, seven months after he entered the academy.

Author James Fennimore Cooper Created The American Loner

 

James Fennimore Cooper 
(colored print after an image in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 1872)

James Fenimore Cooper made a living out of getting people lost.

 

He sent them into forests, across lakes, onto ships, and behind enemy lines. Once they were there, he made sure someone dangerous was close behind. Readers bought the books as fast as he could write them.

 

That may sound ordinary now. In the 1820s, it was a big deal. Americans loved novels, but most of the popular ones came from Europe. Cooper gave them adventures that could happen right here, in places with American names and American problems.

 

His breakthrough novel was The Spy (1821). Its hero, Harvey Birch, was a peddler doing secret work for George Washington. Birch had to let everyone think he was a traitor, even when his own safety was on the line.

 

Readers loved it.

 

Cooper followed with The Pioneers and a character they’d want to see again: Natty Bumppo. Natty lived by his own rules, knew his way through the woods, and had little patience for the settlers filling them with fences. 

 

Cooper brought him back four more times.

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If the Old West is your thing, you may enjoy these books...

Shot All To Hell

Shot All To Pieces

Stop Faking Murder Stories: The Death of Celebrity Whist Player Joseph Elwell

Roy Harris (The Buffalo Times. April 7, 1921)

Someone murdered Joseph Elwell, “the whist wizard” of Manhattan, overnight on June 11, 1920.

Elwell’s maid, Marie Larsen, found him in his home at 324 East Fifty-second Street with a bullet in his head. An ambulance took Elwell to Bellevue Hospital, where he died at 11 a.m.

 

Detectives fixed the time of the shooting between 7:35 a.m. and 8:15 a.m. They knew that because he was reading mail; the postman delivered at 7:35, and his maid found him when she arrived for work at 8:15 a.m.

 

Oddly enough, the house was sealed tight. All the doors and windows were locked when the maid found him. Detectives found thousands of dollars in jewelry and $300 or $400 in cash in Elwell’s upstairs bedroom, which ruled out robbery as a motive.

 

The papers reported Elwell was a high-stakes gambler and often won or lost as much as $30,000 in a single night playing auction bridge. He made another $25,000 a year teaching and writing books on bridge-whist.

Murder At The Grand Hotel In New York

 

Dolly Reynolds. (The Sun. March 24, 1899)

The Grand Hotel was your typical New York meeting place, “in that part of New York where people go and come as they please and where no one seems to care about his neighbor’s affairs. The clerk of the hotel finds no time to ask many questions of his guests, and he would not think it strange if any of them passed in or out at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.” 

 

The clerk didn’t ask Dolly Reynolds (real name Emmeline Reynolds) any questions when she checked in on the afternoon of August 15, 1898. She signed in as “E. Maxwell and wife” and was shown to room 84 on the fourth floor. “The good appearance she made was a sufficient guarantee that he would get all that was coming to him in the shape of pay for board or lodging.”

 

Dolly ate lunch by herself in the dining room at 2 p.m. She left the hotel and returned at 6 p.m., accompanied by a man later identified as Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy. They left the hotel and returned just before midnight. Not long after that, John Day, a negro bellboy, brought them a bottle of champagne. Day told the court he remembered Kennedy because of his generous tip—25 cents on a $1.75 bottle of champagne.

 

Dr. Kennedy slipped out of the hotel in the middle of the night. Elevator boy Patrick Lenehan said he took Kennedy to the first floor at 2:30 a.m. Desk clerk, Joseph Gregory, watched him leave the hotel by the Broadway door.

 

The next morning, chambermaid Mary Higgins opened the unlocked door and found Dolly Reynolds dead on the floor of her room with her head bashed open. After getting over the shock, she made some mental notes to herself. There were two glasses of champagne on the table, one full and the other half full. The pillowcases were still pinned in place, so no one had slept in the bed, and a fifteen-inch section of lead pipe was lying next to the body. 

The Cambridge Curse - Coincidence Or Murder

 

Street festival in Cambridge, Illinois, circa 1907 (colorized postcard)

On January 13, 1907, the Sunday Record-Herald devoted its entire front page to the mystery everyone was talking about—the Cambridge Curse. They said, “Henry County, Illinois, suffers from an epidemic of murder and suicide unequaled in any rural community in this country.”

 

The paper reported that the city had become so accustomed to the “carnival of crime” that “a murder now is not more than a two-day wonder in Cambridge. We constantly wonder what will happen next.”

 

Things had gotten so bad that people were overheard asking each other...

 

“Who next?” “What next?”

 

And history was on their side. Over the past three years, Henry County had experienced ten murders, five suicides, two attempted suicides, and a bank robbery—statistics totally out of whack for a community of 1500. 

 

What surprised the reporter even more was that the authorities could find no connection between the murders and suicides. They just happened. Finally, the paper concluded that it was nothing more than a “gruesome and unfortunate coincidence.”

 

Still, the reports were alarming...