Alfred Morrison: The Mount Vernon Dream Killer

 

Alfred Morrison (The Evening World. April 6, 1900)

A sneak thief stole an overcoat from Alfred Morrison’s back porch Thursday evening. When he went to bed that night, he fell asleep with a big cavalry revolver under his pillow.

His younger daughter, Josephine, slept in the bed with him. His wife and youngest child slept in a smaller bed on the other side of the room. 

Alfred Morrison woke up at 2:30 a.m., standing beside his wife’s bed, holding his pistol. “Run for a doctor, quick,” she screamed, “you’ve hit me.”

Much like Walter Mitty, Morrison was an excitable guy who lived in a vague, dreamlike state. For example, that night, he pictured himself fighting off a hoard of burglars, not his wife.

Lemp Brewery In St. Louis: Makers Of Falstaff Beer

 

Lemp Brewery in St. Louis, Missouri
(color drawing after a photo in the St. Louis Star & Times. March 14, 1914)

The Lemps knew how to get their name in front of people. They put it on bottles, advertisements, and the side of a smokestack. By the 1870s, they ran the largest brewery in St. Louis.

 

Before all that, there was a grocery store.

 

Johann Adam Lemp came to St. Louis in 1838. He’d learned to brew in Germany and started making beer while running his store. The lager found customers. Enough of them that groceries stopped being the principal business.

 

The family claimed 1840 as the brewery’s founding year. Historians haven’t quite settled that, but records show brewing operations by 1841. Adam called it the Western Brewery and set up near the riverfront.

 

He had beer to make and a problem to solve.

 

Lager needed to stay cold while it aged. St. Louis got hot, and a brewer couldn’t leave barrels sitting through a Missouri summer and expect everything to turn out fine.

 

Adam used caves.

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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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.