"Dark deeds of licentiousness and vice"

"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, to visit, out of curiosity, the third row, in the Tremont Theatre. In all cities, this part of the theatre is well understood to be the resort of the very dregs of society. Here the vile of both sexes meet together, and arrange their dark deeds of licentiousness and vice. Soon after entering the common hall, this Portsmouth gentleman was struck with the very youthful and innocent countenance of one of the girls in the crowd. He sought an opportunity to speak to her. After some light observations to engage her attention, and not excite any suspicions, but that he was one among the rest, he asked her to walk a little aside, when he inquired how she came to her present condition, &c. He learned that she was from L_______, Vt., that she was very unhappy in her situation, but did not know how to get out of it...

"We warn parents in the country, to be careful about permitting their daughters to go to factories, and especially about coming to Boston. There are men here who have the appearance of gentlemen, who, by the most seductive pretensions, and consummate artifice, seek every opportunity to ruin the innocent and unwary. They do this too, without the least remorse; they even make a boast of their ruined victims. Trust not, then, your daughters here, unless you can secure the watchful care of some well known friend. O how many who have come to this city, innocent and unsuspecting, have been soon snared in the trap of the deceiver, and here found an early, and a dishonorable grave!"

Zion’s Herald, May 9, 1838

One of the most desperate characters in the City

Over the years I've devoted several posts to the colorful early history of Manhattan's Water Street Mission, an institution that was founded in 1872 by reformed convict Jerry McAuley (and which still exists, though under a different name). Above is a little handout card from the mission that can be fairly precisely dated to 1882-84, after McAuley had moved on to start a second mission further uptown.

According to Samuel Hadley's Down in Water Street, McAuley's immediate successor or co-successor was the John O'Neil whose name appears on the card, but O'Neil was only in charge briefly before giving up the helm to one J. F. Shorey, who was already in place as superintendent by November 1884. Hadley himself took charge in 1886. Below is the floral design on the other side of the card.

There doesn't seem to be much other information available on the O'Neils. The only significant source I've found is the New York Times obituary from 1879 (below) for a Mrs. John O'Neil "who identified herself for years with Jerry McAuley's Water-Street Mission." Here we learn that her husband John, who apparently survived her, had been a career criminal and "one of the most desperate characters in the City" before his eventual reformation. He might not have been cut out for the task of superintending the mission, but he seems to have settled down to a productive life.

Around the same time there was another John O'Neil in New York City who was notorious for criminal activities, specifically burglary, but whose very recognizable modus operandi was a clever con involving pawn shop tickets. One of his arrests came just a few weeks after the death of the Water Street Mrs. O'Neil, but there's no reason to suspect that the two men were one and the same. The website Professional Criminals of America — REVISED, based on an 1886 volume devoted to the topic, has a photo and details of the activities of the unreformed O'Neil.

Previous Water Street Mission posts:

The Madonna of Cherry Hill
Death of a Salesman
A Manhattan Mission
Cassie Burns
The Water Street Mission, Revisited
Tracts (2): Jerry McAuley's Story

Music Notes: "Idumea"

Charles Wesley, one of the founding fathers of Methodism, is said to have penned some 6,500 hymns, among them "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." I can't say for sure — not having heard them all — but I suspect he never wrote another as weirdly beautiful as "Idumea":

And am I born to die?
To lay this body down
And as my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?

A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary region of the dead
Where all things are forgot

Soon as from earth I go
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my fortune be

Waked by the trumpet's sound
I from my grave shall rise
And see the judge with glory crowned
And see the flaming skies

The peculiarities begin with the title itself, which seems to have come not from Wesley but from a later arranger. Why "Idumea"? According to reference works, Idumea (or Edom) was an ancient kingdom south of the Dead Sea. It is mentioned in the Bible, though not, as far as I can tell (and I'd welcome an exegesis) in any context that would explain the lyrics above. The noted folklorist A. L. Lloyd, in his liner notes to the version of the song performed by the English folk group the Watersons, thought it unnecessary (or was it impossible?) to explain the allusion.

Then there's the way the song begins: in mid-sentence, in mid-thought. Hymns tend to speak in a collective voice; this one is first-person singular and sounds almost like a monologue spoken in character, along the lines of Spoon River Anthology. Even the hymn's theology seems a tad unorthodox. Christianity, as a religion that offers, in effect, a choice of afterlives, has long alternated in its vernacular forms between a kind of "Joy to the World / God is Love" cheeriness and a darker strain, whether expressed in threats of hellfire and brimstone or in the death-obsessed pessimism of the danse macabre and Blind Willie Johnson's "You Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond." But Wesley's description of

The dreary region of the dead
Where all things are forgot

sounds more like the pagan, antinomian conception of the underworld (peopled by Homer's "exhausted dead") than it does the Christian vision of a place where sinners are sent to be paid back for their misdeeds. Is this because the speaker's voice is supposed to be an ancient, Idumean one? Is it because Wesley, though an evangelist and missionary, was also a classically educated scholar for whom the tropes of Greek and Roman literature would have been part of his intellectual training? Or was Wesley, good Methodist, really a secret Modernist avant la lettre (Pound's Cantos, after all, also begins with "And …")? All the elements are there: cryptic reference to antiquity, fragmented monologue …

According to Lloyd, the hymn fell out of favor in England, but remained popular among parishioners in what he calls "remoter settlements of the Upland Southern states of America." One can only wonder what they made of it.

The above note was originally published in A Common Reader's blog Book Case in 2003. I have dusted it off and revised a few points.

Thanksgiving in the Five Points (1852)

In the 1850s, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan, a now obliterated slum occupying the area adjoining what is now the Foley Square district and Chinatown, had the reputation -- no doubt to some extent exaggerated -- as the most squalid and depraved neighborhood in New York. The missionary ladies of the Five Points Mission, when not inveighing against drinking, Roman Catholicism, and other perils, organized an annual feast for the children of the mission school and as many of the other local denizens as they could feed. The following description is from The Old Brewery and the New Mission House, by the Ladies of the Mission; New York, Stringer & Townsend, 1854. The feast was held in a large tent in a park called Paradise Square.

The morning of Thanksgiving dawned in cloudless beauty, and as the day advanced, not a shadow dimmed the horizon. The cool, pure atmosphere, and the glowing sunshine, seemed to inspire every heart with courage.

We met in the office of the Old Brewery, formerly the liquor store of the establishment. This was a low, long room, with cracked and stained walls, its only furniture, besides the Missionary's bookcase, being some benches, and the boxes of clothing supplied by our kind friends from abroad. Provisions began to arrive and soon it presented a most ludicrous aspect. Turkeys, chickens, and meats of every kind mingled in sweet confusion with cakes, pies, fruits, &c. — evergreens on the floor, crockery on the window-sills and benches, huge piles of clothing waiting for distribution, visitors pouring in, childish faces peeping through every window and open door — commands, opinions, directions issuing from every quarter.

The tent is sixty feet in diameter, and very lofty. It is circular in form, and around it were tiers of seats, meeting at a small platform, where the speakers stood, at the temperance meetings, and on the Sabbath, to preach.

Eleven o'clock arrived, and notice was given that the tables in the tent were ready for the ladies. The seats had all been removed, and four tables, nearly the length of the tent, and about three feet wide, had been arranged, two on either side of the furnace, leaving wide passages between for the visitors. Soon the evergreens were festooned around by the gentlemen, then the floor was strewed with clean straw, and table-cloths of white muslin laid over the tables. By this time, hundreds of ragged, dirty children, had collected around the tent and Brewery. The food, all gathered in the Brewery, had to be removed to the tent. A door-keeper was stationed at each place, a passage-way cleared, and then ladies and gentlemen were transformed into carriers and waiters, (we could not trust any of the little rebels to help, though we had plenty of offers.) As they passed through rank and file of the hungry watchers, loud cheers were given for each successive turkey, and three long and loud for a whole pig with a lemon in his mouth, and it was difficult to conclude whether it was most appropriate to cry over the want displayed, or laugh over the temporary plenty provided.

During the time of these preparations, others of a different character were transpiring. The ladies were trying to select, first our Sunday school children, and next any who seemed hopeful. These were washed and dressed, and then each received a ticket which admitted them to the Mission-room, where friends received and entertained them. In the tent was a scene of activity — gentlemen carving the meats, ladies cutting the pies and cakes, and forming them in towering pyramids, the younger girls filling paper bags with candies and fruit, workmen hanging the lamps, others filling a large wicker-stand with dolls and toys of various kinds. At half past four all was ready. On our tables were sixty turkeys, with beef, ham and tongue, in proportion, and sundry chickens, geese, &c. Pies, cakes, bread, and biscuit, celery and fruit, and candy pyramids filled the slight intervals, and the whole presented an appearance inviting to the most fastidious appetites. Plates and cups were arranged around for more than three hundred; the lamps were lighted, and the signal given. Hundreds of visitors stood in silent expectation, and in a moment the sound of childish voices was heard, and they entered in regular procession singing —

"The morn of hope is breaking,
All doubt now disappears,
For the Five Points are waking
To penitential tears; [..]"

They took the circuit of the tent, and were then arranged, standing around the tables. They stood, with folded hands, while all sang the doxology, and the Missionary asked a blessing upon the occasion. Not a hand was raised, not a voice was heard, until the ladies and gentlemen who had charge of the tables supplied their hungry visitors with food. Then all was glad commotion, and then was the time for joyous tears. Three hundred and seventy poor, neglected, hapless children, placed for an hour in an atmosphere of love and gladness, practically taught the meaning of Christian kindness, wooed and won to cling to those whose inmost hearts were struggling in earnest prayer for grace and wisdom to lead them unto God. [...] They ate and drank without restraint until all were satisfied, then again formed and commenced singing. In the central aisle was placed the stand containing the toys and cornucopias of candy, and another filled with oranges and apples. By these, two ladies were seated. The children marched by them, in as much order as the dense crowd would permit, singing as they went, "We belong to this band, hallelujah," and in each hand the ladies placed a gift as they passed, until all were supplied. Then all the children left the tent.

There was now an interval of a few moments. The tables were hastily replenished, and then notice was given to the visitors, that the company now about to assemble were the "outsiders," about whom we knew nothing, save that they were poor and wretched, and all were warned to take care of their watches and pocket-books.

They came in scores, nay in hundreds; they rushed in and surrounded the tables, men, women, children, ragged, dirty, forlorn. [...] And the children who accompanied them, miniature likenesses, both physically and morally. Alas! alas!

"It needed no prophetic eye to see
How many yet must the same ruin share."

And we could scarcely hope to snatch these from the vortex. We spoke to them words of kindness and encouragement, and they partook until not a fragment was left, and then quietly left the tent.

More than a half-century later, in 1904, the Five Points Mission was still organizing Thanksgiving dinners, by then for more than a thousand children of the Lower East Side.

Update (2013): Below is a solicitation for donations for the mission's 1867 Thanksgiving Dinner. The return mail envelope is addressed to the Rev. James Newton Shaffer (1811-1901), who served for thirteen years as the organization's superintendent.

Dear Friend : —

We are making arrangements for our usual
THANKSGIVING DINNER
for the Children of this well-known poor neighborhood.

May we ask you to enclose to us in the directed envelope a contribution to this object? If more than enough for the Dinner is received, it shall be faithfully used in providing for the sick and poor as far as it will go, through the winter.

You are cordially invited to visit the Mission, and acquaint yourself with its work and its success.

Respectfully,
J. N. Shaffer,
Superintendent.

(Posted 2010 and at various times since.)

Tracts (2): Jerry McAuley's Story

Me father was a counterfeiter, and ran away from justice before I can remember him. There was a lot of us, and they put me with me grandmother. She was old an' a devout Romanist, an' many's the time when she was tellin' her beads an' kissing the floor for penance I'd shy things at her just to hear her curse an' swear, an' then she'd back to her knees. I'd got well beyond her or anybody by the time I was thirteen. They let me run loose.

I've posted a bit at various times about New York City's Water Street Mission, founded by ex-convict Jerry McAuley. This little leaflet was published some years after his death in 1884 by the Free Tract Society of Los Angeles, which, like the Water Street Mission, apparently still exists. The Free Tract Society was founded in 1897, and this copy bears a handwritten date of 7-11-45.

The text of the tract loosely follows the narrative of McAuley's colorful story that was published in versions issued while he was still alive, but the wording and punctuation seem closer to the text published by Helen Campbell as "Light in Dark Places: Jerry McAuley's Water Street Mission" (Methodist Magazine 1893) and in a book entitled Darkness and Daylight. Campbell claimed to have received the narrative verbatim from McAuley, and it's quite possible that he could recite it from memory. Below, for comparison, is the corresponding passage from McAuley's own Transformed, Or, the History of a River Thief: Briefly Told, "published by himself" in 1876. This "original" version (below) doesn't play up McAuley's dialect, although it preserves the convert's anti-Catholicism.

I was born in Ireland. Our family was broken up by sin, for my father was a counterfeiter, and left home to escape the law, before I knew him. I was placed at a very early age in the family of my grandmother, who was a devout Romanist. My first recollections of her are of her counting her beads, and kissing the floor for penance. I would take the opportunity while she was prostrated upon her face, to throw things at her head, in my mischievous play, and when she rose from her knees, it was to curse and swear at me. At such times I can distinctly remember thinking, though I could not have formed the thought into words, "What sort of religion is this that requires such foolish worship, and allows such sinful ways?" I can trace my infidelity to Rome to just these incidents.

In the margins of the page above are a few printed lines of unattributed verse, noteworthy for a pungent rhyme of "illy clad" and "will he had." (From other sources I gather that the versifier responsible was one Francis S. Smith.)

Poisoned by alcohol, blear eyed and illy clad,
Cursing his fate as he shuffles along;
Crushed and bereft of the once earnest will he had,
Penniless, homeless, jeered by the throng.
Friends have assisted him, pastors have prayed o'er him,
He has been rescued and lost o'er and o'er;
Oh, do not give him up,
Pull from his lips the cup,
Tell him of Jesus and try him once more!

The margins between the last two pages bear this plea:

Don't let this tract die, pass it on.
All Tracts Free, as the Lord permits, as this work is
Conducted on the Free-Will Offering Plan
Free Tract Society (Inc.)
746 Crocker St., Los Angeles, Cal., U. S. A.

Previous Water Street Mission posts:

The Madonna of Cherry Hill
Death of a Salesman
A Manhattan Mission
Cassie Burns
The Water Street Mission, Revisited

The Poison of the Age

"Novel reading has been fearfully on the increase during the last fifteen or twenty years, and especially in the last ten years; and may we not say that the increase of suicides is due, in a considerable measure, to such reading? May we not also say that it has had a baneful effect, also, on the spirituality of many professing Christians? Will anyone deny that the practice of reading the cheap, sensational novels of the day does not naturally lessen one's taste and desire for frequent and devout reading of the Bible? — No. The truth is, no one can pursue the habit of reading the trashy novels of the day without having his moral taste and tone ruinously debilitated and damaged.

"Read what a discerning and judicious writer says on the subject: 'Novels are the poison of the age. The best of them tend to produce a baneful effeminacy of mind, and many of them are calculated to advance the base designs of the licentious and abandoned on the young and unsuspecting. But were they free from every other charge of evil, it is a most heavy one that they occasion a dreadful waste of that time which must be accounted for before the God of heaven. Let their deluded admirers plead the advantages of novel reading, if they will venture to plead the same, before the great Judge eternal. If you are a novel reader, think, the next time you take a novel into your hands, How shall I answer to my tremendous Judge for the time occupied by this? When he shall say to me: "I gave you so many years in yonder world to fit you for eternity; did you converse with your God in devotion? Did you study his word? Did you attend to the duties of life, and strive to improve, to some good end, even your leisure hours?" then shall I be willing to reply, "Lord, my time was otherwise employed! Novels and romances occupied the leisure of my days, when, alas! my Bible, my God, and my soul were neglected"?' O novel reader, think on these things!" — C. H. Wetherbee

(From Pacific Health Journal and Temperance Advocate, 1891.)

Tracts (1): Satan's Propaganda Agency

This little leaflet is just one example of the countless inexpensive evangelical tracts that have been printed and distributed over the years by various churches and other religious organizations. This one was the work of one Rev. Harold Mongerson (1910-1988), who was associated with the Community Church of the Nazarene in Moline, Illinois, and includes testimony from several of the faithful, one of whom declares sagely that "It's true, there are some good programs, but as my husband says, 'There are just enough good things on T-V to send you to hell.'" The tract must date from no earlier than 1958 (and I suspect from not much later than that either), as it refers to a Saturday Evening Post article from that year. Below are scans of the first interior spread and the last page.

Sixty years on, it's easy to chuckle at the Rev. Mongerson's moral panic in the face of a new medium, but if one leaves Satan out of it (and ignore the conflation of film with video) the message on the cover isn't, arguably, entirely wrong:

The film is an extremely subtle instrument of propaganda. Read a book and you are likely to read it critically and carefully. Not so with a skillfully prepared audio-visual presentation. The careful marshalling of scenes, fortified by well-chosen background music, opens the mind unwittingly to seduction. When the presentation is finished, you are often quite unaware of the ideas which have slipped into your thinking.

The first requirement of good propaganda is that it be not easily recognized.

The Water Street Mission, Revisited

This little "Manual of the Water Street Mission" in New York City was published in 1880, and seems to have served both as an introduction for prospective clients and as the mission's annual report. The founder of the mission, a onetime "river rat" and reformed alcoholic named Jerry McAuley, was still alive at the time. Following his death in 1884 a number of subsequent publications would keep track of the mission's activities, including the Rev. R. M. Offord's Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (1885), Samuel H. Hadley's Down in Water Street (1902), and Mrs. S. May Washburn's "But, Until Seventy Times Seven": The Story of the McAuley Water Street Mission (1936).

The image at the top of this post shows the pamphlet's very nice engraved frontispiece; the cover, which sports another engraving, is shown below. Neither image is credited.

Laid inside my copy, but definitely later in date, I found the gatefold photograph below, which bears the caption "This photograph was taken by Mr. Thomas Savage Clay, and shows the class of men from which we get our converts." A cropped version of the same image is reproduced in "But, Until Seventy Times Seven."

Previous Water Street Mission posts:

The Madonna of Cherry Hill
Death of a Salesman
A Manhattan Mission
Cassie Burns

Cassie Burns

The first snows of December haven't yet fallen on the dirty streets of lower Manhattan, but already there's a chill in the air. The photographer, shifting the legs of his tripod and adjusting the camera for just the right view, shudders under his dark frock. It's an overcast morning without much shadow. The little cluster of urchins have observed his preparations, asking him questions and begging him to take their picture. He has waved them off at first but finally agrees, if they will only stand without moving where he tells them to stand, drawing the eye down from that dead expanse of exposed wall. He has other sites to shoot today and can't waste too much time.

A few men, loitering outside the mission or doing business in the shop that pays cash for "old books, newspapers, pamphlets," have been attracted by the commotion and stand in the background, curious but by old habit loath to draw too much attention to themselves. Along the fence there are posters advertising the plebeian entertainments of the week of December 19th — the Windsor, Huber's Museum, the annual ball in honor of John P. Kenney, and Bartholomew's Equine Paradox — but already one of the posters has had patches of paper torn away by the wind or vandals.

The girl lives a few blocks behind where the photographer makes his preparations, at New Chambers and Cherry Streets, an intersection that today no longer exists. Her name is Cassie Burns. She has dark blue eyes and has just turned thirteen, but she's small for her age; there's TB in the family. Wearing an oatmeal skirt, she stands a bit apart from the boys, the usual playmates she watches over almost like a mother. Womanhood is already inexorably separating her fate from theirs. They will be factory workers or soldiers or will join the drunks that haunt the mission; she will have the harder path of motherhood, struggle, lonely old age.

The children, hunched up against the cold in their worn coats, finally settle themselves enough for the photographer to begin. Only after the fact does he notice that two solitary standing figures, one on either side a few yards away, have left ghostly impressions on the glass. The image is issued as a lantern slide bearing the title "N.Y. City — Homes and Ways 62. McAuley Mission, Water St."

✵

The above isn't a "true story," in that I don't know it to be true, but who knows how far it is from the mark? There really was a Cassie Burns in the neighborhood of Water Street and Cherry Hill when this picture was made, in the first decade of the 20th century. It's highly unlikely but not impossible that the girl — if it really even is a girl — is her, but she undoubtedly knew this block well and may well have played with the children shown here. The real Cassie Burns, it is said, would go on to have nine children of her own.

Secrets

This postcard of the Connecticut River at Greenfield, Massachusetts was postmarked in nearby Turners Falls on January 29, 1909 and sent to a Miss Ruth L. Smith at the Northfield Seminary in East Northfield a few miles away. Founded by the noted evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1879, Northfield was an all-girls school, religious in orientation, though it doesn't appear to have been intended to train clergy in the way that the word "seminary" is usually understood. Moody also founded a school for boys not far away and the two eventually merged. The combined institution still exists but the former Northfield Seminary campus is currently unoccupied.

The inscription on the front is an example of a Masonic or "pigpen" cypher, in which the symbols are obtained by the use of two pairs of grids, one dotted and the other undotted. In the example below, for instance, which is taken from Wikipedia, the letter A would be represented by something like a backwards letter L, while the sign for the letter Z would resemble an upside-down V with a dot in the center.


The above assumes that one begins the grid with the letter "A" and continues in an orderly progression, but there's no reason why one need stick to that arrangement; you could assign the letters randomly as long as both sender and recipient know the key. Even then, in principle the cipher should be readily crackable by the same techniques used to solve newspaper cryptograms, at least if one is sure which language is being represented and that there are no additional levels of trickery involved. So far, however, I haven't managed to decipher this one.

At first glance it shouldn't be difficult to solve. There are some one- and two-letter words, a sequence of repeated words, and some double letters, all of which should be helpful, but there are also some puzzling features. Of the first 20 characters in the inscription, only two appear more than once, as if the writer had deliberately chosen words that contained as many different letters as possible. There are several signs that incorporate a tiny "x" instead of a dot, and I don't know whether or not they should be regarded as distinct letters.

Feel free to take a crack at it and let me know if you come up with anything. In he meantime, below is a roughly contemporary view, complete with piano or portable organ, of another Moody-founded institution, Camp Northfield, which also still exists.


The card was addressed to Gillio Cassari of North Haven, Connecticut, and signed by Coriena [Cassari], both of whom, if my identifications are correct, were born in the 1890s. Gillio died in 1975; Coriena in North Haven in 1985 at the age of 94.

A Manhattan Mission

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, is from Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (Second Edition), edited by Rev. R. M. Offord. The artist is not credited.

Death at the Five Points

(In the 1850s, fired by missionary zeal, the ladies of the Five Points Mission in Manhattan bravely battled poverty, squalor, intemperance, competing missionaries, the Roman Catholic Church, and that most alarming of heathenish practices: an Irish wake.)

During the hot weather in August, many died from the intense heat, and one death from this cause occurred in our building. Dr. McNaire called upon me to visit the dying woman, whom I found lying on the floor with her head slightly elevated on a chair, turned down on the face — her mouth filled with foam, and her pulse quick and thready. A number of Irish, newly arrived, were sitting around, or lying on the boxes in the room. It was a solemn scene. I knelt and poured out my soul in prayer to God; but, oh! how fearful to pray at such an hour — when life is ebbing away, and every moment may decide the destiny of the soul "quivering on the ridge of life."

Just as I had ended the prayer, Mrs. F., who rented the room where the sick woman lay, came running in, and seeing that she was dying, went immediately for a priest, to perform extreme unction, and as I came out, I met him going in. The woman soon died.

Then commenced the preparations for a wake. I gave orders that it should not be; but my orders were disregarded. At midnight, I heard that wild wail rolling upon the air, and I was reminded of that ancient cry at midnight in the land of Egypt, when Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants, and all the Egyptians, and there was not a house where there was not one dead. I thought, too, of the startling summons sounding out at midnight: "Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him." I waited awhile, and while it was still dark, I went up to the room of death. There stood two rows of women, with their left hands around each other's waists, and their right beating upon their lips, making, as they shouted, a most horrible noise. Most of the women had never known the deceased until they saw her in her dying agonies, and yet the tears rolled down their cheeks in torrents. I succeeded at last, much to my joy, in breaking up this strange wild scene of frantic wo.

From The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, by the Ladies of the Mission; New York, Stringer & Townsend, 1854.

Death of a salesman

This will be a bit of an extended gloss on my previous post, which I devoted to an excerpt from Samuel H. Hadley's Down in Hadley Street, a record of his activities as the successor to Jerry McAuley's work at the Water Street Mission in lower Manhattan. In the excerpt, Hadley related the story of one James D. Underwood, commercial traveler and reformed drunkard, who met his end in a St. Louis jewelry store in 1898 as the result of inadvertently (or so it was said) drinking a glass of potassium cyanide.

Hadley made it clear that he considered Underwood's death to have been a horrible accident, and so it may have been; I am not particularly invested in proving otherwise. But the Underwood incident is a bit of a loose cannon, the one detail in Hadley's enjoyable but largely predictable volume that doesn't quite fit in comfortably with the rest. In chapter after chapter the book describes the redeeming work performed at the mission, how one desperate inebriate or career criminal after another was transformed into a useful and upright citizen. James D. Underwood's life had seemingly followed the same course; at one time a successful salesman for a jewelry company, he had fallen prey to alcoholism, lost his job, and had been repeatedly imprisoned for vagrancy. Set on his feet and shown the true Christian path by the mission, he had turned his life around, resumed his commercial travels (possibly for his old employer), and become a reliable provider for his sister and elderly mother. The stinger in the story was at the very end:

One hot day, May 21, 1898, he went into the jewelry store of F. H. Niehaus and Company, No. 312 North 6th Street, St. Louis, Mo., and in some unaccountable manner plunged a glass into a two-gallon crock of cyanide potassium, supposing it was water, and was dead in fifteen minutes.

Hadley's apparent defensiveness about the incident is reflected in the phrases in some unaccountable manner, supposing it was water; remove those words and the story takes on a very different color. Had Underwood fallen off the wagon again and killed himself in a fit of remorse, or succumbed to depression and the lonely life of a traveler? If so, his story would obviously not have suited Hadley's uplifting purpose, nor would it have reflected as positively on the mission's work.

I honestly don't know how plausible it is that one could drink a lethal solution of potassium cyanide without realizing it, or that a two-gallon crock of the poison would be so carelessly labeled and stored that a visiting salesman might accidentally serve himself a draught of it. (The chemical was in fact regularly used by jewelers, so its presence on the premises of Niehaus and Company is not remarkable.) I don't expect to find the answer, and as I said, I don't really care. Underwood appears to have been a good man, at bottom, and his end was ghastly whether he intended it or not. But because his life took such an unusual twist I decided to take a closer look at the circumstances of his end, and as it happens the life and death of this long forgotten man have left a few fleeting traces beyond what we know of him from Hadley's memoir.

First of all, there is the brief account in The New York Times of June 1, 1898:

ST. LOUIS, May 31. James Underwood, a traveling salesman for the Champenois Jewelry Company of Newark, N. J., drank a quantity of cyanide of potassium by mistake at the jewelry store of F. H. Niehaus, thinking it was water. He fell to the floor immediately and lived but ten minutes.

Except for the address of the store and the detail of the two-gallon crock, all of the essential elements of Hadley's account are already established; the date is different, but the article may have been posted some time after the accident. The language in some points is so similar ("thinking it was water") that Hadley may well have referred to the clipping when he wrote.

In the years when Underwood was making his rounds there was a trade journal called The Jewelers' Circular and Horological Review, which among other things of interest to the jewelry business contained reports of the visits of commercial travelers to the various cities where they had customers. And sure enough, we find Underwood's name in those reports. In the issue of May 4, 1898, he is in Louisville, Kentucky. On May 11, 1898 -- just days before the poisoning -- he is already in Missouri, approaching his appointment with death:

The travelers in Kansas City, Mo., last week were: Thos. E. Rogers, Riker Bros.; S. W. Abbey, E. Ira Richards & Co.; Paul Fuesline, Bawo & Dotter; J. D. Underwood, Champenois & Co.; E. A. Reed, Reed & Barton.

Further along in the same column he is listed among the travelers visiting St. Louis, but after that the next mention of him is a posthumous one:

St. Louis, Mo., June 24.—At a meeting of the jewelers of St. Louis, held on Wednesday, June 1, the resolutions below were adopted. Publicity, however, was not given them until this week, when they were beautifully engrossed:

Whereas, it has pleased Almighty God to remove from our midst by death our most esteemed friend, Jas. D. Underwood, and, whereas, in his death we deplore the loss of a real friend, his mother and sister a true and affectionate son and brother. Therefore, be it resolved. That we tender our heartfelt sympathy to the bereaved mother and sister in their hour of grief for their irreparable loss; and be it further resolved, that a copy of these resolutions, suitably engrossed, be tendered to the bereaved mother and sister, and a copy thereof be published in the jewelry trade journals. F. W. Baier, F. W. Drosten, W. F. Kemper, committee.

But the eeriest notices in The Jewelers' Circular and Horological Review don't concern Underwood at all, at least directly. In this single volume of the periodical there are no less than half a dozen mentions of suicides or attempted suicides involving members of the jewelry trade. (From a cursory glance through other volumes it seems that suicide may have been endemic to the profession.) Several of the incidents involve self-poisonings with chemicals used by jewelers, and in one case in particular the details are all too familiar:

William Lucas, a man well advanced in years, who was a jeweler by trade and employed in one of the shops in the Lederer building [in Providence, R. I.] some time during the night committed suicide last week by drinking cyanide of potassium.

Lucas's suicide was reported in the issue of June 28, 1898, meaning that his death followed Underwood's by only a matter of weeks. Had he heard of the latter's end and been inspired to imitate him? Or was death by cyanide poisoning the professional jeweler's little secret, something that everyone in the trade -- craftsmen and seasoned travelers alike -- knew was always at hand?

Supposing it was water

Call me a cynic if you like, but I can't help wondering whether there wasn't more to the following story, which can be found in Samuel H. Hadley's Down in Water Street, Fleming H. Revell, 1902.

James D. Underwood had been a drunkard for years. He came from Providence, R. I., and was arrested many times there. He then located here. At one time he had been a successful jewelry salesman for a large house in Maiden Lane, but finally became so addicted to drink he could not secure employment.

Many times in the early missionary labours of the writer along the Bowery, long after midnight, he has been approached by "Jim" with a request for a nickel, or "Won't you buy some court-plaster so I can get my lodging?" He had often been to Water Street, and had been helped repeatedly.

One night, when the invitation hymn was being sung, the writer was passing down the aisle, asking the poor drunkards here and there to come up to our mercy-seat, when on the last seat near the door sat Jim Underwood. He had come down from the Island that evening for the sixteenth time, having been committed for drunkenness and vagrancy. I took him by the hand and said:

"Jim, aren't you tired of this life? Won't you come ?"

"Yes," he said, "I will come;" and picking up his old cap, he walked up the aisle. He was saved that very night. He worked one week in a restaurant. We helped him to clothing, lodging and food when he needed it, and before long he found employment at his old business, selling jewelry.

When his first anniversary rolled around, he went up and down Maiden Lane, John Street and all over the jewelry district and told everybody, Christian, Heathen, Turk and Jew, that he was going to celebrate his first year in the Christian life. He not only invited them to come, but said he wanted to raise a good sum for the Mission. Nearly all of these people had been pestered sorely by Jim in his old life for nickels and dimes, which always went for whiskey: but how different now! Some well-known Jews said:

"Yes, I'll gladly give to any cause that can make a man of such a drunkard as Jim Underwood."

After Jim had read the lesson and given his testimony, he presented the superintendent with a large envelope containing three hundred and ten dollars for the Mission. The largest gift was ten dollars, and the smallest, one dollar. About one hundred jewelers contributed, probably two-thirds of whom were not professors of Christ.

He traveled for a large house in Maiden Lane, the Champenois Jewelry Manufacturing Company, for about ten years, and supported his aged mother and sister. He laid up a snug sum of money also.

One hot day, May 21, 1898, he went into the jewelry store of F. H. Niehaus and Company, No. 312 North 6th Street, St. Louis, Mo., and in some unaccountable manner plunged a glass into a two-gallon crock of cyanide potassium, supposing it was water, and was dead in fifteen minutes.

We present his picture here to show how this handsome, smart business man was changed from a tramp and a nuisance to a useful Christian gentleman.

The Madonna of Cherry Hill

I don't do it that much anymore, but for many years I made a point of going to as many used book sales as I could get to, and over time I suppose I bought hundreds of books -- maybe more than a thousand -- that way, some of which I still own, most of which I read once or twice and then culled out of my shelves years ago.

The thing about buying second-hand books is that as a rule you generally don't know anything about their previous owner or owners. Once in a while there might be a name scrawled on the endpapers, but outside of a handful of occasions when I bought a copy that had coincidentally belonged to someone I knew or had heard of, the books came to me with their past histories and prior associations stripped away, just as the volumes in my own library, should they escape the dumpsters and landfills that are fated to be the last resting places of countless millions of other forgotten books and go on to live a further life, will likely tell no stories of me.


This book is an exception. When I bought it, some two decades ago, I didn't just purchase a fairly ordinary volume about a turn of the century mission in lower Manhattan, I became the guardian of a memory as well. For one of its previous owners -- perhaps the original owner from the time it was published in 1903 -- had filled the endpapers and available blank pages of the book with his own recollections of the neighborhood in which the mission was located. Though it appears that he was never as badly off as the indigents and alcoholics who made up the majority of those who were fed and ministered to there, he often attended services at the mission, almost certainly in this room:


According to an 1897 notice in The New York Times, "the mission was established by Jerry McAuley, ex-convict, river pirate, and desperado, for religious work especially among the lowest class of outcast men and women of the city." It stood at 316 Water Street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Down in Water Street, written by one of McAuley's successors, contains more than two dozen illustrations, but sadly most are rather uninteresting portraits of the worthies who were active in the running of the mission. The photo below is a notable exception. The mission is the building at the extreme left, with the large white sign on its side; the building in the center of the frame, ironically, may be a saloon, as it is festooned with signs advertising lager beer.


The creator of the handwritten account in the book's endpapers was named William Siemes or perhaps Siemis, which suggests that his parents may have been among the millions of German immigrants who arrived in New York City in the 19th century, an influx even exceeding that of the Irish. At least one set of grandparents were already resident in the city by 1845, as he mentions their having formerly owned a grocery store in lower Manhattan. Siemes worked as a fireman, assigned to a firehouse just blocks from the McAuley Water Street Mission, but lived in High Bridge, miles away in the Bronx; his father was apparently also a fireman at the same house. New York City firefighting had once been a rough-and-tumble occupation dominated by competing private companies that were little more than gangs, but that had all been done away with by the time of the events he describes.

In the following transcription of Siemes's account I have tidied some of the punctuation and spelling, but have made no effort to form complete sentences where there were none. At a few points, which I have indicated, the handwriting is not legible.

While attached to Engine Co. 12, William St. near Pearl St. 1902-1904 I often attended meeting at the mission, too tired to travel home to the Bronx for a meal I ate in different restaurants in vicinity of Brooklyn Bridge, sometimes in very clean Chinese restaurants also, along the water front for a fish dinner, and in Nassau restaurant famous for its ham, corned beef, and beans, custard cocoanut pie, and delicious coffee — coffee I've supped and sipped and poured it while in firehouse, and at fires in heavy winter weather, an old battered 4 quart tin can, blacked by gas light smoke, was the container, coffee from the bakery looked like spilled gasoline on a wet pavement — all colors of the rainbow, a medical officer of the Department, Dr Ransdale [?] in 1903 said “you firemen should be the healthiest men in the city, the coffee you drink looks like a disinfectant, and just as potent.”

The Water St. mission in the early 1900 [illegible] was crowded with worshippers and often disturbed by hostile groups.

Living in High Bridge [in the Bronx] in the early days, among bright sunshine, green fields, birds, and flowers, it was a revelation to see the contrast — narrow streets, shabby buildings, squalor, poverty, and crime.

To tell of experiences I witnessed would be hard to believe. Of course, girls of all types I came in contact with, some vicious, others victims of ignorance and misfortune. I vividly recall the little 13 year old Cassie Burns first noticed her one bitter winter night rationing strong tea to the grateful firemen, who soaked and chilled, drank with grateful hearts, Cassie was apple cheeked [?], rosy as the dawn, her lovely Irish dark blue eyes looked straight into yours. We called her the madonna of Cherry Hill.

I learned her brother Lawrence was ill, “T.B.,“ so several of us visited him, corner of New Chambers [?] near Cherry St.

I later learned with interest the building was once occupied by my Grandfather's grocery store in 1845.

A 3 story triangle with fire escape hanging from iron straps [in?] the rotted brick mortar of lime. Well we built a large flower box, placed it on the escape, sad to say in violation of law, but who cared. The box filled with colored asters, petunias, and geraniums bloomed all seasons, and concealed in the soil were tulip and hyacinth bulbs taken from my garden. Lawrence died before the tulips bloomed, a year later his mother also T.B. Years later I learned Cassie had married a “foreigner” and was the mother of 9 children. Every time a fire [illegible] in the vicinity Cassie [illegible — “mother”?] brewed a large water pail of tea and Cassie did the rest at all hours, in the snow and cold she could be seen comforting the men with her drinks that “cheers but not inebriates.”

One night in her home building a fire occurred in the bakery in store floor and cellar, wrecking the place. Cassie's old grandmother was bellowing like an East River fog horn as she stood on the fire escape near the flower box, her language was expressive of the neighborhood. A ladder was quickly raised and grandma reached the ground in safety a fireman laughing as he told how he lifted the frail old lady of 80, over the fire escape rail, when she said “I'll slap you if you drop me.”

After the fire apparatus left for quarters, I was in charge of a watch line hose “just in case,“ the weather was cold, and the store [illegible] basement were not pleasably [?] placed [?] to occupy — about 4 AM a salvage patrolman on duty said “Do you hear a noise“ all I heard was the drip of water from charred wood.

Then it happened, little Cassie and a 10 yrs old brother carrying a 4x4 ft apple dumpling pan filled with soggy smoky dumpling; struggling [?] to carry its [?] tray up to their room.

The patrolman laughed and said “come back here wid them [?] dumpling[s?].” They came back all right, one at a time as Cassie and her brother threw them at him, sad to say, the dumplings were apple sauce centres and hits in his neck and face smeared him.


Later, down they came again and carted to the regions above whole ferkins of butter, smoky and charred, then several cases of eggs some cracked, roasted, etc. [?] I was relieved at 6 AM learned later the bakery goods were moved to Cassie's flat for safe keeping or for what ever purpose only the children knew.

We humans have much to account for, I remember an incident at 9 Bowery. A small fire summoned us to the cheap, wooden partitioned floor above the street, found our services were not needed, except for a woman lying on a cot worn and thin she begged our captain Michael E. Graham to take her out, said she had been a prisoner for several years and she had no hope of escape.

Capt. Graham summoned an ambulance to carry her to Bellevue Hospital. Our Captain Graham of Engine Co 12 lived in [illegible], we respected him and admired him greatly. I recall the time he was promoted to Batt. chief, how [?] his last night with us was more like a wake than a time of congratulations. My Dad fried three large top sirloin chunks into steaks first in butter and served on toasted bread. Several months later I attended his funeral, a fireman [?] had fallen and our beloved chief and friend was no more. His aged mother said “he was my first born,“ and she soon found rest beside him.

Pasted inside the volume is a newspaper clipping reporting the demolition of the original mission building (the Water Street Mission relocated and in fact still operates.) The clipping is dated, by hand, July 28, 1948, and the ink and penmanship match the fireman's account, so he must still have been alive at that time. On the title page there is a note in another hand stating that the book was "given to Grandpa M[...] by neighbor Mr. Siemis in Ardsley, NY." There is also another owner's name, which I can't make out, in pencil at the top of the page.

(I have since discovered a Social Security Death Record for a William L. Siemes, b. 27 March 1878, d. October 1971 in Ardsley, NY. I've also found a New York Times entry, dated July 9, 1913, recording the transfer of a William L. Siemes from Engine 82 of the New York City Fire Department to Engine 48. Both departments are located in the Bronx. Federal census records for 1920 show a firefighter named William Siemes, age 42, living with his parents and sister on West 166th Street in the Bronx.)

Also see postscript.