Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Read online

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  HERE IS WHERE

  “Here Is Where is remarkable for the painstaking research on display and its yield of rescued-from-obscurity stories. Many of the true incidents Andrew Carroll has uncovered aren’t just surprising but powerful. Others are simply laugh-out-loud funny, but all are described with considerable skill. America has always had among its citizenry a number of individuals whose legacy is immense but unappreciated, and Carroll has truly done them justice.”

  —Steven Pressfield, bestselling author of Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Killing Rommel

  “Both a fascinating excavation of underappreciated events and agents and a compelling analysis of what binds us together, Here Is Where makes for rich and vivid reading. It seems to me that Andrew Carroll has become the Charles Kuralt of American history.”

  —Les Standiford, bestselling author of Desperate Sons and Last Train to Paradise

  “In Here Is Where, one of our best historian-sleuths, Andrew Carroll, has given us a fresh and irresistible approach to experiencing history. Until someone invents a time machine, it’s the next best thing to being there—and he’s such a vivid, engaging writer that it’s probably more fun.”

  —James Donovan, author of A Terrible Glory and The Blood of Heroes

  “Writing with a historian’s insight and the skill of a master storyteller, Andrew Carroll reminds us to look for the fascinating bits of history that lie just behind the curtains of our modern surroundings. Here Is Where is a captivating, thoroughly enjoyable journey across the country with a friend who knows all the cool places to stop and have a look.”

  —Gregory A. Freeman, author of The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys and The Forgotten 500

  Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Carroll

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-46399-9

  Jacket design by Jessie Sayward Bright

  Jacket photograph: David Bassett/Getty Images

  v3.1

  The mind is not a vessel to be filled,

  but a fire to be kindled.

  —From “On Listening to Lectures” by Plutarch

  To Andrew Delbanco, John Elko, Robert Herman,

  David Kastan, Victoria Silver, Arnold Rampersad,

  Neal Tonken, and Ellis Turner—

  the teachers and professors in my life who lit the fire.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  I. WHERE TO BEGIN

  Starting Points

  NIIHAU

  ONA JUDGE’S HOME AND GRAVE

  MOUND CITY

  RICHARD “TWO GUN” HART’S HOUSE

  FORT MEADE

  MARY DYER’S FARM

  II. THE WORLD BEFORE US

  Coming to, Exploring, and Conserving America

  THE PAISLEY FIVE MILE POINT CAVES

  THE REMAINS OF PROMETHEUS

  MOUND KEY ISLAND

  THE GRAND PRAIRIE HARMONICAL ASSOCIATION

  PIKES PEAK’S SUMMIT

  MADISON GRANT’S RESIDENCE

  III. THIS LAND IS MY LAND

  The Dark Side of Expansion and Growth

  THE SONOMA DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER

  HAUN’S MILL

  UNION PACIFIC MINE #6

  DOWAGIAC TRAIN STATION

  PARIS-COPE SERVICE STATION

  IV. LANDMARK CASES

  Crimes and Lawsuits That Changed the Nation

  SLIP HILL GRADE SCHOOL

  SALUDA COUNTY JAIL

  JAMES JOHNSON’S LANDING SPOT (VIA THE DESERET CHEMICAL DEPOT)

  HEIGHTS ARTS THEATRE

  NEAL DOW’S BIRTHPLACE, H. H. HAY DRUGSTORE, AND MONUMENT SQUARE

  V. SPARKS

  Inventions and Technological Advancements

  CALEDONIA CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

  ELISHA OTIS’S BIRTHPLACE

  WILLIAM MORRISON’S LABORATORY

  THE FARNSWORTH FARM

  ROBERT GODDARD’S BACKYARD

  VI. BITTER PILLS AND MIRACLE CURES

  Medical Pioneers and Discoveries

  HARTFORD UNION HALL

  MINNESOTA RIVERBANK

  RANKIN FARM

  USDA NATIONAL CENTER FOR AGRICULTURAL UTILIZATION RESEARCH

  DR. MAURICE HILLEMAN’S BIRTHPLACE

  DR. LORING MINER’S HOUSE

  VII. BURIAL PLOTS

  Forgotten Graves, Cemeteries, and Stories About the Dead

  BREVIG MISSION

  HENRY LAURENS’S GRAVE

  DANIEL BOONE’S GRAVE

  THOMAS “PETE” RAY’S GRAVE

  HART ISLAND

  VIII. ALL IS NOT LOST

  Finding and Preserving History

  LEARY’S BOOK STORE

  THE MENGER HOTEL AND ADINA DE ZAVALA’S RESIDENCE

  MOUNT BAKER

  HOME

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THE EXCHANGE PLACE

  No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself

  But by reflection, by some other things.

  —Brutus, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

  HERE IS WHERE it all began: the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. This is the spot that sparked my almost compulsive desire to seek out unmarked history sites throughout the country. It’s been fifteen years since I first read about what happened here a century and a half ago, and while in New York visiting family I thought I’d subway over from Manhattan and finally see the place for myself.

  During the Civil War, the New Jersey Railroad Company ran trains through here, and one night in 1863 or ’64 (the exact date isn’t known) a young man fell between the loading platform and a Washington, D.C.–bound train. Just as the steam-powered locomotive began to lurch forward, potentially crushing the man to death under its massive wheels, a bystander rushed over and pulled him to safety. The man in peril was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son. His quick-thinking rescuer was the prominent Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. Robert and Edwin had never met, and there’s no indication that they ever saw or communicated with each other again. Nor does it seem that the story made its way to President Lincoln himself. He and Mary had already buried two other sons: three-year-old Eddie, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1850, and eleven-year-old Willie, who died in the White House on February 20, 1862, from typhoid fever. The couple was still grief-stricken from Willie’s death, and a third loss might have proved emotionally incapacitating. Mary had all but physically barred Robert Todd from fighting in the war and, after he enlisted, made certain he landed a desk job on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff.

  I don’t remember exactly where I first heard about the Exchange Place story, but I do recall thinking, initially, that it must have been apocryphal. Perhaps the two men had bumped into each other on the train platform and exchanged a few cordial words, and then over the years this brief encounter blossomed into the sensationally ironic tale of how a Booth had saved the life of a Lincoln not long before Edwin’s younger brother assassinated Robert’s father. Or maybe Robert ha
d indeed fallen onto some railroad tracks and Edwin was at the station but only as a witness while another man swiftly came to Robert’s aid. The possibility that their lives had intersected in the dramatic manner I’d read about seemed far-fetched.

  Except that the story turned out to be true. Robert Todd Lincoln himself described the episode in a February 1909 letter to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine. “The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car,” Lincoln explained.

  The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.

  What especially intrigued me when I first read this was the possibility that, if the station were still active, each day thousands of commuters, tourists, and other travelers would wait for their trains near the very spot where this extraordinary encounter had occurred—and would probably be unaware of it. I started to wonder what other great unmarked sites are all around us that we pass by or walk over every day.

  Stories began to accumulate. Whenever a newspaper, magazine, book, radio program, documentary, lecture, or cocktail conversation alluded to a relatively unknown incident, I jotted it down and slipped the note into a manila file titled “Forgotten History.” That slim folder grew fatter and has since multiplied into twenty-four bulging cabinets full of articles, clippings, and hastily scrawled reminders of places to research. I’ve also discovered that while I’m digging about for smaller nuggets, my eye often catches the glint of something bigger and more striking. This happened when I delved into the Lincoln/Booth story.

  Obviously I’d heard of John Wilkes Booth, but I knew nothing about his brother. Did he harbor the same pro-Confederacy views? Was he complicit in the assassination? Or was their relationship antagonistic?

  No on all counts. Edwin was close to his younger brother, and apparently there was tension only if they discussed politics. The last time the two had met, John Wilkes stormed out of the room after Edwin told him he’d voted for Lincoln.

  When Edwin saw the April 15, 1865, newspaper article naming his brother as the president’s assassin, he immediately wrote to a colleague that he felt as if he “had been struck on the head with a hammer.” The manager of the playhouse where Edwin was performing notified him by messenger that, in light of his relationship to the killer, “out of respect for the anguish which will fill the public mind as soon as the appalling fact shall be fully revealed, I have concluded to close the Boston Theatre until further notice.” Edwin agreed and confided privately to his very close friend Adam Badeau: “The news of the morning has made me wretched indeed, not only because I received the unhappy tidings of the suspicion of a brother’s crime, but because a good man, and a most justly honored and patriotic ruler, has fallen by the hand of an assassin.”

  In his next letter to Badeau, Edwin, his anger clearly growing, referred to John as an outright “villain.”

  One of the final meetings between Edwin and John—and this was the larger gem that sparkled into view as I poked around the Exchange Place story—occurred in New York City on November 25, 1864, known back then as Evacuation Day. (The anniversary commemorates both the departure of British troops from the colonies in 1783 and the last shot of the war; as His Majesty’s ships sailed out of New York Harbor past jeering mobs on Staten Island, a British gunner petulantly fired a cannonball toward the crowd. He missed.) On this same night, Confederate officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Martin scattered throughout lower Manhattan glass bottles containing a highly flammable phosphorous liquid known as “Greek fire.” Their mission was to burn the city to the ground in what would be the first major domestic terrorist strike on New York.

  Martin and his seven coconspirators had all checked in to hotels under assumed names. At a prearranged time they would pour the incendiary chemicals on the floors and beds of their suites and disperse once the fires became uncontrollable. The flames would then ignite a firestorm through the densely packed wooden homes and buildings of Manhattan and kill scores of innocent men, women, and children.

  This was just one of many schemes to inflict widespread suffering on Northern civilians, and the plots were often sanctioned at the highest levels of the Confederate government. Texas state senator Williamson Simpson Oldham explained to President Jefferson Davis in explicit detail one particular plan to “devastate the country of the enemy, and fill his people with terror.” In mid-October 1864 an American doctor and acquaintance of Oldham’s named Luke Blackburn sailed to Bermuda to care for patients in the final throes of yellow fever. Blackburn’s intentions, however, were far from charitable; the forty-five-year-old Kentuckian was secretly collecting soiled bedsheets and garments to ship back to the States in sealed trunks. He hoped the linens and clothing could then be used to unleash an outbreak of the fatal disease throughout the North. He especially wanted to get a “gift” of fancy—and contaminated—dress shirts into the hands of Abraham Lincoln. (The war would be over by the time Blackburn could start his pandemic, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes.)

  For die-hard Rebs such as Lieutenant John Headley, Robert Martin’s second-in-command, extreme measures against the North were entirely justified. “Ten days before this attempt of Confederates to burn New York City,” Headley wrote in his journal, “General Sherman had burned the city of Atlanta, Georgia, and the Northern papers and people of the war party were in great glee over the miseries of the Southern people.”

  The Confederate attack on Manhattan was started by Headley himself, in Suite 204 of the Astor House hotel, when he lit his room’s carpet and bedsheets on fire and then set out into the night. At the North River Wharf, Headley lobbed bottles of Greek fire at wooden vessels and hay barges. While passing Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum, he was delighted to see smoke pouring out of the building and terrified patrons leaping from windows. Headley bumped into fellow conspirator Robert Cobb Kennedy and learned that Kennedy had impulsively tossed a bottle into a museum stairwell because he figured it would be “fun to start a scare.” With bells clamoring in every direction, Headley and Kennedy rushed like giddy pranksters to the rendezvous house in the Bowery, laughing and backslapping the whole way.

  Just north of them, John T. Ashbrook was setting fire to Lafarge House at 671 Broadway. Right next door was the Winter Garden Theatre, where a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was under way. Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, along with their older brother, Junius, were the featured performers. Smoke from the Lafarge seeped into the theater, and Edwin, according to a New York Times article the next day, calmed the frightened crowd as alarms began ringing.

  Order was quickly restored at the Winter Garden and throughout Manhattan. No one died, and the fires failed to ignite a citywide conflagration. There was, however, significant property damage, and some New Yorkers were injured scrambling for their lives, but that was the extent of the crisis. Fear and hysteria turned to outrage as the Confederate plot was revealed in morning newspapers, and a massive hunt for the perpetrators was launched. All of them were able to evade capture except Robert Cobb Kennedy, who was tried and, on March 25, 1865, hanged at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor.

  The November 25, 1864, performance of Julius Caesar represented the first and last time the three Booth brothers shared a stage. Edwin starred as the assassin Brutus; Junius played Cassi
us, who instigated the plot against Caesar; and John was Mark Antony, whose funeral oration deftly stirred the vacillating Roman crowd against Caesar’s killers. In the play’s penultimate lines, however, it is also Antony who concedes that at least Brutus’s motivations were honorable: “All the conspirators save only he / Did that they did in envy of great Caesar.” Antony says of Brutus:

  He only in a general honest thought

  And common good to all made one of them.

  His life was gentle and the elements

  So mixed in him that nature might stand up

  And say to all the world “This was a man.”

  The production was a one-night-only benefit to raise funds for a statue of William Shakespeare in Central Park. The life-sized monument was erected in May 1872 and stands there to this day.

  Before heading over to see the Exchange Place for the first time, I decide to pay Will a visit. I have a general idea where his memorial is supposed to be, but foolishly I’ve neglected to bring a map.

  “Excuse me,” I ask a middle-aged couple (the man is wearing a Yankees cap, so I assume they’re locals), “do you all know where the Shakespeare statue is? It’s around here somewhere.”

  Contrary to stereotype, I’ve always found New Yorkers to be very helpful with directions. They stop and she says, “That sounds vaguely familiar,” then looks at him.

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t know there was one.”

  I get a similar response from almost everyone else I ask (a few, to be expected, are tourists), and several positively know where it is and send me in the absolutely wrong direction. After forty-five disorienting minutes, an obliging soul finally points me to Literary Walk, and sure enough, there’s Shakespeare. A sign a few feet away chronicles the history of the memorial and acknowledges Edwin Booth’s fund-raising efforts. Brother John isn’t mentioned.