The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Newspapermen, too, proved remarkably susceptible to Mary’s fascinations. As word of “the comely seegar vendor” began to appear in the social notes of various publications, Mary achieved a curious form of celebrity, becoming perhaps the first woman in New York to be famous for being talked about. “It is a most curious thing,” one newsman noted drily. “Her notoriety is unencumbered by position or achievement.”

  It is not clear how John Anderson came to meet his celebrated employee, but his interest in her welfare clearly extended beyond the workplace. According to city records, Mary and her mother, Phoebe, settled themselves in Anderson’s house on Duane Street when they arrived in New York in 1837, though this arrangement lasted only a few months. The following year, when Anderson bought a new house on White Street, Mary and her mother removed themselves to the home of Mrs. Hayes, one of Phoebe Rogers’s sisters, on Pitt Street. Even so, the fact that the two women initially chose Anderson’s household over that of a blood relation would seem to indicate something more than a chance circumstance. It has been suggested that Mary and her mother earned their keep by performing domestic duties for the young bachelor, and that perhaps Anderson developed romantic feelings for the beautiful young girl under his protection. Whatever the case, by the time they departed from Anderson’s house Mary had begun working behind the counter of the cigar store, and the tobacco merchant would continue to serve as a friend and protector long afterward.

  Many of the young men who vied for Mary’s attentions would describe her as carrying herself in a manner that was pleasant but somewhat aloof. At times, recalled one admirer, a shadow would pass across her “beauteous features,” as if she were “troubled by a great secret.” Though such recollections are likely fanciful, and colored by the knowledge of what became of her, Mary would have had good cause for occasional flashes of melancholy. Though not yet out of her teens, her life to that point had been fraught with upheavals and tragedy.

  Mary and her mother came to New York from Connecticut during the banking panic of 1837, a period in which many along the eastern seaboard had fallen on hard times as a result of crop failures and collapsing markets, forcing a mass exodus from the region. By May of that year the crisis had hit New York, touching off a disastrous run on the city’s banks. “The volcano has burst and overwhelmed New York,” wrote Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York best remembered as a diarist. “I was there…and witnessed the madness of the people. Women were nearly pressed to death, and the stoutest men could scarcely sustain themselves, but they held on, as with a death’s grip, upon the evidences of their claims, and exhausted as they were with the pressure, they had strength to cry ‘Pay! Pay!”’ As the crisis deepened, New York, along with much of the rest of the country, faced an economic downturn that would last six years, leaving few prospects for the city’s growing tide of new arrivals.

  In spite of the hardships, Hone remarked, “honest, manful laborers who are not afraid of toil will have cause to rejoice.” The outlook was not as bright for honest women, for whom manful labor was not an option. In Connecticut, Phoebe Rogers and her young daughter had been secure and socially prominent, the descendants of several important New England families—including the Mather and Rogers clans, who were among the first settlers of New London County. In New York, by contrast, the two of them were alone and nearly friendless, facing an uncertain future with very few prospects.

  It cannot have been how Phoebe Rogers imagined her declining years. Born in 1778, she was not quite eighteen when she married Ezra Mather, a descendant of Increase Mather, the legendary Puritan leader, and his son Cotton Mather, who had played a significant role in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Phoebe’s new husband was a successful merchant in his own right. Ezra Mather owned property in Lyme and the surrounding communities, and even a Pearl Street lot in New York City. The couple lived comfortably and were well regarded in the community.

  By 1808 the marriage had produced four sons and a daughter, and the family appeared firmly settled into a life of convention and prosperity. That same year, however, Ezra Mather fell ill and died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight. Phoebe Mather, not quite thirty years old at the time, was now a widow with five children in her care. Fortunately her husband had left a considerable estate: His will provided for the support and education of the children, and insured that his widow would be well cared for until such time as she should remarry.

  Phoebe Mather could easily have lived out the rest of her life in comfort. Six years later, however, she married again, relinquishing the generous bequest from her first husband. Daniel Rogers, a man eleven years younger than his new wife, came from one of the leading families in New London’s thriving shipbuilding community. Like the Mathers, the Rogers family had featured in the early history of the region, but where the Mathers had been Puritans, the Rogers family had been of a more rebellious turn of mind, forging a religious sect known as the “Rogerenes” that stood in direct opposition to the established orthodoxy of the Puritans. Sometimes this opposition took the form of creative civil disobedience, with members appearing “nearly or quite naked” at public assemblies, and behaving in “a wild and tumultuous manner” so as to disrupt the Puritan solemnities. Apparently this unruly streak was passed down through the generations: James Rogers, Daniel’s grandfather, once found himself trading blows with a constable over a barrel of beef that had been set aside for a minister’s wages. The conflict ended only when Rogers threw scalding water on the officer and made off with the spoils.

  Although the progression from the Puritan Mathers to the rebellious Rogers family may have been unconventional, Phoebe Rogers’s second marriage appears to have been a happy one. Mary Rogers was born in 1820, probably in Lyme, Connecticut, when the marriage was in its sixth year. Curiously, the official records of the birth are missing or destroyed, though the births of the five children from Phoebe’s previous marriage are well documented in a variety of forms. It is possible that this discrepancy reflects a decline in social status from the first to the second marriage, but another explanation suggests itself. Phoebe Rogers would have been forty-two years old in 1820, a notably advanced age for childbearing at the time. This fact, coupled with the absence of official birth records, has led to speculation that Mary was not the daughter of Phoebe Rogers at all, but was instead her granddaughter—possibly the illegitimate child of Phoebe’s twenty-one-year-old daughter by her first marriage, taken in by Phoebe and Daniel Rogers to be raised as their own. The Rogers family would not have been the first to resort to this means of concealing the pregnancy of an unmarried daughter.

  Whatever the circumstances of Mary’s birth, her early years in Connecticut were marked by loss. By the time she was fourteen years old, three of the older children from Phoebe Rogers’s first marriage had died in the space of only five years. To compound the family’s grief, a steamship explosion on the Mississippi River claimed the life of Daniel Rogers, Phoebe’s second husband, in 1834.

  Twice widowed, Phoebe Rogers remained in Lyme with her young daughter under increasingly straitened circumstances for three more years. As the financial panic of 1837 took hold, however, the two women were forced to sell up and try their luck in New York City. The fact that Phoebe had a sister in New York would likely have been a factor, though it is also possible that John Anderson, who may have had business dealings with Ezra Mather, lent some assistance with the move. Whatever the reasons for the move, the transition from the tranquil and familiar world of rural Lyme to the bustling streets of New York must have been wrenching. At nearly sixty years of age, Phoebe Rogers left behind the only world she had ever known. In Lyme, at least during her first marriage, she had enjoyed a life of prosperity and social position. Now she found herself alone and unprotected, and charged with the care of a young daughter while seeking to make an entirely new life in a strange and chaotic city. Acquaintances in New York would describe her as grim, withdrawn, and “deserving of our earnest compassion.” In the circumstances, this cannot be see
n as entirely surprising.

  Where Phoebe Rogers inspired sympathy, the vivacious Mary awakened more complicated feelings in the many men whose paths she crossed. As the beautiful young daughter of an elderly widow, she appeared to have stepped from the pages of Dickens, complete with ambiguous lineage and a tragic aura. “We look upon this girl as we would our own daughters,” one admirer would declare, but this paternal instinct seems to have been in the minority. A far greater number of men expressed their admiration in terms of courtship. Mary’s Puritan ancestors would have recoiled at the sight of her passing out cigars in Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, but at a time when many able-bodied men were losing their jobs, she was fortunate to have found such a congenial position.

  Mary seems to have understood from the beginning what was expected of her, and as time passed she began to show a certain flair. One hopeful suitor spoke of passing an afternoon at the cigar store for no other purpose than to exchange “teasing glances” with the captivating girl behind the counter, who seemed able to fan the flames of his ardor without giving false hope. A poem published in the New York Herald gives some indication of the effect she exerted:

  She moved amid the bland perfume

  That breathes of heaven’s balmiest isle;

  Her eyes had starlight’s azure gloom

  And a glimpse of heaven—her smile.

  John Anderson paid his employee a generous wage to provide this glimpse of heaven for his customers. Undoubtedly Mary enjoyed the attention and preferred these light duties to the scullery work she might otherwise have been doing to support herself and her mother. After a few months behind the cigar counter, however, she found herself at the center of a strange and disturbing episode. In October of 1838, barely a year after her arrival in New York, Mary suddenly went missing from her post behind the cigar counter. Later that day, Phoebe Rogers discovered that her daughter had left behind a suicide note.

  At the time Mary and her mother were still living at the home of Mrs. Hayes, Phoebe’s sister, on Pitt Street. On October 6 the New York Sun reported, under the heading of “Something Mysterious,” that Phoebe Rogers had discovered a letter on her daughter’s dressing table bidding her “an affectionate and final farewell.” Horrified, Phoebe “sent messengers in all directions” to search for her daughter, but no trace could be found. The New York Journal of Commerce took up the story, relating that Mrs. Hayes promptly carried the letter to the office of the New York coroner, who agreed that the young woman’s message revealed a “fixed and unalterable determination to destroy herself.” The Sun added that the “cause of this wayward freak of the young lady is supposed by her friends to be disappointed love—she having recently received the addresses of a certain widower, who, it is said, has deserted her and by his desertion has brought upon her a state of mind which has prompted her, it is feared, to commit self-destruction.” Readers were urged to report any sightings of the young lady, in the hope of preventing “the fulfillment of her dreadful purpose.”

  Mary returned home safely a short time later—within a few hours, according to some accounts. The following day’s issue of the Times and Commercial Intelligencer dismissed the matter as a hoax: “A Correspondent who says he is well acquainted with the parties in the ‘Love and Suicide’ affair published yesterday gives a quite different version of it and states that the story is without the least foundation.” According to this unidentified informant, the tale had been “got up by some evil-disposed person who addressed a letter to the mother amounting in substance to that published yesterday.” In fact, the article went on to report, “Miss R. only went on a visit to a friend in Brooklyn. She is now at home with her mother.”

  This innocuous explanation failed to put an end to the matter. According to some accounts, the report of Mary’s safe return was itself a hoax—as evidenced by Mary’s failure to return to work—designed to discourage unwanted attention to the matter while she remained missing. When Mary eventually reappeared, apparently none the worse, another paper insisted that the disappearance had been a publicity stunt engineered by John Anderson: “After the smoke of the extra cigars sold during the excitement had cleared away,” declared the reporter, “the young woman returned as good as new.” Still others insisted that the suicide story had been fabricated to cover the fact that Mary had run off with one of her young suitors: “Some penny-a-liner trumped up a tale that she had eloped,” insisted a weekly paper called Brother Jonathan, though this storialso went unsubstantiated.

  The true facts of Mary’s brief disappearance remained muddled and contradictory, and would grow more so in years to come. Years later, an account in the Sunday News would dismiss the affair as a “cruel and unjustifiable hoax” practiced by one or more of the journalists who frequented the cigar store. This is entirely possible, as journalistic hoaxes had become a familiar tradition in the newspapers of the day. A few years earlier, in 1835, the Sun had created a sensation—and sold thousands of extra newspapers—with a breathless front-page account of the discovery of life on the moon. The “scientific dispatch” told of herds of bison thundering across the lunar surface, and blue unicorns clustered on its hilltops, while a colony of intelligent “bat-creatures” disported themselves in a mysterious golden temple. This “Great Astronomical Finding,” usually attributed to Richard Adams Locke, came to be known as the “Great Moon Hoax,” and it inspired numerous imitations.

  If the story of Mary’s disappearance and suicide bid began as a journalistic hoax, it may well have had an element of personal malice behind it. In her early days at the cigar store Mary received the attentions of a young newspaperman named Canter. On one occasion, according to the Herald, Canter was “severely beaten…by three or four rivals, in consequence of visiting her.” It is possible that Canter found his revenge in print, as the account in his newspaper, the Times and Commercial Intelligencer, took a decidedly bizarre tone toward the affair: “It seems that Miss Rogers was employed in Anderson’s segar store in Broadway,” the paper noted. “There she met and fell in love with a gallant gay Lothario, whose name did not transpire. After a month’s course of billing and cooing across the counter of Anderson’s store, which ended like the smoke of one of that gentleman’s segars (not however to speak disparagingly of their departed worth) in thin air. The Lothario was one morning found missing and that is the reason why Miss Rogers is now missing. When she left she took with her a shilling, as it is supposed, with the intention of purchasing poison.”

  It seems curious that a young woman’s threatened suicide should have been an occasion of such mirth in the offices of the Times and Commercial Intelligencer. If the article was the work of a wounded lover, intended as a barbed hoax, the joke fell wide of its mark.

  Whatever the truth of the episode, all accounts agree that Mary herself was mortified by the attention. One report had her fainting with horror upon her return to work, overcome by a crowd that had gathered for a glimpse of the celebrated cigar girl. “Concerned hands bore her back to her lodgings,” reported the Sunday News, “where she remained for some time.” Tearfully, Mary told her mother that she would never show herself again at the cigar store, and only the earnest pleadings of John Anderson—and a generous increase in wages—could induce her to return. Nothing more was heard of the suicide note she was supposed to have left, or of the “gallant gay Lothario” who was said to have led her astray.

  Soon enough the commotion surrounding the disappearance faded and Mary resumed her work behind the cigar counter as if nothing had happened. Still, the incident had tempered her enthusiasm and she no longer felt quite so comfortable in the public gaze. A short time later, when an opportunity to leave Anderson’s presented itself, she seized it. It emerged that Mary’s half-brother (Phoebe Rogers’s surviving son by her first marriage) had gone to sea and managed to accumulate a large sum of money by means that some described as “a foreign business venture” and others referred to as “plunder.” In any case his pockets were lined with money when he next passe
d through New York in the spring of 1839. Upon learning of Mary’s recent notoriety, he resolved at once that a tobacco store was not a fit place for a young woman to earn her keep, and provided his mother with the funds to open and maintain a boardinghouse on Nassau Street. With her son’s help Mrs. Rogers leased the property from a man named Peter Aymar, who owned several buildings in the neighborhood, and immediately began advertising for lodgers. Over John Anderson’s strong objections, Mary stepped out from behind the cigar counter, never to return.

  As it happened, Phoebe’s generous son would not live to see the results of this new venture. Within a few months, a lurching sail would knock him off the deck of his ship and he would drown before his crewmates could fish him out of the water. The news of his death would add yet another sorrow to Phoebe Rogers’s already heavy burden. She had now outlived four of her five older children.

  For the moment, her son’s generosity appeared to offer a safe haven, providing Phoebe and Mary with a place to live and also a steady source of income. The three-story red brick building was one of several boardinghouses along Nassau Street, all of which catered to business travelers and office workers. Boardinghouses were a relatively new phenomenon in New York at the time, reflecting the unsettled nature of its workforce. For previous generations, room and board had often been provided as a condition of service, with long-term assistants and apprentices attaching themselves to the households of their employers. As that way of life vanished, boardinghouses sprang up to meet the needs of a far more transitory worker. Providing rooms and meals to these workers offered a rare opportunity for a widow such as Mrs. Rogers, who would have had few other avenues of income open to her. “The kindly matrons who open their doors to New York’s working man give much-needed warmth and succor,” wrote the New York Gazette. “They give sanctuary to the noble working man.” Perhaps so, but for Phoebe Rogers, scrubbing potatoes and washing linens for a group of tradesmen and office clerks marked a considerable descent from her vastly more comfortable life back in Connecticut. As if to underscore the decline in her fortunes, her new boardinghouse was only a few hundred yards from the Pearl Street lot once owned by Ezra Mather, her first husband.