Goat Castle

by Karen L. Cox

  Based on this same interview, a reporter with the Natchez Democrat sought to reclaim Dana’s aristocratic past and links to Old South elites, describing his life as both “fantastic and weird.” In addition to calling Dana a “half-demented musical genius” and a “mental wreck,” the writer made sure to include his family connection to the Lees of Virginia, southern royalty if there ever had been. Dana’s father, who served as rector of Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, for twenty-six years, the reporter explained, had confirmed Robert E. Lee’s children. Taking Dana’s words as fact, the writer repeated the line that Dana was a “gay, debonair, well-dressed young man, [who was] much liked and very welcome in the best homes of Natchez.” In truth, Dana left Natchez as a teen, and when he returned, he did so as a boarder in various homes around town, including that of Richard Forman, Octavia’s brother-in-law. He simply was not the “master of Glenwood.”26

  Dana’s respectable ancestry, not to mention the reputation of Natchez elites, led the community to look the other way when it came to Dick’s peculiar behavior. “Knowing his past, Natchez felt a pitiful interest in Dick Dana, and when stranger fantasies and hallucinations began to people his brain, friends remained close lipped about his affliction,” a Natchez reporter wrote. This was followed by the assertion that allowing Octavia Dockery to become his guardian may have been a mistake. Local officials who had dealt “gently with his case” had “allowed [Dana] a freedom that in light of present events has proven a mistaken kindness.”27

  If Dick’s story was crafted from his own ramblings and the memories of a few Natchezeans, Octavia Dockery’s story was absolutely of her own design. She wanted to be accepted as both an accomplished woman and a sympathetic figure, especially for staying the course at Glenwood. After all, she had remained with Dick Dana “through all his vagaries and cruelties,” as one writer put it, “even when he fled from the house like some timorous, frightened beast, and spent days at a time roaming the woods.”28

  Sitting in her cell, Octavia answered reporters’ questions and wove a tale that mixed fact with fiction. The story she gave of her life’s trajectory was calculated to garner sympathy and perhaps lead to her release from jail. By now, she was well aware of the damning fingerprint evidence found in Jennie Merrill’s home. And the prospects of living her last days in prison were very real. But Octavia was cunning and a bit of an actress. She enjoyed the attention and she played her part to perfection.

  Reporters were totally taken in. Sitting with this woman “tanned by wind and sun” and whose “work hardened hands [fluttered] nervously . . . to detract attention from her swollen knuckles,” it was difficult to imagine that she was once a “proud belle.” Regardless of this disconnect, they documented Octavia’s telling of her personal history — one that began with promise and distinction but went swiftly downhill. “Her story runs the gamut of human misery,” wrote one reporter, and “tells of broken hope, crushed ambition and also an iron determination to follow her own way and drink misery to the very dregs.”29

  Dockery began at the beginning. “I was born on Lamartine plantation in southern Arkansas,” she said. Her father, Thomas Dockery, had been a distinguished Confederate officer — a point that likely resonated with southern readers. After the war, she continued, he traveled extensively in the North and South while she and her sister Nydia lived with their mother and a relative in Mississippi. “When I was about twelve years old, we moved to New York City, where we lived fourteen years,” she said. While there she attended “the Comstock School on Forty-Second Street, a fashionable school for girls.” In truth, Octavia was a few years older when she went to New York, but then she regularly shaved years off of her age. There also was no mention of how her father had died destitute in a New York boardinghouse.30

  What brought her back to Mississippi was her devotion to her sister, she said, who was like a second mother to her after their mother, Laura, died. When Nydia married Richard Forman, whom Octavia described as “a wealthy plantation owner,” she moved to be with her sister in Fayette County, where Forman owned property. Given his “considerable prominence,” she explained that she had no cares but “to amuse myself.” And how? By traveling frequently to New Orleans and Vicksburg “to attend balls and house parties of friends.” In this, she aligned herself with Mississippi’s planter elite, even though the details of Forman’s actual prominence are quite vague. Octavia even told a story of riding on horseback down Main Street wearing a velvet jacket and feathered bonnet, cutting such a “graceful figure” that she turned men’s heads.31

  Then Octavia came to the part of her life story of which she seemed most proud. Tired of being a lady of leisure, she asserted that she became a professional woman and began writing to make her own money. At best, Dockery had modest success, but this is not how she portrayed it. “My work was enthusiastically received,” and, she avowed, “editors praised it for its freshness and originality.” She wrote poetry and newspaper articles, and “all were eagerly accepted, printed and paid for.” Reporters found her so convincing that they referred to Octavia as a woman of “rare literary ability,” not bothering to check the facts.32

  If she had such a successful writing career, she was asked, why had she turned “from poetry to pigs”? Her answer was a combination of truth and fabrication. Her sister, she said, died not long after the family moved to Natchez, after which Octavia lived briefly with relatives in Mobile. On the one hand, she said she returned to town and took the money she made from selling “magnificent family jewels” to “raise funds to establish a small dairy and chicken farm at Glenwood.” On the other, she claimed to have taken what little she earned from writing “to establish a chicken farm on the property of Dick Dana, who was then a prominent planter.” With no form of financial support, she asked, “What was I to do?” While her sister did die in Natchez, it occurred more than a decade after they moved there. And it was likely she had to sacrifice family jewelry in the wake of Richard Forman’s death, since he was Octavia’s sole means of support since marrying her sister decades before. Yet her claim that Dana had been a “prominent planter” was simply untrue. Glenwood may have been his inheritance, but by the time she moved there — along with her sister and brother-in-law — the estate was already in deplorable condition and far from a profitable plantation.33

  Since people in Natchez barely knew her, Octavia could say what she wanted, and no one could contest it. As she talked, the portrait of her life took on a pathetic tone. “I have stuck it out at lonely, deserted Glenwood with nothing but ceaseless drudgery to fill my days, because I hoped better days would come,” she said, adding, “I was almost worked to death.” By now the word was out about the appalling conditions of the home she shared with Dana. When asked why goats were free to “roam about neglected rooms and galleries,” Dockery returned to explaining her hard life of raising cows and goats to support the pair “without help from anyone.” Because Glenwood did not have running water, she told how she transported water over a “distance of three miles” in order to cook meals.34

  Reporters presumed that since Octavia had been a “belle,” she “had not been taught the first principles of housekeeping,” which accounted for the accumulation of filth inside her home. “Who ever dreamed that [her] soft white hands should be hardened by such drudgery?” the Natchez Democrat reporter declared. Dockery also made excuses for the conditions of Glenwood. “I spend most of my time out of doors,” she said, adding, “Dick is unable to help me as everyone knows. It’s a dangerous life, I realize, but I must earn my daily bread.” She repeated the line of “earn[ing] my daily bread” throughout her interview — a statement she had to know would resonate with so many readers whose own lives involved financial struggle, especially in the depths of the Depression.35

  If Octavia sought sympathy from readers, she certainly received it. Locals not only stopped by the jail to leave her flowers and a kind word but also soon began to demand that she and Dick be released. And in fact, within
a week of her jailhouse interview, the two were able to return home on their own recognizance. But Dockery’s story did more than assist in their release. She had now achieved the attention that her writing never brought her. And after she returned to dilapidated Glenwood, the “Goat Woman” decided to take her act on tour.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SIDESHOWS

  When the Natchez Garden Club held its first pilgrimage in the spring of 1932, locals were stunned by its success. More than four thousand visitors from thirty-eight states made the journey to their little town on the bluffs of the Mississippi River to tour its magnificent mansions and experience the place “where the Old South still lives.”1

  Perhaps they should not have been surprised given America’s fascination with the Old South in the 1930s. Even before the Depression hit, Hollywood was making escapist films set in the Deep South, where, very often, the Mississippi River provided a romantic backdrop. Given the allure of the region’s plantation heritage in all forms of popular culture, it is no wonder Americans were drawn to Natchez as the place where this image appeared to come to life.

  Plans were already underway to promote the pilgrimage for the coming spring when Jennie Merrill was murdered. Her passing, in many ways, marked the death of the Old South. This alone was a sobering reality for a town so engaged with its antebellum past. Yet it was the publicity surrounding the case, which dominated national headlines for weeks, that gave locals pause. It brought their town the kind of notoriety that both disturbed and embarrassed well-heeled Natchezeans. It was unseemly. And it detracted from the picturesque portrait of the Old South they still clung to.

  Yet everything about the case of Jennie Merrill’s murder revealed an Old South in ruins, at least where the planter class was concerned. And the news media milked the story until it ran bone-dry.

  Glenwood itself became its own story following the arrest of Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. Its derelict condition, its peculiar residents, and the menagerie of animals that made their home inside its walls shocked locals and outsiders alike and proved an ominous sign of southern decay. Once the respectable abode of Dick’s father, the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, it contained fine furniture and a large library appropriate for such an educated man as Charles Backus Dana. In the decades since his death in 1873, nearly all of it had deteriorated into conditions not fit for human habitation. And yet humans did inhabit it, including the reverend’s son. Now thousands of others were eager see it for themselves.

  It was clear early on that the story of Goat Castle and the “forlorn pair” arrested for the murder of Jennie Merrill attracted more than general interest. In the days that followed, public curiosity was further piqued by reports about the home and living conditions. News stories ran the gamut of providing realistic descriptions that defied belief to comparisons with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” Yet none of it was fiction, because the world of the “Wild Man” and the “Goat Woman” was nothing short of a southern gothic drama come to life.

  Their home, a rambling two-story antebellum structure with four large chimneys, sat atop a rise on the property that faced a deep bayou overgrown with weeds, vines, spiky palm fronds, and a forest of trees draped in Spanish moss. The driveway that approached Glenwood was gully-washed and uneven. Broken furniture, an old horse-drawn carriage, and the ratty mattress dragged over from the Skunk’s Nest lay askew along the front porch that was missing planks like Dick Dana was missing teeth. “So weird and ghostly in its appearance,” one reporter commented, “that the timid visitor feels a tremor of fear, even in midday. All is desolate, unkempt, and melancholy.”2

  By Sunday, August 7, just three days after Dick and Octavia’s arrest, Glenwood was overrun with voyeuristic tourists and more than a few thieves. There were heavy thunderstorms that day, but it did not prevent people from crossing onto the estate and into the house. Archibald Dickson, the pair’s good friend whom Octavia later asked to be custodian of the residence in their absence, was not there that Sunday. Yet he was aware that people from Mississippi, Louisiana, and beyond had come there in droves. “I understand that notwithstanding the downpour of rain,” Dickson said, “probably a thousand people entered the house.” Over the next few weeks, thousands more arrived.3

  Numerous individuals took personal papers and other items they could carry by hand that Sunday. A few days later in Jonesville, Louisiana, thirty-six miles from Natchez, the local paper announced it was displaying “Dana souvenirs” taken by a man who had “visited” the home. Among the publicly exhibited items were letters written to Dana’s father when he was in college, bills for clothing, an 1845 marriage certificate, and a “picture of the celebrated steamboat Natchez.”4

  Octavia was in jail when she learned of the theft, but she used it to her advantage to gain sympathy. “While we are behind the bars of prison for a crime of which, as God is my bearer, we are innocent,” she said, “vandals prowl through our house. True it is a pitiful place, now, but after all it is ours.” She had gotten word from friends, she said, “that fiends in human form have not hesitated to take away the most intimate personal possessions of the father and mother of Dick,” adding that among the missing items was “a brooch of mine, one of the few articles of value” she had left.5

  Speaking on Octavia’s behalf, Archibald Dickson went so far as to suggest that the Adams County sheriff was at fault for failing to secure the items stolen from Glenwood. Book Roberts bristled as the implication. Already overwhelmed with the criminal investigation, Roberts now had to deal with the pilfering going on at Goat Castle and called Dickson in to identify the persons who took items. Glenwood’s custodian believed that “99 per cent” of the items were taken on the Sunday he was not at the house. Since then, only reporters had been allowed access. Dick Dana had given a few of them permission to remove items to be photographed, but the reporters were always accompanied by officers. Dickson said he had escorted “a woman reporter from Baton Rouge” but vowed she did not take anything.6

  Ed Ratcliff, Dana and Dockery’s attorney, announced that people who had taken items from Glenwood should return them immediately “on pain of prosecution,” but even Ratcliff was not immune to the draw of Goat Castle. He provided his wife a pass to go inside the house. “She wanted to inspect the furniture and other valuables,” Dickson told the sheriff, “to get a line on what it would bring for sale.” Book Roberts asked Dickson if this was for attorney fees. “No,” he said, “for the general expense”— likely the huge debt the pair owed on the mortgage. This was the excuse given, but no sale was forthcoming.7

  The handful of reporters who entered Goat Castle were met with a scene of complete ruin and decay. It defied belief that anyone could live in such filth and neglect. Fleas and other vermin infested the place. Dick Dana himself was not sure whether the papers that were missing from the house were “gone through the ravages of rats and snakes or were carried away by souvenir seekers.” Bird droppings and the waste of other animals covered the rotting floors. Old letters and magazines were strewn about, and on one table lay a faded Confederate uniform, likely that of Octavia’s father. Rosewood furniture had been cut up for firewood, while cobwebs wafted down from the ceilings. Then there were the goats that fed the residents and gave the home its nickname. They shuffled in and out of rooms, oblivious to visitors, and some of the herd could be spotted on the second-story porch, chewing their cud as they peered down on those entering the house.8

  Among the reporters covering the case, Gwen Bristow from the New Orleans Times-Picayune proved to be a talented investigative journalist. A true reporter who attended Columbia University’s school of journalism, she meticulously documented the living conditions at Glenwood. Her investigations in Natchez led to the interview with Jennie’s car mechanic, who recalled having seen a gun in her purse. She also interviewed Merrill’s relatives the McKittricks at Elms Court. Bristow, a South Carolina native, went on to a successful career as a novelist, writing the best-selling book Ju
bilee Trail, which became a film in 1954. But in the fall of 1932, she attracted national attention with her feature articles on Goat Castle.9

  Bristow visited the home in the days after Dana and Dockery’s arrest and is likely the “woman reporter” whom Archibald Dickson accompanied. She found the house, like Dick and Octavia, to be a study in shocking contrasts, as suggested by Bristow’s headline “Damask and Dirt Mingle in Dick Dana’s ‘Goat Castle.’” She took readers on a tour of the home through vivid descriptions of its condition. “The house from a distance has a look of rickety decay,” Bristow wrote, yet the mansion’s “crumbling columns” and rotting porch did not compare to what she found inside. “Edgar Allan Poe never described a place such as the ‘Goat Castle,’ because he never saw its equal,” she said, adding, “There are some pictures beyond imagination.” Relating what she saw inside, Bristow wrote about the marble fireplaces where the pair cooked, using bedsprings to smoke goat meat — some of the same goats they lived with. “Chickens and ducks run in and out of the doorway and flutter over the furniture in the hall with easy familiarity. Cats scramble over the sofa in the front parlor,” she wrote, and the dust that covered everything inside was so thick “that even the titles of some of the magazines could not be read.”10