Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  65 Temple Street Mrs. Rudolph Davis’s, saloon - backroom

  Trumbull Street Grace Howard and Harry Arnold-1896-1898

  110 Ward Street Mabel Hotchkiss - 1914

  22 Water Street Allen Wesley & Julia Sullivan - 1893

  135 Wells Street Franklin & Minnie Cadwell - 1874

  114 Wells Street Charles Thompson -1886

  Mary Bernard (a.k.a. Mary Smith) - 1903

  76 Wells Street Thomas & Jennie Hollister- 1883 -1900

  Adella Leffingwell - 1900-1901

  48 Wells Street Joseph Longworth’s saloon - backroom

  305 Windsor Street John & Josephine Starzick

  309 Windsor Street Gustav Stavel

  Woodland Street Frank Cadwell’s - 1874

  Other keepers - Lewis Cook - 1874

  Joanna Cunningham - 1867

  Charles Hill - 1874

  John Mack & Emma Smith - 1874

  Catherine Ricard - 1862

  Augustine Sherlock - 1866

  Charles Winter - 1866

  Jennie Luretta – 1910

  Author’s Notes

  Introduction

  Hartford Land Records, Hartford City Hall, Main Street, Hartford, Vol. 187, p. 297, June 2, 1882; “Pen and Ink Sketches of the Brothels of Sin . . .,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, May 31, 1896, 11.

  [2] “Pen and Ink Sketches of the Brothels of Sin . . .,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, May 31, 1896, 11.

  [3] Letter from Mark Twain to Alta California, dated September 6, 1868. Section “Hartford—The “Blue Laws.”

  Chapter 1 – Jennie McQueeney of Dublin

  [4] FamilySearch.com (LDS); Ancestry.com; US Census Reports, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900.

  [5] US Census Reports, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900; Vital Records, Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford, CT; Passenger Ship’s Manifests, NARA, Ancestry,com.

  [6] “Frank McGuire Found In Cleveland,” Hartford Courant, May 22, 1900, 5.

  [7] Miller, 35.

  [8] Jones, 1906, 286-294.

  [9] Dudley-Edwards, R; Williams, TD. The Great Famine, Studies in Irish History 1845-52. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1956, (Reprinted 1997); Miller, 282.

  [10] Miller, 291-293; Revenue, Population & Commerce, London: Oxford University Press, 1850.

  [11] Ibid; “Riot in Glasgow,” The United Irishman, March 11, 1848, 67; “Riots in Edinburgh,” The United Irishman, March 11, 1848, 67; “Riots in London . . . ,” The United Irishman, March 11 1848, 67.

  [12] Hyde, 1975, passim.

  [13] New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957, Ancestry.com;

  [14] “Editorial Article 2—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 19, 1838, 2; Geer’s Hartford City Directories, 1850-1855.

  Note: A skilled machinist in a manufactory could make about $400 annually. Thus, weekly earning in the early 1850s would have been about 7.69; in 1900, median weekly earnings were $9.40; and, in 2014, median weekly earnings had blossomed to about $784. Keep in mind that weekly median earnings represent only one guide to dollar conversion through the decades. The 1850-dollar must be multiplied by 102, and the 1900-dollar by 83, to reach a reasonable value of past wages and prices.

  Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Editor's Desk, Median weekly earnings, 2004–2014 on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140423.htm (visited September 25, 2014).

  [15]“The Working of the Law ,” The United Irishman, February 26, 1848, 37.

  [16] “The Poor Law,” The United Irishman, March 18, 1848, 82.

  [17]“State Prosecutions,” The United Irishman, March 25, 1848, 101.

  [18] Ibid.

  [19] “Meeting of the Irish Confederation,” The United Irishman, May 27, 1848, 235.

  [20]“The Coercion Act—The Law of Dublin”.—The Irish Felon, July 22, 1848, 66.

  [21] Préteseille, Landry. The Irish Immigrant Trade to North America: 1845-1855. Master's Thesis, Centre d'Etudes Irlandaises de l'Université Rennes 2, Haute Bretagne.

  [22] Ibid.

  [23] “Frank McGuire Found,” Hartford Courant, May 22, 1900, 5.

  [24] Ibid.

  [25] Greenhill & Giffard 1974, 14.

  [26] “Common School Report…,” Hartford Daily Courant, February 20, 1845, 2.

  [27] Ibid.

  [28] Southworth, Eve. Drunken Sailors and Fallen Women: The New London Whaling Industry and Prostitution, 1820-1860, (2005).History Honors Paper, 1.

  [29] Weaver, Thomas, 1901, 5-11.

  [30] Sanger, 1858, 484; “Diamond Lucy Chapman,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, October 2, 1904, 11.

  [31] “Real Estate Transaction 1—No Title” Hartford Daily Courant, July 23, 1868, 2; “Article 6—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 7, 1862, 2; “Old Lafayette House,” Hartford Courant, August 1, 1902, 5.

  [32] “Conclusion of Windsor Locks Murder Trial,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 13, 1872, 2.

  [33] U. S. Census Records, 1850, 1860; In the cemetery plot at St. Francis Cemetery in North Providence, R.I. that Jennie Hollister bought for her favorite sister Katie McQueeney, she only allowed two others to be buried there. Both were uncles of hers: Francis “Frank” and Alexander McGuire.

  [34] “City Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 11, 1860, 2.

  [35] “A Strange Affair,” Hartford Daily Courant, November 10, 1882, 2.

  [36] “City Police Court, “Hartford Daily Courant, March 2, 1852, 2.

  A skilled mechanic at Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms in the mid-1850s made about $7.69 a week. In 1900, median weekly earnings were $9.40; and, in 2014, median weekly earnings had ballooned to $784. Therefore, to reach a reasonable value of past wages and prices, the 1850 dollar must be multiplied by 102 and the 1900 dollar by 83.

  Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Editor's Desk, Median weekly earnings, 2004–2014 on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140423.htm (visited September 25, 2014).

  [37] Death Certificate, City of Hartford, “Jennie G. Hollister,” Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford.

  [38] “Money and Business,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 23, 1860, 2.

  [39] Kneeland, George, 1913, 244-245; Woolston, 68-69.

  [40] “Police Matters,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 27, 1865, 2.

  [41] “Article 3—No Title, “Hartford Daily Courant, December 23, 1863, 2.

  [42] “Editorial Article 4—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 24, 1863, 2.

  [43] “Article 8—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 29, 1864, 2.

  [44] “Article 1—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 23, 1863, 2.

  [45] “Article 8—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 2, 1858, 2.

  [46] Woolston, 1921, 52.

  [47] Ibid.

  [48] “Widening of Market Street,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 16, 1856, 2; “Article 3—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 23, 1856, 2.

  [49] “Article 6—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 5, 1856, 2; “Article 3—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 1, 1858, 2.

  [50] “Money and Business,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 23, 1860, 2.

  Chapter 2 – Entering The Oldest Profession

  [51] “After ‘Jo’ Bullock’s Cash,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, September 16, 1900, 10.

  [52] U.S. Census Records, 1850, 1860; “Death of Thomas Hollister,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 28, 1894, 3; Ancestry.com.

  [53] “Death of Thomas Hollister,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 28, 1894, 3; “Wanted,” Hartford Daily Courant, Nov, 19, 1855, 1.

  [54] Ibid.

  [55] “Arrested Fifty Times,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, September 16, 1900, 10.

  [56]“Common Council—December 8,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 9, 1845, 2; “Common Council—January 26,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 27 1846, 2.

  [57] “Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 2, 1851, 2.<
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  [58] “Court of Common Council—May 26,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 27, 1851, 2; “Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 2, 1851, 2; “Public Acts,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 14 , 1851, 2; “Common Council—November 10,” Hartford Daily Courant, November 11, 1851, 2.

  [59] “City Meeting,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 22, 1851, 2.

  [60] “City Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, February 6, 1852, 2.

  [61] Geer’s City Directory, 1899. On May 11, 1862, Boston Police Officer James T. Hill was attacked by toughs. Officer Hill was forced to pull his revolver and kill one of his attackers. (“Attack on Policeman,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 12, 1862, 3.) Regardless of the date when police officers were officially allowed to carry firearms, it is clear that in New York, Boston, Hartford and many other cities, revolvers—usually .32 caliber—were carried long before the police commissioners gave permission.

  [62]“Police Headquarters,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 14, 1865, 2; “New Police Headquarters,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 24, 1870, 2; “New Police Building,” Hartford Courant, March 16, 1897, 8.

  [63] “Walter P. Chamberlin,” Hartford Daily Courant, Nov. 21, 1870, 2.

  [64] Ibid.

  [65] Ibid.

  [66] “Article 8—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, February 22, 1859, 2.

  [67] Ibid; “Walter P. Chamberlin,” Hartford Daily Courant, Nov. 21, 1870, 2.

  [68] Murphy, 2010, 2.

  [69] “Report . . First Quarter of Police Force,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 24, 1860 , 2.

  [70] “Short Paragraphs,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 31, 1860, 2; “Article 17—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 31, 1860, 2.

  [71] “Article 12—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 23, 1862, 3.

  [72] “Article 5—No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 21, 1862, 2.

  [73] “All Sorts,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 7, 1866, 2.

  [74] Fishkill, New York, on the Hudson River above the city, was as close as the great railroad magnates would allow an out of town road to get to New York City. For a number of years, trains could move goods and passengers as far south as Bridgeport, from whence they would transfer everything onto steamships to complete the journey into New York City.

  [75] U.S. Census Reports, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880.

  [76] U.S. Census Records, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920. Providence City Directories, 1860-1927. Rhode Island Birth, Death, and Marriage Records; 1860-1930.

  [77] “After ‘Joe’ Bullock’s Cash,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, September 16, 1900, 10; It has been written that Angeline ran the Cedar Mountain House with Joe Start, her second husband, but this cannot be true. Angeline did not marry Joe Start until 1885, after Jennie “Taylor” McQueeney was running her own houses of prostitution for eighteen years. Angeline may have run the Cedar Mountain House while she was married to Billy Prentice—and this is where Jennie “Taylor” McQueeney got her start. The math works, but there is no corroboration for this chronology of events.

  [78] “Saint Louis,” The Dallas Herald, August 4, 1881, 6; Index to deaths in the Saint Louis Globe Democrat, 1881, http://www.slcl.org/content/index-deaths-saint-louis-globe-democrat-1881-m (accessed 7-18-2014)

  [79] “Mrs. Start’s Claim,” Hartford Courant, May 22, 1901, 4.

  [80] “The Shaw-Carstang Case . . . ,” Evening Star (repr. The Herald, N.Y.), April 5, 1860, 1.

  [81] Ibid.

  [82] “New York City . . . ,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 18, 1886, 3.

  [83]“Jo” Bullock’s Wine Closet,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, May 26, 1895, 11.

  [84] Porter, Daniel L. Porter, 1466-67.

  [85] “This Woman Made Happy,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, June 2, 1901, 10.

  [86] U.S. Census Records, 1900.

  [87] Hartford Land Records, Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford. Vol. 122, p. 453, June 27, 1867; Vol. 129, p. 426, March 20, 1868; Vol. 129, p. 426, March 28, 1870;

  [88] Ibid;

  [89] “Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 15, 1868, 2; Woolston, 1921, 94; Howard Woolston’s statistics regarding madames are based on U. S. Department of Justice statistics.

  [90] “Article 4-No Title,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 27, 1864, 2. Mary Ann Atherton’s first recorded arrest was in 1864 and she was still in the business when she died in 1901. Always operating houses of ill fame in the squalor of Ferry Street, for all of her long career, she was without a doubt, the oldest and most notorious madame in Hartford.

  [91] “General News” Marshall City Republican, “May 3, 1867, 1.

  [92] U.S. Census Reports, 1870, 1880; Geer’s City Directory, 1867.

  [93] Dr. William Sanger’s book History of Prostitution was published in 1858, but he began his research in 1855; Woolston, 1921, 20-21; Baldwin, 1999, 83.

  [94] Woolston, 1921, 59-60.

  [95] Ibid; “Police Intelligence,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 26, 1870, 2; “Mr. Joseph Weeks In Jail,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 23, 1873, 2; “The Courts,” Hartford Daily Courant, February 12, 1873, 2; Hartford & Vicinity,” Hartford Daily Courant, November 3, 1873, 2; “Police Intelligence,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 24, 1874, 1; “Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 28, 1874, 2; “The Courts,” Hartford Daily Courant, February 12, 1881.

  [96] “Police Intelligence,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 26, 1870, 2.

  [97] Ibid.

  [98] “Action of the Police Board,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 30, 1871, 2.

  [99] “The Police Scandal,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 9, 1874, 2.

  [100] “The Chief of Police… ,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 23, 1871, 2.

  [101] “The Police Force… ,” Hartford Daily Courant, November 8, 1871, 2.

  [102] “The Police Board,” Hartford Daily Courant, November 21, 1871, 2; “Vindication,” Hartford Daily Courant, April 26, 1875, 2; “Steps Down And Out,” Hartford Daily Courant, October 17, 1881, 2.

  [103]“Williams A Witness,” Hartford Courant, December 27, 1894, 1; “A Stubborn Witness,” Hartford Courant, December 28, 1894, 1.

  [104] Ibid.

  [105] “A Pension for Williams,” Hartford Courant, May 25, 1895, 1.

  [106] “Police Court,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 1, 1866, 2.

  [107] Beers, 343; “Recollections of Forty Years in Connecticut Politics,” Hartford Courant, October 25, 1914, E21-23.

  [108] Ibid.

  [109] Murphy, Kevin, Fighting Joe Hawley (2014) 192.

  [110] Woolston, 23.

  [111] Woolston, 24-25.

  Chapter 3 – A Different Tack

  [112] Connecticut General Statutes, 1796; Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin 1805, 216, 30, Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford.

  Re: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 book The Scarlet Letter— Scholars have searched forever for cases of actual branding with the letter A, which might have happened in the 17th and 18th centuries and the matter is cloaked in mystery. However, the following article courtesy of the Lane Memorial Library in Hampton, New Hampshire, sheds as much light on the subject as exists in 2014.

  While there has been no shortage of studies on Hawthorne's literary borrowings in The Scarlet Letter, little has been found concerning historical sources of the letter A itself and virtually nothing has been uncovered concerning adulterous figures in Puritan history who might have been the prototypes of Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. We do know that by 1838, when an early version of Hester appeared in "Endicott and the Red Cross," Hawthorne was aware of the 1694 law enacted in Salem that required a woman convicted of adultery to wear a capital A sewn conspicuously on her garments. Although the appearance of this law so late in the century might seem anomalous to the 1634 setting of "Endicott and the Red Cross" or to the 1642-49 setting of The Scarlet Letter, we may easily resolve the discrepancy by assuming either that Hawthorne had been influenced ins
tead by the early seventeenth-century case of Goodwife Mendame, sentenced to wear an AD on her sleeve, or that, contrary to his usual practice, he felt the need in this instance to take liberties with the historical record. . . In three separate sources, Hawthorne could have read about a woman who . . . had the letter A branded upon her. Perhaps just as curious, this woman was married to a former Puritan minister who had been previously censured for adulterous behavior. Hawthorne was undoubtedly acquainted with the fall of this Puritan divine, the implication being that the adultery of the Reverend Dimmesdale was not entirely the product of Hawthorne's irreverent imagination after all. As the scholarship on Hawthorne's historical works has consistently revealed, the "Actual and the Imaginary" do indeed meet, and "each imbue[s] itself with the nature of the other. . . .”

  The case of the woman branded for adultery first appeared in the records of York, in what is now Maine. Dated 15 October 1651, the entry reads: “We do present George Rogers for, & Mary Batchellor the wife of Mr. Steven Batcheller minister for adultery. It is ordered by ye Court yt George Rogers for his adultery with mis Batcheller shall forthwith have fourty stripes save one upon the bare skine given him: It is ordered yt mis Batcheller for her adultery shall receive 40 stroakes save one at ye First Towne meeting held at Kittery, 6 weekes after her delivery & be branded with the letter A." (Beside that entry, written in the same hand, is the notation, "Execution Done." It appears that Charles Edward Banks, in his History of York, Maine (1935), recognized the connection between Hawthorne's novel and this case, for he refers to Mary Batchellor's branding in a section titled “The Scarlet Letter.”)

  http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/bachilerscarletletter.htm (Accessed November 1, 2014)

  [113] Connecticut General Statutes, 1854; New Haven: T. J. Stafford, printer, 1854, Revision 1866. 266-67. Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford.

  [114] Hartford Land Records, Connecticut State Library, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford. Vol. 138, p. 134, April 18, 1871; Vol. 150, p. 142, May 23, 1873.