18 tiny deaths, p.3
18 Tiny Deaths, page 3
In the mid to late 1800s, the reputation of coroners in Boston was as bad as anywhere. There was no limit to the number of coroners the governor could appoint. The designation of coroner was a valuable plum to hand out as a political favor, practically a license to steal. Before the medical examiner office was established in 1877, Boston had forty-three coroners. The city of New York, with three times the population of Boston, had four coroners for the entire jurisdiction. Suffolk County had more coroners than New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, combined.19
“You have in the coroner an officer armed practically with the utmost power of the law,” said prominent Boston attorney Theodore Tyndale.
He decides in the first place, upon his discretion, whether an inquest be necessary or not; it is obvious how large are the opportunities for corruption in this direction: that for a man whose cupidity or possibly culpability and fear are stronger than his honor and integrity, it would not be difficult to thwart justice and close the door to all judicial investigation of a crime by corruptly declaring an inquest unnecessary, and even aiding in the removal of suspicion and the concealment of the evidence and traces by authorizing a speedy burial. But if he may thus on the one hand shield the guilty and endanger the public safety, on the other the opportunities for a man prompted by malice or vindictiveness or the desire of cheap notoriety are enough, truly, to make us tremble.20
The scandal that precipitated the end of the coroner system in Boston began when the body of a newborn baby was found in a trash can. One of Boston’s district coroners convened an inquest, which returned a verdict of “death at the hands of a person unknown.” Each member of the inquest jury earned two dollars, and the coroner made ten dollars. But rather than show some decency, coroners saw an opportunity. The body of the baby was dumped in another district for another coroner to hold another inquest and dump the body again. Four times this decomposing baby was exploited until word of this appalling practice got out.21
That was the end of coroners in Boston. In 1877, lawmakers abolished coroners and inquests and placed a competent doctor in charge of death investigations.
This, then, was the world Captain Frances Glessner Lee made her mission to change. Before her time, progress in the field of death investigation was slow, lurching toward progress only when scandals shocked the public’s sensibilities. It was her goal to bring the United States out of the Middle Ages, to replace coroners with medical examiners and modernize the investigation of sudden and unexplained deaths.
The Chicago Police Department is older than the city of Chicago itself. On January 31, 1835, two years before the city was incorporated, the Illinois General Assembly authorized the town of Chicago to establish its own police force. Seven months later, Orsemus Morrison was elected the town’s first constable.22
As constable, Morrison carried the “staff of office,” a whitewashed wood baton that was more ornament than weapon, to indicate the authority of his elected position. His duties included collecting fines and taxes and serving as coroner of Cook County by leading inquest juries in cases of questionable deaths.
The first death that Morrison investigated was that of a visiting Frenchman found dead in the fall of 1835. He was discovered in the early morning, half-buried in a muddy pit in “the woods,” an area densely overgrown with foliage bounded by LaSalle, Washington, and Randolph Streets—the location of present-day city hall. Morrison called an inquest jury. The decedent, they were told, had been staying at a hotel and went out for an evening walk. He had been drinking and apparently got lost and became mired in the mud pit, where he fell victim to the elements. The jury concluded that the man froze to death by misadventure. No evidence suggested otherwise.23
At the time of Morrison’s tenure as constable, Chicago was a village of fewer than 4,500 inhabitants. Favorably located in proximity to the Great Lakes, railroads, and the Mississippi River, Chicago rapidly grew into a major center of manufacturing and distribution. Agricultural equipment sold through Chicago transformed the country’s vast prairies into productive farmland. Cattle and hogs raised on farms throughout the Midwest returned to Chicago for slaughter and from there, along with corn and grain, were shipped throughout the United States. The city became home to some of the country’s largest manufacturers and some of the country’s wealthiest families.
During the 1800s, the population of Chicago rose at a breathtaking rate. By 1860, Chicago was home to more than one hundred thousand people. In the next decade, the population nearly tripled, approaching three hundred thousand. And among the legion of young people migrating to Chicago during this period of growth were Lee’s parents, John Jacob Glessner and Frances Macbeth.
The son of a newspaper publisher, Glessner was born in 1842 and spent his formative years in Zanesville, Ohio, At the age of twenty, he struck out on his own and took a position as bookkeeper at Warder, Child, & Co. in Springfield, an industrial town in the southwest part of the state. Warder, Child, & Co., a maker of reapers, mowers, and planters, was one of the largest farm equipment companies in the country. In Springfield, Glessner rented a room with the Macbeth family, where he met and fell in love with Frances, a young schoolteacher. He rapidly advanced his station in Warder, Child, & Co. Adept in the world of business, Glessner seemed destined for success.24
In 1869, the firm’s principals decided to open an office in Chicago to increase their share of agricultural markets in the Midwest. Glessner asked to head up the new operation in Chicago, so long as he was given authority to run the business as he saw fit, and he was appointed a vice president of the company. He and Frances were married at her parent’s home in Springfield, then after a visit to his parents in Zanesville, they took the train to begin their new lives in Chicago.
On October 2, 1871, one week before Chicago’s Great Fire, the Glessners celebrated the birth of their first child, George Macbeth. A daughter, Frances, arrived on March 25, 1878. A plump and healthy baby, she was called Fanny.
As Glessner’s career advanced, his personal wealth grew accordingly. As a junior partner, Glessner’s share of the company’s profits in 1877 was $39,600 or almost $872,000 in present-day value. By the time he was forty years old, Glessner was a millionaire, with a net worth of about $27 million in today’s currency. He was among the wealthiest men in Chicago.
Eventually, five major agricultural machinery companies—the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, Deering Company, Plano Manufacturing Company, Wisconsin Harvester Company, and Warder, Bushnell, & Glessner (the successor of Warder, Child, & Co.)—merged to form the International Harvester Company. At its inception, the company was valued at $150 million. By then the last active principal of Warder, Bushnell, & Glessner, John Jacob Glessner was elected chairman of International Harvester’s executive committee. He suddenly owned a piece of the largest manufacturing company in the world, and his family’s security was set for generations.
In their personal lives, the Glessners’ wealth allowed them to indulge their shared passion for music and the arts. They enjoyed live performances, attending the opera and musical events at venues throughout Chicago, and raised their children, George and Fanny, to appreciate the fine arts their parents patronized. Most of all, the Glessners enjoyed classical symphonic music. Glessner was one of a group of prominent Chicagoans who provided the funding to establish the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891. He was a staunch supporter and benefactor of the orchestra for the rest of his life.
Elected a trustee of the Orchestral Association, Glessner contributed more than $12,000 to the construction of Orchestra Hall, designed by Daniel Burnham. When Orchestra Hall was completed in 1904, Box M, directly behind the conductor’s podium, was reserved exclusively for the Glessners. The Glessners were also close friends of Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor Theodore Thomas, his successor, Frederick Stock, and several members of the orchestra. Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a celebrated concert pianist who served as prime minister of Poland, was another family friend. Music was often performed in their home.
The Glessners were enthusiasts of cultural and intellectual self-improvement. John Jacob was active in the Literary Club, while Frances took lessons in literature, French, Italian, and German. They enjoyed acquiring fine furniture, art, and decorative objects for their home.
During a visit to the Interstate Industrial Exposition in 1875, the Glessners admired black walnut furniture carved by Isaac Scott.25 Scott was an artist, woodworker, and designer particularly known for art furniture. The Glessners commissioned Scott to build a bookcase for their home. It was the beginning of a close personal friendship the Glessners had with Scott for the remainder of his life. Over a matter of years, Scott designed furniture, pottery, picture frames, embroidered works, pewter, and other decorative items for the Glessners.
Wealth seemed to assure a life of comfort and security for the Glessner children.
2
THE SUNNY STREET OF THE SIFTED FEW
PRIVILEGE IS NO IMMUNITY to misfortune. George Glessner developed severe hay fever at around age four. By the time Fanny was born, his doctor advised the Glessners to summer away from the filthy, pollen-filled air of Chicago and take George to the country for respite from his symptoms.
The Glessners heard about an area in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with a claim for being practically pollen-free. They visited in the summer of 1878. Frances had taken ill since Fanny’s birth, so she remained in Chicago with the baby while George was sent to New Hampshire with Frances’s sisters, Helen and Lizzie.
After a two-day train ride, the group arrived in Littleton, New Hampshire. Littleton was a town of fewer than two thousand people about twenty-five miles west of Mount Washington. Littleton had a well-developed hospitality industry receiving guests from the Midwest and the East Coast. At the time, the White Mountains region boasted numerous large hotels and resorts—the Flume House, the Maplewood, the Mount Pleasant, the Fabyans, and the Crawford House among the best known.1 George and his aunts booked themselves into the Oak Hill House, but the boy experienced little relief of his symptoms. Helen Macbeth consulted a local doctor, a homeopath, who concluded that George wasn’t “far enough into the mountains.” The doctor recommended a hotel about fourteen miles away, the Twin Mountain House.
It turned out that the homeopath may have been onto something. “Aunt Helen made the move and George was very much better almost overnight,” according to Lee’s recollection. At last, George found blessed relief from the misery of hay fever.2
Frances Glessner Lee later described the Twin Mountain House as a “great barn of a place.” It was an impressively grand three-story wood frame structure, with the upper floor a steeply sloped mansard roof. “Of course there was no plumbing,” she said.3
Many guests, including the Glessner family, returned to the Twin Mountain House summer after summer. One Twin Mountain regular was Henry Ward Beecher, a celebrated clergyman who was an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist. Beecher had recently been embroiled in scandal, his reputation soiled by an adulterous relationship with his assistant’s wife and the high-profile lawsuit brought by the wronged husband that followed.4
At Twin Mountain House, five-year-old Fanny befriended Beecher. “He took a fancy to me as I did to him,” she recalled. “In the middle of the morning he would go into the bar for a lemonade and often took me with him. I would sit on his knee with a little glass of ice cold lemonade.”5
One morning, during a visit with his family, John Jacob walked down the stairs and saw Fanny sitting with Beecher, having their lemonades. He stopped in his tracks, disapproving of his young daughter being in the company of unsavory characters. He spoke with his wife. “My dear, a summer hotel is not a good place to bring up children,” he told her. “I think if we’re going to have to come up here year after year for George’s hay fever, that we will have to have a home of our own.”6
Touring the area in a horse-drawn buggy, the Glessners found a prominent hill that had been cleared of timber, leaving a rough rocky pasture strewn with boulders. The view was spectacular, with Mount Washington to the east and the towns of Bethlehem, Littleton, and Scythefactoryville spread out below. The Glessners purchased one hundred acres of farmland from Oren Streeter for $23,000, which included a farmhouse and a few assorted ramshackle buildings on the property. They called their new summer home The Rocks. The summer home would become one of the most important places in their lives for many decades to come.
Isaac Scott designed a nineteen-room mansion built on a high prominence overlooking the White Mountains. It was completed by the summer of 1883 at a cost of $10–15,000. The Glessners called their summer residence the Big House.
The Glessner’s Big House was “the finest summer residence in the mountains,” according to the Littleton Gazette. The home had “one of the finest and most extensive views of any house in the mountains.”7
Scott designed a carriage barn with a granite foundation and wood shingle siding, which was completed the following year. He designed many buildings and structures for The Rocks, including an apiary for Frances Macbeth’s beekeeping and several gazebo-like summerhouses that dotted the estate, connected by walking trails.8 For young Fanny, Scott designed something truly special: her own two-room log cabin playhouse, complete with a kitchen with a working wood-burning stove.
In the neighboring villages of Littleton and Bethlehem, there were distinct class differences between townsfolk who had lived in the area for generations and the wealthier newcomers like the Glessners who purchased summer homes at the higher, more picturesque elevations. It was “up the hill”—the seasonal residents—and “down the hill”—people who lived there year-round. Locals couldn’t understand why somebody would prefer to build a grand house way up in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, far from the amenities of town. Sensing their curiosity, Frances Glessner invited local residents to visit The Rocks and meet the family. She made elaborate preparations for her guests, having a huge black fruitcake made by Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City and stocking her cellar with fine French wines.9
One day, a mountain wagon drawn by four horses brought about sixteen guests from the Twin Mountain House to call on the Glessners. Frances had the wine and fruitcake brought out and served.10 “Each lady looked at the cake and with turned up nose said, ‘No thank you’ until one lady braver than the others took both cake and wine and then said, ‘Better take some, Mrs. Devoe, it’s pretty good,’” Fanny recalled later in life.
The visitors peppered the Glessners with questions. Don’t you get lonely up here? Do you get anything to eat up here? “We were always so glad to see them go and so annoyed when they came,” Fanny said.
For a while, visiting The Rocks became something to do, to go see what the Glessners were up to. Wagonloads of locals and seasonal visitors came around at random intervals, much to the annoyance of the family. Matters came to a head one day when a wagonload of tourists pulled up to the kitchen window and ordered a pitcher of lemonade. The cook, in no subtle terms, refused. Fanny took great pleasure in telling the story to her parents, who had a pair of formal stone gateposts installed—the gate was never closed—and a sign that read THE PUBLIC IS REQUESTED NOT TO ENTER THESE GROUNDS.
There was “much discussion over whether it should be ‘the public is’ or ‘the public are,’” Fanny said.
Around this time, the Glessners began to think about building a home of their own in Chicago. They wanted a home designed and built for them, one that reflected their tastes and style and in their way contributed to the architectural renaissance of post-fire Chicago.
Having looked at several neighborhoods, the Glessners settled on acquiring a lot on the southwest corner of Prairie Avenue and Eighteenth Street, on the city’s near South Side.
Some of the finest homes in Chicago were on Prairie Avenue. The street was lined with magnificent mansions framed by manicured lawns and sculpted gardens, majestically sweeping staircases leading to porches or grand entrances.11
John Jacob Glessner wanted an architect of note for the home. He regarded Henry Hobson Richardson highly but had been informed by friends that Richardson only undertook monumental buildings—Boston’s Trinity Church, the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, and Albany’s city hall, among others.12 He decided to contact Richardson anyway.
Richardson, along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, was one of the leading architects of his time. After attending Harvard, he went to Paris in 1860 to attend the famed École des Beaux Arts—only the second American to attend the École’s architectural division.
The style that Richardson developed for his designs, like Isaac Scott’s with its allusions to medieval elements, was so distinctive that it is known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Characteristics common to Richardson’s buildings include thick walls, semicircular stone arches, and clusters of squat columns.13
Glessner told Richardson that he’d heard he only did large, institutional buildings and not private residences.
“I’ll plan anything a man wants, from a cathedral to a chicken coop,” Richardson said. “That’s the way I make my living.”14
Glessner and Richardson took a carriage to visit their Washington Street residence to give Richardson a sense of the Glessners’ present circumstances. They sat in the library to discuss Glessner’s needs and wants for his family’s home. On the mantel was a small photograph of a building at Abingdon Abbey in Oxfordshire, England.
“Do you like that?” Richardson asked, gesturing to the photo.
“Yes,” Glessner replied.
“Well, give it to me,” Richardson said. “I’ll make that the keynote of your house.”
Later, driving to view the lot, Richardson sat in silence in the carriage. After several minutes, he blurted out, “Have you the courage to build the house without windows on the street front?”
