Asakiyume mita

I've been meaning to share this piece of B-town history with you for almost a year. The article from which I'm drawing the facts is Cliff McCarthy and Paul Weigold, "Mysteries of Local History: The murder of Julia Town Warren," The Sentinel, January 3, 2013, page 8.

Julia and Emily were sisters sat next to each other in birth order in the Town family, a family destined for the poorhouse. By 1855, everyone in town knew it, including the girls themselves. They and two younger sisters had been "hired out" by the town--an arrangement somewhere between foster care and slavery: the families who received the children (in 1855 Julia was about fourteen and Emily was nine; their youngest sister, Delia, was only four) cared for them and fed them in return for their labor.

Julia, described as "under medium size, with full bust, rosy cheeks, dark brown hair, blue eyes, and withal quite pretty," managed at age fifteen to inveigle seventeen-year-old John Warren, a boy who ran away from home and who had "not sustained a very good character since," into marriage by claiming to be pregnant--but when no baby was forthcoming the relationship grew rocky . . . and ended in Julia's murder at John's hands.

What about Emily? She must have been an impetuous, hot-tempered girl because at age thirteen she'd been sent to the Industrial School for Girls, in Lancaster, Massachusetts--a reform school--for the crime of setting fire to a wealthy farmer's barn, causing the loss of "thirteen head of cattle and several swine . . . His loss was estimated at $2500."

This--setting fire to the property of the wealthy--seems maybe to have been a thing? And maybe a specifically female thing? It came up in the turn-of-the-century potboiler King Spruce that I read a few years ago. In the story, an illegitimate, hard-done-by girl sets fire to a bunch of timber land (more here).

The Industrial School for Girls "emphasized the teaching of useful skills and proper behavior to help the girls rise above their circumstances" . . . and it appears in Emily's case to have been successful: she married Solomon Haskell of Coventry, Rhode Island, in 1864 and raised two boys to adulthood. She died young(ish), though--at forty-six--and ironically, is buried in the same graveyard as her sister's murderer.

I recommend reading the original article--there's fodder for a full quiver of ballads in there.

PS. Emily's middle name was Sophronia. Now there's a name you don't hear much anymore.