Diana's House

Readers may recall that Ben Northcote spotted the ideal house for Diana during his travels in No Mortal Reason. In Lethal Legend he has arranged to have it built in Bangor. Below is the drawing of the real house I based this on.

You might also be interested in reading the articles in the Spring 2008 newsletter. You can find it by clicking here:

Lawrence and Catherine had two children, Myron Gonzales Hornbeck (January 1861-1948) and Constantia Elizabeth Hornbeck (October 25, 1862-September 22, 1941). M. G. Hornbeck married Ella May Applebee, who also came from a farm/boardninghouse tradition. Pictured below is the Applebee House.

The Applebee House, Hurleyville, run by Isaac and Mary Applebee, parents of Ella Hornbeck; I believe it was on Rt.107 (the Monticello Road), reached by a right turn at the top of Columbia Hill. I have also been told it was called the Applebee Inn and later Fairlawn Farm and Fairlawn Acres.

M. G. and Ella Hornbeck had six children: Tressa Estelle, Ida Arlena, Catherine May, Myron H., Luella, and Howard Clark Hornbeck Catherine Hornbeck Coburg lived on the Hornbeck Farm until her death in March of 1958 and continued to take in tourists through the summer of 1957. The farm was then sold. It burned down several years later. The only thing left now is a cellar hole. The photograph below shows the house as it was in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

My mother, Theresa Marie Coburg Gorton , was the daughter of Tressa Hornbeck. Her mother died a few days after her birth in 1910 and Marie, as she was called, was raised by her grandparents and her Aunt Katie. In a series of interviews in 1987 she recalled life in a summer boarding house when she was a girl.

NOTE: ARTICLES FROM PAST FACE DOWN UPDATES follow this material.

There were over 200 hotels in Sullivan County in the 1920s—none would use a Liberty address because Liberty was associated with tuberculosis cures. There were hotels up Goldie's road (the road M.H. and Goldie Hornbeck lived on). On the other road to Monticello, new ones were built. Gurney's Hotel (later burned down) bought water from the Hornbeck pond. They had a little house, a big house, a casino, and dances. Casinos at hotels were separate buildings for dancing and entertainments by summer staff, bands, etc, NOT for gambling. No money gambling was allowed in New York State [NOTE FROM KATHY: I'm not sure that meant there wasn't any!!!].

We had guests Decoration Day weekend, then the last of June/1st of July. On July 4th we had sparklers and firecrackers. We were too involved in the boarding house to go to coaching days but my aunts and uncles did in the old days. All the farms took in boarders. It was all boarding houses along the road: Aunt Carrie's, Cohen's,and Hornbeck's. Many built new buildings or built on. The "addition" to the boarding house was built on in the back—6 bedrooms upstairs and downstairs was a big dining room and a kitchen as long as the dining room. Off the back was a hall. Off the front was the writing room. You went through the writing room to get to the dining room and there was a door out of the back of the dining room. To serve, food was slid through a hole in the wall to the waitresses. There was a shelf for plates. There were no individual tables, just long tables. My grandmother cooked, but sometimes they also hired summercooks. One older New York woman, an Irishwoman, left because it was "too damn lonely in the country." Another time Lena Bauers and her husband and son came and the couple cooked. There was a built-in flour bin over the countertop in the family kitchen and a griddle on top of the stove. There was one bathroom, upstairs—I'm not sure when that was put in. There were chamberpots. The boarders cleaned their own or left a tip. Family cleaned rooms and made beds for boarders. We had to bathe and dress for dinner at 4 PM. The bathroom was upstairs. The boys had the room next to bath and there was a crack in the door. The big long room downstairs was used by M.G. and Ella in the winter but given to boarders in the summer (the Getzens); M.G. slept on a featherbed on top of the grand piano in the dining room. M.H. and Howd had an apartment in the barn reached by outside stairs. The apartment over the garage was put in around World War II at about the same time the change was made from boarders to roomers [NOTE FROM KATHY: several small kitchens were put in where the large kitchen had been. That was the way I remember it from the 1950s]. The three big trees in front were evergreens. The old winter kitchen was flush with house and had a door to the side with a narrow porch and steps. We had a big ice house and a water tower (for summer only). We had a crank telephone on the wall. We had electricity.

The Farm took the overflow from the Columbia Farms Hotel. The Hornbecks also had an ice business and then whatever farm work and later on my Uncle Howd was a salesman for cars. He worked in Monticello. They were busy with the ice business. They had a truck. My grandfather had a wagon but I can't say that I remember that time. After that they had a truck. They had a model T touring car they used as a taxi later. My uncles (M.H. and Howd) had gamblers as passengers, some possibly with a Mafia connection. [NOTE FROM KATHY: This was the area where Murder, Inc. dumped bodies.]

To make more room for boarders, the family slept in the attic where there was a big bed on one side and mattresses on the other. Sometimes there were as many as 35-40 people in the house with two full beds in some rooms. Most rooms had two beds and some also had a cot so they could sleep the whole family in one room. Often the same people took the same room year after year. There were Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans among the guests. Young people came too and the family socialized with them after chores were done. There were dances in the winter dining room with bands. There was a flag raising ceremony every day. The radio station was KDKA and we had a victrola. Some of the names of guests were Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Woll, the Quirks (Irish family) and the Seligs (did their own cooking and ate in a corner; no bread and butter). Aunt Katie went to a Selig girl's engagement party. Also the Silvers—Irish wife, Jewish husband.

In the summer, the older children waited tables while the younger children washed dishes. There were big drying racks for dishes—no wiping. I had lots of play time. We had swings,swimming, boating, climbing the hill in back of the lake. We went barefoot a lot. Walter's entire family came up in the summer to work. My cousin Eleanor worked at Aunt Carrie's. Aunt Carrie (Lounsbury) was the first woman in the area to bob her hair and drive a car. Aunt Carrie also employed Mexicans but was always afraid they'd run off. We'd run out (to get away from chores). I don't ever remember acting up at the table. We ate what we had. Martha and I would try to run upstairs, any excuse to get away. That was when Eleanor was there. One year she took a job with Aunt Carrie to get away with us. We used to go up on the hen house roof and tease the bull and then he'd run. One time he got real mad and ran through the sheets in the orchard.

A typical mid-day meal was chicken on Sunday with homemade ice cream, biscuits, a choice of pies and cakes, veg & salad & soup, pickles, etc., served at a big long table, family style. Certain days=certain things so you could plan ahead. The evening meal was lighter: salmon, cold cukes, potato salad. We had a big breakfast: cereal, juice, eggs, bacon, toast, sometimes pancakes but no choices. Some special diets were accommodated.

There was nothing in Fallsburgh then. Shopping was done in Hurleyville—people came there from Fallsburgh, Woodbourne and Loch Sheldrake to shop at Van Keuren's butcher shop. There were also Jewish shops. Uncle M.H. worked for Lawrence—he drove all over in a truck with fruits and vegetables, delivering to the houses. Still many things came from home: milk, eggs, we made our own bread. There was a dress shop in Liberty that New Yorkers raved about. For movies we went to Monticello and shopped at Hammond and Cook.

Prohibition was ignored—had home made wine and white lightning. When there was a deadbeat, they called Sheriff Farquhar.

There was not a lot of prejudice in the area. There were some smart asses, but they had no particular target. Schoolmates were mostly Jewish. Cousin Walter was Catholic (lapsed). There was one colored man in town (Doc) who sometimes stayed at the farm as a helper. A KKK cross was burned on Columbia Hill. There were lots of cars. The Lounsburys were involved but the town wrongly thought the cross was on Hornbeck land and that almost lost us the ice business.

The family did talk about my mother. They all said she was pretty and that she was very vivacious and I remember my grandmother and Aunt Katie saying Tressa would say "I'm not going to have any life insurance on me. They can just throw me out when I die. I'm not going to worry about any insurance." Everybody had a little insurance then. She had a boyfriend before my father. My aunts all had boyfriends from New York.

I only saw my father every few weeks. He was a trainman and went from New York to Oswego and different places. I can remember he always brought me something, a present. He brought me bathrobes and dresses. I had dolls already. "Doc" brought me presents, too. My grandfather spoiled me. I couldn't do any wrong. No one ever discussed why Aunt Katie didn't marry her sister's husband until after my grandmother died.

I walked in my sleep as a girl. One night I got up and I started to walk down the stairs, the back stairs, and Aunt Katie heard me and she started after me. I guess she caught me downstairs but I didn't know until I woke up. And then I used to hang out of the window in my sleep. Not my whole body, just my elbows. Then one night I evidently got up and I was in the new section I think and Aunt Ida and Uncle Walter were sleeping in that section and I pounded on the door because I wanted to tell them something but when I woke up I couldn't remember what I wanted to tell them. Sometimes in the winter hanging out the window would be cold but it wouldn't bother me.

I was in an accident in an old Buick that was cut down and had just the seats on it. Painted red. Two seats in the front and a place to sit on a board in the back. Martha and I were in the seat. The brakes gave way. He said stay in and I thought he said jump out and Martha was hanging on for dear life. This was down across the hill and back. We didn't hit the garage. We went right through the gates that kept the animals in. Uncle MH took me out driving when I was 13 and he got a ticket for letting me drive. A State Trooper gave him a ticket. I used to take the car and go around and around the driveway. That was my grandfather's car, the one I got my license on. I drove it when I worked for the telephone company. That was one that had a shift.

Everyone was a Republican: Grandfather (M.G. Hornbeck) was superintendent of roads and a school trustee, so he hired the teachers.

The smell of cucumbers=milk snake.

TWO FRIENDS ADD THEIR COMMENTS:

Lil Cohen Benmosche was my mother's next door neighbor and lifelong best friend. When I talked to her in 1987 she had some memories of the Hornbeck farm to add:

Marie would sit down on a very small chair in the kitchen and Aunt Katie would have to braid her long hair before she went to school. Marie would say "tighter" and Katie would say, "I think it's tight enough." And Marie would say "no, tighter." And she would keep shouting "Tighter! Tighter!" until the whole braid was finished and her skin was literally popping out of her head. That's the the only way she would do it, every single day, and we had to wait. We knew we were going to be late but Marie needed her hair braided tight.

Most of the children liked to come to Marie's because she had all the toys and we always played in the orchard near the chicken coops. We had one girl, Mary, who was very unhappy because she always wanted to be the mother. To keep peace we allowed her to be the mother. We used to go after the pigs and winter time we'd take barrel staves and go down the hill right onto the ice. We used to have ice skating and watch the men cut the ice and put the ice into the icehouse.

In the summer we had a boarding house and we had to work no matter how young we were. Our house was the Columbia Star House. Katie was like a second mother to us. She knew I loved rhubarb so she'd call "come up and get your rhubarb, I just made a rhubarb pie for you." I'd come running about a quarter of a mile, I guess. My brother Sam lived with them for a year and he used to do everything for them. He loved chocolate cake and she'd make any food he wanted. He was an adult by then (in high school) and he'd come and help with the ice. It was a beautiful love affair with the Hornbecks. Today you don't get that warmth from people.

Anna Mauer Todd, another old friend of my mothers, grew up on a farm/boardinghouse as well. In 1987 she remembered that they had boiled cheese to eat. "They'd take great big metal spoons and scrape it out." They also had homemade bread and asparagus.

In the summertime we'd pick wild flowers. We always had flowers on the table for the boarders.

There was wallpaper in the outhouse.

Men came with a team of horses to clean out the outhouse through a separate door and take out the contents. There was always a catalog hanging there to use the pages for toilet paper.

In the summer kitchen apples were strung and hung from the ceiling to dry.

Everybody had wine in their house during Prohibition.

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ARTICLES FROM
"FACE DOWN UPDATE
AND DEADLY TIDBITS"

"Real Nineteenth-century female journalists"

The most famous of the lot was Nellie Bly, who worked as a "stunt girl" for the New York World. She got her job by pretending to be mad and having herself committed so she could write about the appalling treatment of the insane. I used a number of her observations to create the situation Ben Northcote encounters during his visit to Bellevue in Deadlier than the Pen. Unfortunately, although Ten Days in a Madhouse was popular reading in 1887-8, and promises to improve conditions were made, few permanent changes came about because of this early example of investigative journalism.

In 1890, Nellie Bly again captured the public's interest by making a trip around the world with the avowed intent of beating Jules Verne's fictional "record" of eighty days. Nellie succeeded in her attempt to great fanfare. What is less well known is that another female journalist, Elizabeth Bisland of Cosmopolitan Magazine, set out at the same time, heading in the opposite direction, to race Nellie around the world. She, too, beat the eighty day goal.

Elizabeth Bisland was much more the model for my Diana Spaulding than Nellie Bly. She avoided "stunts" for most of her career. And she wrote reviews. Below is a sketch of her from 1890.

"The Blizzard of 1888"

Halfway through Deadlier than the Pen, my characters are stranded on a train by the Blizzard of 1888. This was a real event, and the books written about it provided me with a gold mine of information about life in that particular year.

The storm was horrendous, hitting New York and Connecticut without warning.It raged for 36 hours, starting on March 12th and ending on the 14th. It took days after that to dig out. It was called "the great white hurricane" and paralyzed the east coast from Chesapeake Bay to Boston.

Telegraph service, the major way people communicated over long distances in those days, was out for two days. Twenty to thirty foot high drifts immobilized trains. Some were buried for a week before they could get moving again. What made things worse was that March 10th was a bright, springlike day with temperatures in the 50s. It had been a mild winter up until that point.Trees were budding and the crocus were up in Manhattan.The weather predictions were all for fair weather.

On the night of the 11th, torrential rains began and rapidly turned to sleet, then hail. By the morning of the 12th, it was snowing and gusty. Women fared worse than men in the wind, which was strong enough to turn their skirts into sails. It also plastered the veils meant to keep their hats in place to their faces, obscuring vision and in many cases turning their skin mottled colors as dyes ran.

The Spuyten Duyvil railroat cut near the top of Manhattan Island was blocked early in the day on the 12th. The Croton local with seven commuter coaches, the Peekskill local, with eight, and six sleeper trains from the west ended up stuck there. Local people provided coffee and sandwiches to over a hundred passengers. The tracks were finally cleared after three days by using a snowplow pulled by 28 horses. Hundreds of men shoveled snow in front of it in order to get traffic moving again.

In my home town of Liberty, New York, the roof blew off the railroad station. In Bangor, Maine? Just another typical winter day.

For those interested in reading more about it, there are two books devoted to the blizzard of '88, Mary Cable's The Blizzard of '88 (New York: Atheneum, 1988) and Judd Caplovich's Blizzard! The Great Storm of '88 (Vernon CT: Velro Publishing Company, 1987).

"Fallen Women"

early cover sketch showing some of Elmira's girls

I used several real Denver madams in my story. One was Jennie Rogers, who was 44 in 1888. Raven haired, nearly 6' tall, and willowy, she reportedly also had "a nice bosom." She owned a two-story buff-colored brick parlor house at what is now 2009 Market Street (in 1888 the address was 527 Holladay Street), for which she paid $4600, and built another nearby of three stories. In this second house there were three parlors on first floor (one called the Turkish Room), a ballroom, dining room, kitchen, and fifteen bedrooms. There was a furnace in the basement (a real innovation), along with a wine cellar, storage closets, and servants’ quarters. Sometimes cattlemen took over the whole lower floor on a particular night to entertain friends. Jennie drove a high two-wheeled trap pulled by matching bays when she went out. In March 1882, she was arrested for "unladylike conduct in the street"—reckless horseback riding! In 1886 she was arrested again and this time fined $75 for keeping a lewd house. She once paid a reporter $50 to keep her name OUT of the Police Gazette. By early 1888, Jennie owned three adjacent parlor houses on Holladay Street.

Jennie’s biggest competitor was blond, blue-eyed Mattie Silks, shown here.

Plump and petite, she customarily wore a diamond encrusted cross at her throat and kept roll of bills in her stocking. All her dresses had two pockets. In the left she kept gold coins. The right held a pistol with an ivory grip. Called “a vest pocket edition of Lily Langtry” and "Queen of the Red Light," she was about 39 in 1888. By 1880, her business was located at 500-502 Holladay (later 1916-22 Market)—two houses connected at the rear. One was frame and the other red brick. She added a third house toward the other end of the same block as Jennie's new house. In 1888 she also bought a home, at 2635 Lawrence Street, in a fashionable residential district.

There was no Elmira Hotel on Holladay Street, but there could have been. Holladay Street (the name was changed to Market Street in 1889) was the center of red light district. Holladay ran parallel to Larimer (the main street) and a block away. In most towns this was called "The Row" or "The Line" and was where parlor houses, cribs, variety halls, saloons, gambling houses, and opium dens congregated. In Denver a few parlor houses and cribs were scattered at other addresses but all were easily accessible to Larimer Street. In 1880, in three blocks on Holladay Street, an estimated 3000 prostitutes conducted business. A survey of just eleven brothels in that year gave the ages of seventy-seven women. Fifty-one were between 15 and 24 and five were over 35. Another survey of 360 prostitutes, made sometime in the 1880s, reported that 204 were white, forty-four were black, two were Mexican, three were Oriental, and 107 could not be assigned an ethnic identity. Imported French prostitutes, some of whom spoke no English, were also very popular.

There was a good deal of variety in the way high class parlor houses were managed but in one model a madam would pay $75-200/month for the building (NOTE: The same dwelling used for legitimate business would rent for $25/month.) She’d sublet the rooms. The “girls” regularly put 60% of their income into housing. The standard practice was to take one customer a night at $5/night. A room in the house of a successful madam might cost $20/month but the girls also handed over 50% of the take. Most of the time the madams managed the money, including loans to purchase ball gowns.

The brass check was an alternative medium of exchange. A customer could purchase a token to give to a girl for one silver dollar. Or he could buy six for $5. The girls turned in their tokens in the morning in order to get paid. These brass checks had designs on one side and lettering on the other. Some were a bit crude, others said something along the lines of “compliments of Miss Olga, 2148 Market St., Denver."

"Denver, Colorado in 1888"

The Windsor Hotel, where the murder takes place

From Denver it was a half day's ride to the mountains. The population in 1887 was 96,000 and estimates of the population for 1888 are upwards of 100,000. In that year there were over sixty churches, seven hospitals, and fourteen banks. There were shortages of jobs and housing, a situation not helped by segregation of races and nationalities. The population included about. 6000 blacks and about 1000 Chinese.

The first telephone was installed in Denver in 1879 but there were few telephone lines until after 1890. The first electric street lights appeared in 1880 and both gas and electric were in use thereafter. The streets were unpaved but eighteen city-owned sprinkling tankers operated on a daily basis. There were wooden plank sidewalks in thebusiness district and diamond-shaped marble sidewalks in upper class neighborhoods. Streetcars were operating from 1871 on and for five cents one could ride to anyplace in the city. In 1886 the Denver Tramway Company installed electric lines but in 1888 went back to using horses while a few bugs were worked out of the system. People and horses both kept getting shocks when they crossed the lines. The streetcars made 883 trips a day over twenty-four miles of track and used 350 horses. Water from artesian wells flowed from faucets “with sparkling brilliancy" and a steam-heating company provided five miles of mains and three miles of service pipes.

There was no state capitol building yet, but work was ongoing in 1888. Ground had been broken in July 1886. From Capitol Hill one could see hotels, offices, private schools, exclusive clubs, church steeples and the flat roofs of business blocks, as well as the “sea-like plains in the distance.” There was a city jail, and a police force, created in 1864. The location of the Police Station moved around a lot in the early years and was rarely used since the officers were all on patrol. Assisting a dozen or so policemen in law enforcement were five to ten U. S. Marshals stationed in Denver after 1876.

On the seamier side, in 1890, Denver had 500 saloons. Ladies were banned from these until 1894, a law that was largely ignored. There was also a midnight curfew, but after the bell rang the saloons stayed open. They were supposed to be closed on Sundays, too. They weren't. Gambling in saloons was also forbidden and punishable by a $10 fine.

Blake Street was the center of gambling in Denver. In 1885, 200 persons were employed in Denver gambling houses. Faro was the most popular game because gamblers believed it couldn't be fixed. A single gambling house might have a Hieronymous bowl, six faro banks, four roulette wheels, four tables for hazard and craps, two for stud poker and two for draw poker, one for short faro and one for twenty-one.

Denver’s Chinatown, nicknamed Hop Alley, was settled in 1870 when Chinese workers were laid off by the railroad. It was located at the "back" of Holladay Street, where the “ladies of the evening” plied their trade. Hop Alley had a church, a restaurant, laundries, and herb shops, but it also had opium dens. Gun Wa, the “great Chinese physician” who sold cures for almost anything, was actually an Irishman named Hale. The bottles he used for his miracle drug are shown below.

"Bangor Maine 1887-8: From the annual report of the City of Bangor, March 1887-March 1888"

I recently got a look at the annual report for 1887-8 for the city of Bangor, Maine. From March 1887 to March 1888, the city had more arrests than usual, mostly due to strangers working on the railway. Half of all arrests were of non-residents. There were 1,443 arrests in all, 895 of them for drunkenness. Two people were committed to the Insane Hospital in Augusta, Maine. No murders are listed. Although the terms police department and policeman are used at this time law enforcement was in the hands of the city marshall. In one place a 13 man police department is mentioned but 17 policemen are listed in one place and 9 constables in another. 4 names appear on both lists. No one is listed as city coroner but there is a city physician. Coroner was actually a county officer, elected every two years, and was called in to investigate unnatural or violent deaths. According to A Bicentennial Look at Bygone Bangor (1975), the rule of thumb for coroners for bodies found floating in the Kenduskeag Stream or Penobscot River was that if they had money in their pockets they were suicides and if there was no money, they'd probably been murdered.

FUN FACTS ABOUT LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY MAINE:

The telephone was available in Bangor by 1880. In Bangor there were 270 subscribers by 1885.

The first typewriter was used in a Bangor newsroom (at the Bangor Daily News) in 1894.

Moxie, the official Maine state soft drink, was first produced in 1885.

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© 2008 Kathy Lynn Emerson. All rights reserved.
Last updated 2/10/2008