Mill employee’s grim Nineteenth-century homicide was a cautionary story for ladies
It was a heat day in April 1850. Saco’s Woodbury Brook was doubtless a torrent of spring meltwater as Osgood Stevens, 14, tried to unclog a culvert the place the stream handed underneath Storer Avenue.
Standing within the icy water, Osgood discovered the perpetrator. A whitewashed, picket plank was blocking the stream. Then {the teenager} made a way more ugly discovery.
A lady’s lifeless physique was hooked up to the opposite aspect of the six-foot board.
Her arms had been sure with cotton rags, and she or he was tied to the plank at her neck and ankles. Dressed solely in blue stockings, a lightweight shift and nightcap, rats had gnawed away most of her face. It was clear to the gathering crowd that she’d been within the culvert for fairly a while.
Thus started the sensational public story of Mary Bean, a girl whose story would finally embody a botched abortion and the homicide trial of the physician who carried out the process. The story turned a nationwide sensation and cautionary morality warning in opposition to younger ladies leaving their rural properties and virtues behind whereas looking for alternatives — and their very own wages — in New England’s burgeoning manufacturing unit cities.
“It is a story about ladies within the workforce, and the value of progress and who ought to even be within the workforce,” mentioned College of New England professor Elizabeth De Wolfe, who wrote an award-winning guide titled “The Homicide of Mary Bean and Different Tales” in 2007. “And it’s about ladies leaving dwelling, out of the watchful eyes of males and it’s about policing ladies’s conduct.”
De Wolfe will talk about her guide, in individual on Feb. 17 and on-line Feb. 21, as a part of the College of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library exhibition “Trade, Wealth, and Labor: Mapping New England’s Textile Trade.”
The exhibition is impressed by the library’s latest acquisition of textile mill insurance coverage and historic maps from the defunct American Textile Historical past Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Mary Bean’s actual identify, obscured for privateness’s sake on the time, was Berengera Caswell. Born in Quebec, Caswell had come to work in New England’s mills just a few years earlier than her demise. She was considered one of hundreds of younger ladies escaping farm-life drudgery, longing for money wages of their very own.
This rural-to-city labor migration got here simply as the ladies’s suffrage motion was gathering steam. It additionally coincided with a number of new state legal guidelines granting ladies freestanding rights to property and resolution making untethered both to their husbands or fathers.
These modifications, coupled with wage-earning ladies forgoing early marriage, made many within the institution deeply uneasy. A cultural backlash was inevitable.
Caswell’s unhappy finish was thus a handy car for salacious newspaper tales and moral-panic pamphleteers whose underlying message to ladies leaving dwelling was all the time the identical.
“You’re going to wind up lifeless or a prostitute,” De Wolfe mentioned.
Whereas working in a Manchester, New Hampshire mill, Caswell met William Lengthy. The 2 turned lovers however Lengthy misplaced his place and moved again to his hometown of Biddeford. A while later, Caswell found she was pregnant and adopted Lengthy, taking over residence in a boarding home in late 1849.
Being pregnant amongst New England’s “mill women” as they had been referred to as, was a standard drawback. If found, the ladies had been inevitably fired. Lengthy requested his supervisor on the Saco Water Energy Firm on Manufacturing facility Island for recommendation. His boss mentioned he knew a Saco physician who may abort the being pregnant and even loaned Lengthy cash for the process.
Caswell then moved into Dr. James Harvey Smith’s home in Saco. Smith practiced natural drugs and held no medical diploma. He repeatedly dosed Caswell with a juniper concoction meant to carry a few miscarriage however the botanical methodology didn’t do the job.
On Dec. 15, Smith took a extra harmful and drastic method.
“Utilizing a wire instrument, eight inches in size, with a hook on the tip, Smith carried out an abortion,” De Wolfe wrote in her guide. “Together with his wire instrument, and with out anesthesia, Smith tried to puncture the amniotic sack and scrape free the being pregnant.”
Nonetheless, within the course of, Smith perforated Caswell’s uterus, leaving a four-inch gash, and mangled adjoining organs as effectively. An infection set in instantly and Caswell died per week later, doubtless in agony.
Smith then lashed Caswell to a board from a stall in his barn and set her adrift in Woodbury Brook. He thought the stream would take Caswell’s stays to the Saco River after which out to sea however she by no means cleared the close by culvert. Caswell’s physique had remained there for over three months by the point Stevens discovered her in April.
Authorities finally recognized the stays and arrested Smith. Abortion and contraception had been each authorized in Maine however he was charged with second-degree homicide in Caswell’s demise.
“Mary Bean; The manufacturing unit woman; Sufferer of seduction,” screamed a headline within the Maine Democrat newspaper as Caswell’s story started to make the rounds, getting an increasing number of dramatic with every retelling. Some printed accounts additionally included sexualized, buxom drawings supposedly depicting Caswell sporting prostitute-like robes.
Moralizing, reality-blurring and outright fictionalized “ripped-from-the-headlines” accounts had been additionally revealed as free-standing pamphlets and magazines. Caswell, Lengthy and Smith’s names had been all modified however the public knew who the story was about.
In every case, Caswell – and Lengthy – had been easy, nation folks lured into temptation and ethical ruination by unhealthy firm, which got here solely from the nation’s mill cities.
A full-length guide titled “A Thrilling and Thrilling Account of the Horrible Homicide of Mary Bean, the Manufacturing facility Woman,” was revealed in 1852.
Smith was represented at trial by Nathan Clifford, a former diplomat, U.S. legal professional common and future U.S. Supreme Court docket justice. Nonetheless, even with Clifford repeatedly impugning Caswell’s ethical character echoing the favored press, it took the jury simply two hours to search out Smith responsible. The physician was then sentenced to life in jail.
On attraction, Clifford succeeded in getting Smith’s conviction lowered to manslaughter. Smith served two years then died of tuberculosis three years after getting out of jail.
Greater than 170 years later, Caswell’s story nonetheless attracts consideration.
“We have now so many individuals signed up for the speak,” mentioned Libby Bischof, Government Director of the Osher Map Library. “Lots of people love true crime however there’s additionally loads of nostalgia for Maine industries. It’s the place folks made their livelihoods and it’s being misplaced — and altering once more.”
De Wolfe sees Caswell as a bridge between two American eras.
“She lived on this industrial second when ladies had been taking steps ahead and society was making an attempt to push them again,” she mentioned. “Recovering her story is vital for us to grasp the lengthy street to ladies’s rights and to ladies’s trade.”
This previous summer time, De Wolfe received an opportunity to go to Caswell’s grave in Quebec. Whereas there, she supplied a token of thanks, feeling that she owed Caswell one thing for the younger girl’s story and the alternatives it’s introduced.
“In one of many newspapers, there was a little bit, tiny story that I occurred on, fairly by chance,” De Wolfe mentioned. “In it, her sister Thais was recalling that Berengera had a bean-shaped purse wherein she saved shiny 5 cent items that she saved as a elaborate.”
Earlier than leaving Caswell’s ultimate resting place, De Wolfe left Caswell a shiny, new nickel.
