In 1898, the Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan founded the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company to extract gold from seawater. When the gold ran out, so did Rev. Jernegan, taking the company’s capital.
Via Newspapers.comThis week, we visit a haunted house that has a bit of Mystery Blood thrown in. The "Glen Elder Sentinel," August 20, 1903:A remarkable ghost sensation is disturbing the serenity of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, where a local photographer has just vacated his residence on the ground that he and members of his family have been terrified by supernatural visitations. The photographer
When Patrick H. Doherty joined the Fall River Police Department in 1885, he might have been astounded to learn that he would be involved one day in two notorious murder cases- both involving hatchets and axes. Patrick Doherty was born in Peoria, Illinois on August 10, 1859 to John and Mary Walsh Doherty. Later the family moved east to Fall River, and we find Patrick Doherty living at 104 Columbia St. (off South Main) and working as a laborer for a time employed by Fall River Iron Works and the Fall River Line steamboat company. He married Honora (Nora) E. Coughlin on April 25, 1887 at the age of 28, when he was employed at the Fall River Police Department as a patrolman. The couple would have seven children: Charles T., Frank., Grace, Robert, Helene, Margaret (called Marguerite), and John. Doherty, (as were several other patrolmen), was promoted to the rank of captain after their work in the case of the century, the Borden Murders of 1892. Doherty had arrived at #92 after George Allen on the morning of the murders, and was very quickly in the thick of the action, questioning Lizzie upstairs, looking at the bodies with Dr. Dolan, running down to Smith’s pharmacy with Officer Harrington to question Eli Bence, prowling the cellar for weapons with Medley, Fleet and Dr. Bowen, and making note of Lizzie’s dress. Doherty stayed on the job on watch at the Borden house until he was relieved at 9 p.m. When it came time for the inquest, it was Doherty who slipped down to 95 Division St. to collect Bridget, who had been staying with her cousin, Patrick Harrington after the murders. He would testify at the Preliminary and the 1893 trial in New Bedford. In the midst of the excitement in New Bedford as Lizzie’s trial was about to get underway, yet another hatchet killing took over the front page, the murder of Bertha Manchester on May 30th. It was a brutal attack to rival the Borden’s with the weapon being most likely a short-handled axe or possibly a hatchet. Doherty went out to the Manchester place with Marshal Hilliard, Captains Desmond, and Connors and Inspector Perron on June 6th with the suspect, Jose Correa de Mello, who revealed his hiding place for the stolen watch taken from the victim and her purse at that time. De Mello served time and then was sent back to the Azores, banned from stepping upon U.S. soil again. The Dohertys moved to 1007 Rock St. in 1897 and Patrick was pleased to walk his daughter Margaret (Marguerite) down the aisle in 1913. Patrick Doherty retired from the force in 1915 and succumbed to interstitial nephritis on June 28, 1915.. He, and some of his children are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Fall River. Resources: Ancestry.com, Parallel Lives,: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and her Fall River, Find-a-Grave.com. and Yesterday in Old Fall River: A Lizzie Borden Companion Fall River Globe June 28, 1915
17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway. [“Subway Steps”] Gussow would […]
An article I recently wrote for the British online magazine, New Politic, is now available online. The article, “The Criminal Origins of the United States of America,†is about British convict transportation to America, which took place between the years 1718 and 1775, and is the subject of my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: […]
Via Newspapers.comThis week, we visit a haunted house that has a bit of Mystery Blood thrown in. The "Glen Elder Sentinel," August 20, 1903:A remarkable ghost sensation is disturbing the serenity of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, where a local photographer has just vacated his residence on the ground that he and members of his family have been terrified by supernatural visitations. The photographer
17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
Roped-inOmaha Daily BeeJune 25, 1884(Click image to enlarge)
OSSIBLE VICTIM OF THE JEFFERSON R. SMITH GANG. Omaha Daily Bee
June 25, 1884
COLORADO.
Col. Fletcher, a tourist from Boston, was roped-in by the bunko men of Denver and relieved of $1,000.
NOTES:
$1,000.00 in 1884 is the equivalent of $33,472.95 in 2023. According to the Rocky Mountain News there were at least two,
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
In a shack on a pier in Providence, Rhode Island, one chilly February afternoon in 1897, the Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan gave a scientific demonstration to Anthony F. Pierson and Arthur B. Ryan, two prominent Connecticut businessmen. At Jernegan’s request, the men had brought with them a zinc lined box built to Jernegan’s specification and several jars of mercury. Reverend Jernegan insisted that the men bring their own equipment so there would be no question as to the authenticity of the experiment. This was hardly necessary as Ryan knew the Baptist minister well and could vouch for his honesty.
The Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan.
The experiment would demonstrate the discovery by Reverend Jernegan of a method of extracting gold from seawater. It was well known that seawater contained a measurable amount of gold but there was no profitable way to extract it. Jernegan would remedy that. He poured the mercury into a pan in the bottom of the box, sprinkled some of his secret formula over it, attached electrodes from the pan to a battery, covered the box with a lid, perforated to let the water in and out, then he lowered the box through a trapdoor into the ocean below. The men then settled in to wait for morning, no doubt spending the night discussing the fortunes to be made if the experiment proved true.
At dawn Jernegan opened the trapdoor and pulled up the box. When he opened the box the men could see that some of the mercury was gone. The Connecticut men took away what was left and had it analyzed by a chemist. Sure enough, the chemist found traces of copper and silver along with $4.50 worth of gold. The experiment was a success, Jenegan had succeeded in extracting gold from seawater.
The demonstration was repeated at several other locations in Rhode Island and Connecticut generating considerable interest among potential investors. On November 5, 1897 five of them met with Reverend Jernegan and his partner Charles Fisher in Portland, Maine to form the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. They issued ten million shares of stock at a par value of $1.00 per share and began selling them to raise capital for the new company.
The company purchased a grist mill in North Lubec, Maine, and there built a plant over the ocean where they sunk 243 “gold accumulators.” They named it the Klondike Plant and by July 1898 it was pulling in gold at the rate of $308 dollars a day. Work had already begun on Klondike Plant No. 2.
Charles Fisher.
Unbeknownst to any of the investors, the gold that manifested in the accumulators was actually placed there at night by Charles Fisher who opened them up underwater while wearing a diving suit with a tank of compressed air. He would remove some of the mercury and replace it with mercury he had laced with gold. All of the experiments were done this way and he even salted the accumulators at the Klondike Plant. He and Jernegan had used the early investments to buy old jewelry which they melted down and added to the mercury.
Charles Fisher and Prescott Jernegan, both sons of whaling captains, had grown up together in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard before Jernegan got the calling. Years later they reunited and came up with a scheme that they believed, correctly, would be worth a fortune. They practiced together until they could pull off the experiments without a hitch and they were even able to convincingly run the Klondike Plant for a time.
Then one day in July 1898 the plant stopped paying. No gold came up in the accumulators. The investors learned that a large sum of money had been withdrawn from the accounts of the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, and Jernegan and Fisher were nowhere to be found. Fisher had fled to New South Wales. Jernegan, under the alias Louis Sinclair, had taken his wife and family, along with about $100,000 to Europe. He sent a letter to Ryan saying Fisher had run off with the secret formula and he had gone to track him down.
A while later Jernegan had a change of heart. Maybe it was his religious training coming back or maybe he just enjoyed perpetrating the fraud more than the spoils, but he sent a check for $75,000 from Brussels, Belgium to his investors in the United States. That, together with the sale of the property allowed investors to recover thirty-six cents for every dollar invested. Jernigan tried the scheme again in England, but the Brits proved harder to fool and he lost $30,000.
Prescott Jernegan surfaced again around 1901 in the Philippine Islands. He had gone straight, becoming a schoolteacher there and publishing several books on Philippine history and culture.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841