No. 707
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
July 3, 2025

Her Striped Stockings.

November 30, 2021
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Via Newspapers.comFor this year’s Fourth of July, I’m bringing you something a bit different: A patriotic mystery!  The “Bonner County Daily Bee,” August 26, 2014:KELLOGG - Old Glory is flying high atop a large ponderosa pine on Fourth of July Pass. How the flag got there, on national forest land, is a mystery.At night the American flag, which is on the north side of the highway around
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Strange Company - 7/2/2025
Wouldn’t you love to have interviewed Lizzie’s physician, Dr. Nomus S. Paige from Taunton, the jail doctor, ? He found her to be of sane mind and we can now confirm that he had Lizzie moved to the Wright’s quarters while she was so ill after her arraignment with bronchitis, tonsilitis and a heavy cold. We learn that she was not returned to her cell as he did not wish a relapse so close to her trial. Dr. Paige was a Dartmouth man, class of 1861. I have yet to produce a photo of him but stay tuned! His house is still standing at 74 Winthrop St, corner of Walnut in Taunton. He was married twice, with 2 children by his second wife Elizabeth Honora “Nora” Colby and they had 2 children,Katherine and Russell who both married and had families. Many of the Paiges are buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Taunton. Dr. Paige died in April of 1919- I bet he had plenty of stories to tell about his famous patient in 1893!! He was a popular Taunton doctor at Morton Hospital and had a distinguished career. Dr. Paige refuted the story that Lizzie was losing her mind being incarcerated at the jail, a story which was appearing in national newspapers just before the trial. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Taunton, courtesy of Find A Grave. 74 Winthrop St., corner of Walnut, home of Dr. Paige, courtesy of Google Maps Obituary for Dr. Paige, Boston Globe April 17, 1919
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 5/24/2025
How did New Yorkers get through sweltering summer days before the invention and widespread use of air conditioning? Well, a lot of it depended on your income bracket. If you were wealthy, you likely waited out the summer at a seaside resort like Newport or on a country estate cooled by mountains or river breezes. […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/30/2025
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 … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
A boatman working near the foot of Little Street in Brooklyn, on October 3, 1864, saw a package floating on the water. Thinking it might contain something of value, he took it into his boat. He unraveled the enameled oilcloth surrounding the package, and inside, covered in sheets of brown paper, was the trunk of a human body. The head, arms, pelvis, and legs had been cut off with a saw or sharp
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/28/2025
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 20 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge) oapy Smith's early empire growth in Denver.Operating the prize package soap sell racket in 1884. This is page 20, the continuation of page 19, and dated May 6 - May 29, 1884, as well as the continuation of pages 18-19, the beginning of Soapy Smith's criminal empire building in Denver, Colorado.&
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 6/1/2025
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
The “Prisoners’ March.” | Illicit Distilleries.

Her Striped Stockings.

Striped-Stockings

The other day a groceryman at Vallejo, Cal., gave a large party, at which the daughter of the carriage painter who lived next door created a decided sensation. It was not that she was more handsomely attired than the other ladies present, but that when she gyrated in the "dance of death" she was observed to display the only pair of pink silk stockings in the room. She left the house for a few minutes at the expiration of the dance, and in the next waltz exhibited a pair of light blue dittoes. An hour later her crushed and exasperated female friends beheld' these supplemented by further hose of a delicate chocolate shade. And so it went on, until her miserable rivals determined to follow her the next time she disappeared. They traced her to her father's paint-shop in the backyard, where she was discovered brush in hand and about ornamenting her nether extremities with a final artistic coat of light salmon. The exulting spies rushed back with the damaging news, but it was too late. The men were all too tight to understand, the music had gone home and the lights were being put out. Thus it is that fraud and duplicity triumph, honest simplicity walks around with a darn on its calf and a hole in its heel.

 

Illustrated Police News, November 3, 1877.