Harry Widdowsby Harry Widdows
First published in February/March, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The Borden girls make a donation.
Despite their father’s hard-nosed reputation regarding money the Borden daughters were far less hesitant to contribute to society.
In 1895, a lot was purchased by the YMCA at the corner of Pine Street and North Main in Fall River for the purpose of erecting a new building. In 1898 the new YMCA building was opened and as the Association grew it was deemed necessary that the building needed further expansion.
The following item appeared in the history of the Fall River YMCA for the year 1900:
In April, affluent businessmen and families of Fall River were solicited for donations to the building expansion project. Mrs. R. S. Remington, family of the originator, contributed $10,000.00. The Misses Emma and Lizzie Borden contributed $2,000.00 each. A campaign appealing to the general public for the expansion project had raised $50,000.00 by November.
These donations were quite sizable and Lizzie and Emma’s combined $4,000 would be equal to about $85,000 in 2002 dollars.
Emma did not forget the YMCA and in her last Will and Testament left them $10,000.
Lizzie’s Will left them nothing.
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Lizzie gets a visitor.
Information on Lizzie Borden sometimes turns up in the strangest places. This portion of an article appeared in UFO Roundup, a weekly web site devoted to news articles on UFO’s! Written by the editor, Mr. Joseph Trainor, it appeared in the October 15, 2003, vol. 8, no. 39 edition:
During his visit, [writer H. P. Lovecraft] toured the old Bristol County Jail where the infamous Lizzie Borden was held prisoner during 1892 and 1893. Forty-nine years after HPL’s visit, in July 1970, the county decided to tear down the old jail, and your editor, who was a student-intern at the Taunton Daily Gazette at the time, was assigned to write a feature story about Lizzie’s old cell. I don’t mind admitting that Lizzie’s one-time residence gave me some really bad vibes. Yet, it was over 30 years later, before I finally learned that Lizzie had been visited in that cell by none other than occultist Algernon Blackwood, who in 1892 was a British journalist touring the USA. Algernon and Lizzie spent over six hours sequestered in that cell, discussing who-knows-what.
Unfortunately, Mr. Trainor’s article on the cell was not printed.
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was a writer of the supernatural in both book and short story form and was quite successful. He is mentioned in Leonard Rebello’s Lizzie Borden: Past and Preset, page 203:
Algernon Blackwood, “Episodes Before Thirty”, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1924, page 116: “Mr. Blackwood, a reporter for the New York Evening Sun, mentioned the Borden case in his autobiography ‘. . . and Lizzie Borden . . . though this was in Providence, Rhode Island – who took all her clothes off, lest the stains of blood betray her, before killing her father and mother in their sleep.’”
From these few lines it would appear Mr. Blackwood was not very well informed on the Borden tragedy.
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Prisoner #3517
On June 3, 1893 Lizzie Borden was transferred from the Taunton jail to the New Bedford jail for the duration of her trial. The Bristol County House of Correction, the official title of the New Bedford facility, had Josiah A. Hunt as its Keeper. Hunt was the City Marshal of Fall River prior to Rufus B. Hilliard assuming that office. Sheriff Wright, the official in charge of the Taunton facility, appointed him Keeper in 1886.
It was with the Hunt family that Bridget Sullivan, as a protected witness, worked as a domestic until the end of the trial. Apparently her duties were not too difficult and in Agnes de Mille’s A Dance of Death, page 77, de Mille writes: “Bridget, as chief witness for the prosecution, had been kept part-time in the jail and occupied herself by helping the warden’s wife in the kitchen. She used to make fudge for the warden’s children.”
Lizzie was booked into the New Bedford facility as prisoner #3517.
