Lizzie Borden Society Forum

In Old-Time Fairhaven, by Charles Harris, 1947, I came across a notice that in 1879 Mr. Jotham Goodnow was the telegrapher at the telegraph office of the Fairhaven Branch Railroad depot. Mary Butler was the telegrapher the following year.

This reminded me I have some copies of the Fairhaven STAR from 1879, the weekly newspaper's first year of publication.

Sure enough, in the first copy I picked up, I find the notice “The telegraph office at the depot is open from 7 to 12 a.m. and from 1 to 7 p.m.”

So here is more evidence that Fairhaven did have a telegraph office, located about four blocks west and three blocks south of the Brownell’s house.

On the map below, the red rectangle in the lower right is the train depot. The green rectangle in the upper left is the Delano/Brownell property. I connected the two with a yellow line. (The blue block in the middle is the location of my office, the Fairhaven Visitors Center.)

Bravo Chris! That's a great find. It makes a lot of sense that Fairhaven would have its own telegraph office.

Telegraph lines were in wide use during the War Between the States and that was 30 years or so previous to the Borden murders.

Good Sherlocking!!

That's terrific, Chris! A nice little addition to our 'fact files'.

I forgot a few other notes about the map.

First, the dashed line on Main Street indicates the trolley line. In 1892, this was still a horse car line.

Also notice on either side of Spring Street where it meets Main Street there are livery stables.

The rectangle with the X in it on the 19 Green Street property indicates an out-building of some type--a barn, a shed, something like that.

The map is oriented with North to the left. (Main Street runs north-south.)

The wharves are on the Acushnet River, which is the New Bedford Harbor. New Bedford is to the west, across the river. It's simply a coincidence, but Union Street in Fairhaven more or less lines up with Union Street in downtown New Bedford.

Good work Fairhaven guy. I guess it's as you said, even Rebello is not without errors. So the telegraph went straight through to Fairhaven. Now the only factor that I still wonder about is how long it took them to actually deliver the messege to Emma. How many messengers were employed, what was their mode of transportation, how things actually functioned within the office would be my next line of questioning that deals directly with how the telegraphing worked.