Bridget In the News
Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2015 12:41 pm
From the Montana Butte Standard, July 15, 1939, pg. 5
Mrs. {Lll} Dennehy and son, John, of Fall River, Mass., who have been house guests of their uncle Eugene Sullivan, 709 North Main street, left today.. They plan to visit Alaska, San Francisco fair and return home via a southern route. Accompanying them from Butte was Miss Josephine Mclntyre, daughter of Thomas Mclntyre of 207 Princeton avenue. She will spend a year In the East attending school. While here the Dennehys {·IsHed} (visited?) an uncle and aunt. Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Sullivan, 1900 Yale avenue, and an aunt, Mrs. Bridget Sulivan, 701 Alder street, Anaconda.
Note: The newspaper text was garbled, so I transcribed as best I could. From what I can determine, the people named in the above article are Bridget's relatives via marriage. I believe the Jerry Sullivan mentioned in the article was a brother to Bridget's husband, John. The Eugene Sullivan mentioned married a Johanna Sullivan who may have been John's sister. Apparently, John's family also had ties to Fall River.
This is an article that appeared in the Montana Standard, Aug. 31, 1975, pg. 15. It repeats the Mollie O'Meara library story, but no reference to a Millie Green. And while it doesn't offer any new information, it's an interesting take on how Bridget could have lived so long in anonymity:
Incredible as it seems, Lizzie Borden's celebrated maid, Bridget Sullivan, lived more than 50 years in Butte and Anaconda without once being Interviewed by local, state or national press. Her last address here, just before she died on March 25,1948, (Holy Thursday), was 112 E. Woolman. It's not altogether wholesome to dredge up old tragedies, even from so far removed as 1893 and Fall River, Mass., but television this year Indicted Lizzie Borden once more with a far-out theory on how she killed her father and step-mother without getting blood on her clothes. She stripped naked to wield the grisly little hatchet, proclaimed the network drama that showed again last week, then took a bucket bath to wash the blood away. Lizzie was acquitted, of course, after a fair if not punctilious trial, but broad speculation hasn't been stilled to this day. She never married and so had no heirs. But Bridget Sullivan, the 26-year-old maid from Ireland who figured closely In the Fall River tragedy Aug. 4,1892, came to Butte after a brief return to Ireland, then married an Anaconda smelter man named Sullivan and never revealed to anyone but a close friend (and perhaps her husband) her part In the Borden murder case., Bridget, too, became a suspect, as recently as 1961 when an investigative reporter named Edward Radin researched another Lizzie Borden book. The late Mollle O'Meara, head public librarian here when Bridget Sullivan was in her 70s, had a passing acquaintance with Mrs. Sullivan. Before she died, Miss O'Meara told friends and the reporter Radin how Bridget came to the library one day and asked for books on real-life murder mysteries. Odd as It sounds, Mrs. Sullivan probably had surviving nephews and nieces who weren't fully apprised'of her part In the Borden case. Her obituary in The Montana Standard on Good Friday 1948 was painfully brief, no date or place of birth, no mention of widowed status, no precise time of arrival from the East. •
Bridget did what Lizzie Borden might sensibly have done. Bridget cut herself off from the past and found some peace. It wasn't difficult in Butte before the turn of the century. Among several hundred Sullivans in the Butte directory at the turn of the century, four or five were named Bridget and several were "domestics." One Bridget Sullivan In Centerville was a confectioner, a candy maker. Without launching a full-scale search to bare additional names and dates, we can say with certainty that Bridget was in Butte no more than three years after the trial In 1893. She lived in Anaconda for 45 years and again in Butte for six years before her death. She was a key personage in the case from A to Z, yet she pulled off the nearly miraculous feat of finding anonymity without changing her name. Archie Clark over In Highland View Manor, who worked the old Butte Miner desk in the 1920s, might say he's not surprised Bridget Sullivan could do it. Contrary to myth, provincial newspapermen of the old school weren't always the bulldogs Hollywood made them. They deferred to sensitivities a great deal, and they didn't always listen well. I can't believe Lizzie Borden did it, and I can't believe Bridget Sullivan did it. Like the rest of the world that's delved Into the reports and recorded testimony in the Borden case, 1 have no real idea who might have done It. If Lizzie did it, 19 times with the hatchet on her step-mother and 10 times In bone-crushing fury at her father's head, she was demonstrably psychotic and not at all the cool' murderess later portrayed (as in the network show). If Bridget did it, she was rewarded with a fantastic set of coverup circumstances and a quiet life in Anaconda to boot. New light may yet be shed on the 83-year- old mystery.
Mrs. {Lll} Dennehy and son, John, of Fall River, Mass., who have been house guests of their uncle Eugene Sullivan, 709 North Main street, left today.. They plan to visit Alaska, San Francisco fair and return home via a southern route. Accompanying them from Butte was Miss Josephine Mclntyre, daughter of Thomas Mclntyre of 207 Princeton avenue. She will spend a year In the East attending school. While here the Dennehys {·IsHed} (visited?) an uncle and aunt. Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Sullivan, 1900 Yale avenue, and an aunt, Mrs. Bridget Sulivan, 701 Alder street, Anaconda.
Note: The newspaper text was garbled, so I transcribed as best I could. From what I can determine, the people named in the above article are Bridget's relatives via marriage. I believe the Jerry Sullivan mentioned in the article was a brother to Bridget's husband, John. The Eugene Sullivan mentioned married a Johanna Sullivan who may have been John's sister. Apparently, John's family also had ties to Fall River.
This is an article that appeared in the Montana Standard, Aug. 31, 1975, pg. 15. It repeats the Mollie O'Meara library story, but no reference to a Millie Green. And while it doesn't offer any new information, it's an interesting take on how Bridget could have lived so long in anonymity:
Incredible as it seems, Lizzie Borden's celebrated maid, Bridget Sullivan, lived more than 50 years in Butte and Anaconda without once being Interviewed by local, state or national press. Her last address here, just before she died on March 25,1948, (Holy Thursday), was 112 E. Woolman. It's not altogether wholesome to dredge up old tragedies, even from so far removed as 1893 and Fall River, Mass., but television this year Indicted Lizzie Borden once more with a far-out theory on how she killed her father and step-mother without getting blood on her clothes. She stripped naked to wield the grisly little hatchet, proclaimed the network drama that showed again last week, then took a bucket bath to wash the blood away. Lizzie was acquitted, of course, after a fair if not punctilious trial, but broad speculation hasn't been stilled to this day. She never married and so had no heirs. But Bridget Sullivan, the 26-year-old maid from Ireland who figured closely In the Fall River tragedy Aug. 4,1892, came to Butte after a brief return to Ireland, then married an Anaconda smelter man named Sullivan and never revealed to anyone but a close friend (and perhaps her husband) her part In the Borden murder case., Bridget, too, became a suspect, as recently as 1961 when an investigative reporter named Edward Radin researched another Lizzie Borden book. The late Mollle O'Meara, head public librarian here when Bridget Sullivan was in her 70s, had a passing acquaintance with Mrs. Sullivan. Before she died, Miss O'Meara told friends and the reporter Radin how Bridget came to the library one day and asked for books on real-life murder mysteries. Odd as It sounds, Mrs. Sullivan probably had surviving nephews and nieces who weren't fully apprised'of her part In the Borden case. Her obituary in The Montana Standard on Good Friday 1948 was painfully brief, no date or place of birth, no mention of widowed status, no precise time of arrival from the East. •
Bridget did what Lizzie Borden might sensibly have done. Bridget cut herself off from the past and found some peace. It wasn't difficult in Butte before the turn of the century. Among several hundred Sullivans in the Butte directory at the turn of the century, four or five were named Bridget and several were "domestics." One Bridget Sullivan In Centerville was a confectioner, a candy maker. Without launching a full-scale search to bare additional names and dates, we can say with certainty that Bridget was in Butte no more than three years after the trial In 1893. She lived in Anaconda for 45 years and again in Butte for six years before her death. She was a key personage in the case from A to Z, yet she pulled off the nearly miraculous feat of finding anonymity without changing her name. Archie Clark over In Highland View Manor, who worked the old Butte Miner desk in the 1920s, might say he's not surprised Bridget Sullivan could do it. Contrary to myth, provincial newspapermen of the old school weren't always the bulldogs Hollywood made them. They deferred to sensitivities a great deal, and they didn't always listen well. I can't believe Lizzie Borden did it, and I can't believe Bridget Sullivan did it. Like the rest of the world that's delved Into the reports and recorded testimony in the Borden case, 1 have no real idea who might have done It. If Lizzie did it, 19 times with the hatchet on her step-mother and 10 times In bone-crushing fury at her father's head, she was demonstrably psychotic and not at all the cool' murderess later portrayed (as in the network show). If Bridget did it, she was rewarded with a fantastic set of coverup circumstances and a quiet life in Anaconda to boot. New light may yet be shed on the 83-year- old mystery.
