Unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep up this and my other blogs, but here's a link to the series of old time farm crime I've been writing for Modern Farmer. Enjoy!

More of my old time crime from Modern Farmer. This one on the horrific, and real crime, of ostrich feather theft.

Here's a few links to some great old-time mug shots from the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in England from the 1930s. These are from the 20s. And these are of 19th century child prisoners, as well as a cat murdering dog.

A link to more old time farm crime

The latest in my series on old-time farm crime: Trench Warfare.

I've begun writing a bimonthly series for Modern Farmer magazine called Old-Time Farm Crime. Here's the first piece, a look at an 18th century horse thief and highwayman named Dick Turpin and some contemporary examples of equine thievery.

The Hildebrandt murder

 It was a cold February evening in 1898 when Jonas Staats answered a knock at the door of his Chatham, N.Y.  farmhouse. He didn’t recognize the scruffy-looking man at first, but soon realized who was standing in his doorway.

“My God, It’s Joe,” he exclaimed, ushering the man inside. It was John Schmidt, an accused murderer who had been on the run for more than five years.  

That night after supper, Schmidt, in his broken English, admitted to the farmer that he had killed his stepson, William Hildebrandt, on the evening of Sept. 12, 1893, along the train tracks in nearby Philmont. He claimed that when he cracked the 19-year-old in the head with a hammer it was an act of self-defense.

Staats listened to the man’s story without much in the way of commentary, and allowed the alleged murderer to spend the night and made him breakfast the next morning.

The farmer had known Schmidt for about 15 years, having met him in New York City. Staats brought him to work on his Columbia County farm just after Schmidt arrived from Bromberg, in what was then called Prussian Poland. Schmidt remained at the Staats’ farm for about a year and a half. He then began working for a farmer in Ghent, John Coburn, with whom he stayed on and off for several years.

In 1891 Schmidt met Dora Sophia Johanna, a German immigrant five years his junior. The couple moved in together on Coburn’s property, but soon began a rootless life of travel, going from Columbia to Dutchess County to New Jersey and then Baltimore. When the couple returned to Ghent in 1893 Dora’s teenage son was with them. Schmidt had made enough money to pay the lad’s passage from Germany and now the family was back in Columbia County to work the fields of yet another local farmer.

Sept. 12, 1893

Schmidt and his 19-year-old stepson spent the day working in the field helping to bring in the corn crop of a Ghent farmer. After knocking off for the day they returned to the house. After dinner Schmidt insisted on walking into Philmont to pick up some meat for the family and invited Hildebrandt to go along.

A few hours later Schmidt returned home alone, his clothes bloody and with a leg wound — and without any meat.

He told Sophia that Hildebrandt had been arrested after they brawled with some rowdies in town and that he had escaped arrest by running off. This was just one of several versions Schmidt told of that night’s events. Early the next morning, the couple went to Ghent to catch a train to Hudson, where Hildebrandt would have been taken if arrested. The couple took the train into the city and walked to a building that Schmidt said was the courthouse. He went in alone and came out a few minutes later. Dora was crying and asking where her son was, but Schmidt told her a convenient lie and they headed back home. Later in the evening when the farm boss came around Dora overheard her husband tell the man that Hildebrandt had gone to visit his relatives in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, the crew on a freight train on the Harlem railroad noticed what appeared to be a drunken man passed out along the train tracks in Philmont. He was lying on his back with a leg cocked up, his cap hanging from a nearby tree. It wasn’t until the next morning, on the return trip, that the workers realized the man wasn’t a drunken hobo, but was in fact a corpse.

It wasn’t long until authorities determined young Hildebrandt had been killed by a blow from a hammer that was found near the body, a hammer belonging to Schmidt. He was arrested that afternoon and shipped off to Hudson.  But the constables in charge of the prisoner were drunk and when Schmidt made his escape, they were unable to keep up with him and he disappeared into the night.

For five years Schmidt evaded capture. He traveled widely from New Jersey to Michigan and Minnesota, working on farms and performing odd jobs. And then one evening he appeared on the doorstep of the man who had first taken him in when he arrived in  America.

Why he returned after more than five years as a fugitive is unknown, but Schmidt did say that being on the run and in constant fear of arrest had been hard on him both mentally and physically.

It is unclear whether Staats told authorities at the time about the conversation he had with Schmidt that night or whether he revealed that the fugitive was back in Columbia County. It would be another four months before Schmidt was taken into custody. While sitting in jail awaiting trial he allegedly confessed to two jailers that he had killed his stepson because the teen was having an incestuous relationship with Schmidt’s wife. Later, at trial, the testimony of the two men was called into question by the defense attorney, who told the jury that the jailers might have misheard Schmidt, because his English was so poor. Both witnesses stuck to their stories.

During Schmidt’s trial in Columbia County Court in Hudson, a two-week affair in May and early June of 1899, he told the jury a similar story to the one he had told Staats on that cold February night a year earlier, but in this version, he said he and the teen weren’t on their way to purchase meat, but had instead been trapping along the railroad tracks. Hildebrandt wanted to set a trap, Schmidt told the jury through an interpreter, but when it snapped on his finger he got angry and punched Schmidt.

 “I will give you more, yet,” Schmidt alleged the teen told him before pulling out a knife and taking a swing at him.

“(H)e stooped down and got the hammer and he raised the hammer and struck him,” the interpreter told the jury. “He says he didn’t want to strike him.”

After the boy fell to the ground and didn’t move, Schmidt said he stood there for about 10 minutes and cried, before pushing Hildebrandt’s body further down a culvert. He told the jury he didn’t think Hildebrandt was dead, merely stunned and figured he would wake up and come home. Before leaving, Schmidt left the teen’s cap hanging from a nearby tree. He tossed the hammer down the culvert, took his traps and headed home.

The jury deliberated for close to nine hours before returning a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. After an appeal and a determination of insanity by a special panel appointed by the governor, Schmidt was electrocuted at Dannemora Prison in January 1902.

As a strange side note, during the hullabaloo surrounding Schmidt’s capture, he told his jailers that his wife had murdered her former paramour, a man named Gruber with whom she had been living before she and Schmidt got together. Police discovered the headless remains buried in a cellar on the property of the Ghent farmer John Coburn, whose home was known as “Broadstairs.”  Dora denied the killing, telling police that she came home one day to her residence, which she and Gruber had been sharing with Schmidt, to find Gruber gone. Schmidt allegedly told her Gruber had left her. Dora quickly took up with Schmidt and they were married a few months later.

There have been ghostly encounters reported at the residence since that time.

The wreck of the Albany and Hudson

The Rensselaer train station became a de facto hospital that day as the dead and dying lay on the ground. A low moaning filled the room from the wounded punctuated by hysterical crying from families searching for loved ones. Doctors tended to the accident victims as they awaited transport to area hospitals.

Among the dead the evening of May 26, 1901 was the man train officials would blame for the head-on collision between trains that claimed the lives of five people and seriously injured more than 50 on the new Albany & Hudson Railroad’s electric line.

“It was the worst accident in the history of electric railroading,” the Albany (N.Y.) Evening Journal of May 27, 1901 reported.

That morning had started like many others. It had been a busy Sunday with people as far away as New York City riding one of the first electric train lines in the country. Many spent the day at the train company’s brand new resort called Electric Park, located at Kinderhook Lake, in Columbia County, N.Y.

The Albany and Hudson Railroad and Power Company was formed in 1899 with the intent of creating an interurban electric rail line. Train service began in 1900 and ran from Hudson to Rennselaer, a distance of 37.2 miles. The company also provided local service in Hudson and Albany.

Both the train system and the park were run on electricity powered by a combination of steam and hydroelectric generation delivered through a dam and power station on Kinderhook Creek.

The train cars — 53 feet long and weighing 30 tons — used an electrified third rail for power and could reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.

That Sunday was a fine spring day and business was brisk for the train company with extra cars added to the regular runs to accommodate the crowds.

John DeWitt Peltz, his wife and their young son boarded the local Albany train on State Street at about 2 p.m., connecting to the southbound train in Rennselaer. They were glad to have made it on, as there were a number of people who couldn’t find room and had to wait for the next train.

“They will probably now consider themselves lucky for not obtaining seats,” Peltz later mused.

At 3:17 p.m. train number 22 left Rensselaer two minutes behind schedule and would eventually carry 83 passengers that afternoon. Three minutes later a northbound train, the number 19 — originating from Hudson — left Kinderhook Lake, 20 minutes behind its regular departure time. At the time of the crash there were 20 passengers aboard.

At the controls of the no. 22 was Frank Smith, a North Chatham resident and recent widower. Charles T.  Johnson, a 34-year-old from Clinton Heights, was conductor.

They chugged south, stopping in East Greenbush for a few minutes before leaving the station at 3:44 p.m., now 17 minutes behind schedule.

Meanwhile, the no. 19 pulled out of the Nassau station at 3:40 p.m., 25 minutes behind schedule.

The no. 22 should have pulled off the main line at the No. 69 siding, located 1.3 miles south of East Greenbush, to allow the northbound no. 19 to pass. That didn’t happen.

Five hundred feet south of the siding, on a wide and dangerous curve, the two trains collided head-on, with the impact so sudden that neither motormen had time to apply the brakes.  The no. 22 was traveling at about 45 miles per hour, the no. 19 at 25.

Peltz flew over a half-dozen seats, his son Jack in his arms, and landed in the aisle. His wife also flew through the air. The train car, he saw after gaining his footing,  was a seething mass of bodies. Peltz managed to get outside with his family.

“I saw the two motormen lying side by side, dead.” He later recalled. One, said Peltz, had been cut in half by the collision. Further on, he saw two women lying in a ditch; one was dead and the other unconscious. A third woman stood over them crying. The women had come from Albany and were on their way to visit the graves of relatives.

“Fully 120 men, women and children formed a struggling, shrieking pyramid framed with blood, detached portions of human bodies and the wreckage of cars,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported the next day. The number of people was actually less than that, but never the less, it was a gruesome scene.

Another witness said the two train cars had turned to splinters, with debris thrown 75 feet in all directions. The trains’ heavy axles lay halfway off the tracks, useless and twisted.

The injured were dragged to a fence near the north side of the wreck and those who were less badly hurt provided comfort and aid to the more seriously injured. One of the conductors telephoned for help and soon two doctors arrived, one from Rensselaer, the other from Valatie.

The state report, published the next year, listed the names of the dead and gave an accounting of the wounds suffered by the other passengers, which included numerous broken bones, internal injuries and one poor woman who had the skin from her face scraped off.

At least one report indicated that the accident might have been due to the company running two cars on one time schedule to accommodate the heavy Sunday travel.

The company, probably with the old adage “dead men tell no tales” at the forefront of their minds, firmly laid the blame at the feet of Smith. A state government report would corroborate the company’s version of events.

Newspapermen and others speculated that Smith, “practically insane” with grief over the loss of his wife, was demented at the time of the crash.

 Johnson, the conductor of no. 22, was also blamed for the tragedy because as the conductor he was in charge of overseeing the running of the train. He told officials he signaled Smith to stop at the switch, but that the motorman ignored him and continued barreling south.

Johnson was arrested and charged with manslaughter by the Rennselaer District Attorney’s Office, but the train company backed Johnson’s story. It was unclear what became of the charges.

Those who were killed included Smith; William Nicholas, the motorman from train no. 19; Rose Mooney a domestic servant from Stuyvesant Landing; Maude Kellogg, a 20-year-old from Ballston, N. Y.; and David Mahoney, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man who had been second mate on a Hudson River day liner. He later died in the hospital from his wounds.

The state made recommendations, including putting a steering mechanism and brakes at the back of the car where the conductors were stationed, to prevent this type of accident from happening again, but a little more than a year later, on Aug. 2, 1902, there was another accident on the system that killed two and injured 61.

It wasn’t long after the second crash that the company reorganized as the Albany and Hudson Railroad and again reorganized as the Albany Southern Railroad in 1909.

 The electric train’s final run was made in December 1929.