Metro Pulse/Secret History/Kids These Days

Comment
on this story

Powered flight, the Jersey Lily, and Christmas killings of 1903

by Jack Neely

In future years, historians would insist that it went almost unnoticed, but it was big news in Knoxville. The December 19, 1903, Knoxville Journal had it at the top of the front page: "IN A FLYING MACHINE: Two Ohio Men Make a Three-Mile Journey Near Kitty Hawk, N.C.; Machine Has No Balloon Attachment But Is Propelled By a Small Engine."

Early reports exaggerated the length of the flight. But what it was, according to the wire story, was something like a large "box kite," something familiar but modified with an engine and, in the center, a "navigator's car."

It was all the rage for a day or so, but there was no editorial commentary, no follow-up story. If Knoxvillians quickly turned to other concerns, it was because they were confident that this news wouldn't be affecting their lives in the near future. Most of the thousands Christmas shopping on Gay Street that week wouldn't live to ride in an airplane.

Automobiles seemed a more relevant sensation. As the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk, Knoxvillian M.L. Wolf was under a cloud of suspicion, appealing a criminal charge rarely seen in Knoxville. He was allegedly speeding in his automobile. He was driving down Gay Street "much faster than the 8 mph prescribed by the ordinance." Patrolman John Hubbs spotted him, and was pretty sure the daredevil was doing about 20 mph.

Sharing the front page with the Wright Brothers story was the first news of a weird crime on the north side of downtown.

It had been an interesting evening of contrasts, as churches hosted Christmas-carol singings and Broadway star David Warfield brought his show, The Auctioneer, "a mixture of humor and pathos," to Staub's Theatre on Gay Street. It was coming to the end of its original run, but the play was so enduringly popular that the show would be revived twice on Broadway, each time with Warfield in the lead, over the next 15 years.

That night the Rev. Anna Shaw, a reformer from Philadelphia, the first female Methodist minister in America and a well-known suffragist, lectured at the Methodist Church to an attentive house. Her subject was the problem with kids these days, that "youthful criminality" was out of control. She blamed American materialism, and the fact that so many boys' role models in politics and business in 1903 turned out to be crooks.

It was just after her talk, at about 10 p.m., when two masked gunmen, described as "young, almost boys" robbed the Proctor Coal Co. on Broadway near downtown. Holding pistols in both hands "regular bandit style," they surprised bookkeeper William Murphy and demanded that he open the safe. "This he did with pleasure," reported the Journal, "as it contained nothing." The robbers beat Murphy, and fled.

Nearby, at about 10:30 on that cold, damp night, tall, handsome, 23-year-old Corbin Rowe was on his way home on Central, just north of the Bowery. He'd been invited to attend Rev. Shaw's speech, but he had some calling to do. He was reportedly visiting a young lady who lived on Third Avenue.

He had attended UT for a couple of years and worked as a clerk in a tobacconists' shop before he got a job with his dad's successful firm, Rowe Transfer. Dressed to impress, he wore a tailor-made suit, gentleman's gloves, a snow-white vest, and an overcoat. He may have been singing. He had a reputation for singing all the time. He had his hands in his pockets as he strode by Claiborne's butcher shop. His right hand gripped a loaded pistol.

People in the neighborhood heard a couple of pops, which wasn't unusual this time of year. Firecrackers had been a big part of Knoxville's Christmas celebration for years.

Broadway pedestrians first spotted the young man near the corner of Central, running across the street, toward Meehan's Saloon. He looked like he was going to run in the saloon door, but he didn't. He ran squarely into a window, and fell on the sidewalk.

Some laughing passersby assumed he was drunk. They approached him and greeted him. His face was scratched, and ashen pale. He said nothing, but, just once, gasped.

Corbin Rowe wasn't drunk at all. He was dead. "His snow-white vest and shirt were saturated with his heart's blood." He had a .38-caliber bullet hole in his chest.

Meehan's Saloon had a telephone, and witnesses called the police on Market Square. Lt. George McIntyre and Patrolman Will Coleman were dispatched to the scene, but as it happened, the first to arrive were Patrolmen McCroskey and Lillison, who'd already been investigating the Proctor robbery.

They found that Rowe had jewelry, cash and other valuables on his body. His right hand was still wrapped around his revolver, still fully loaded. The ugly puncture wounds on his face were puzzling at first, until someone noted that the window he ran into was fitted with barbs to discourage loafers from hanging out in the window sill. The theory was that, as he attempted to reach the safety of the saloon, "the blackness of death...fell upon his eyes." His running body went off course.

Police had hardly begun investigating before a fire alarm went up. A business, a lumber factory, burned down on Willow Street, just east of the Bowery. Evacuating the neighborhood, firemen kicked down a locked door and found another corpse. They might have assumed it was related to the fire, but it wasn't. A black man of perhaps 50 had been there so long "his face had been eaten by cats or rats." He was eventually identified as John Richardson, a scavenger who dealt in scrap iron. A neighbor suspected he had died of natural causes, because he'd been complaining a lot lately. Others believed he'd been robbed and murdered. There was nothing in his apartment, not even any furniture. To the coroner, it was just another Bowery corpse. He was buried in Potter's Field. There was no inquest.

At half past midnight, prominent citizen Charles Rodgers was on his way home, walking to the Rodgers family house on ritzy West Cumberland Avenue, right across from the university hill. He was halfway home, walking along Clinch, when three young men approached him and told him to raise his hands. He attempted to draw his pistol, but the men shot him. He fell, badly wounded in the thigh near the hip. He said one of the men was very young, perhaps only 16.

All that happened the same night, the holiday night that Knoxville learned about the first powered flight. The headline of the story played slightly more prominently than the Wright Brothers' triumph was Who Fired the Shot That Killed Corbin Rowe? People were shot to death in downtown Knoxville all the time in 1903, but they didn't usually make the front page. It was usually assumed the murder victims were up to something they shouldn't have been. The Rowe case seemed different.

Police made one arrest, that of one Frederick Geare, a photographic enlarger from Kentucky. Though it was determined that he was wanted on other charges in Lexington, they eventually admitted he probably had nothing to do with the shootings and robberies. The miscreants were called "footpads," the soft 1903 euphemism for muggers.

The neighborhood around Central and Broadway formed a "vigilance committee." Men patrolled their streets with sawed-off shotguns hidden in their overcoats. Sheriff Fox swore he'd arrest "all suspicious characters," especially those with no means of support. Knoxvillians were jumpy. A UT frat boy pulled a gun on a mysterious figure who appeared to be hiding under a viaduct. Holding his gun, he demanded that the furtive figure show himself. From the shadows crawled a man with no legs.

It was the Christmas dilemma, and sometime joke. The Journal had published a wish list of Christmas gifts for Knoxville. After the spate of robberies, the biggest anxiety was that beloved UT president Charles Dabney was about to resign to take a better-paying post at the University of Cincinnati. The Journal asked Santa for a worthy replacement. That and a new hotel, preferably nine-stories. $30,000 for the YMCA, which was renovating an old hotel on State Street. A 7,000-seat auditorium. A new post-office building. Some haste on constructing the long-promised L&N Station. A Clinch Avenue viaduct to stretch over the widening L&N rail yards. None of the wishes seemed too likely in 1904. On Christmas Day, the Journal asked, What if Santa Claus had been held up by the footpads?

Staub's Theatre, at Gay and Cumberland, was the best escape from holiday anxieties. It stayed busy with traveling shows throughout the holidays. During the holidays, all you needed to see big current or future Broadway stars was a couple of quarters.

Besides Warfield in The Auctioneer, you could have seen a performance of Twelfth Night, starring Viola Allen in the role of Viola. The well-known young Shakespearean actress six weeks later would debut the production at New York's Knickerbocker Theater. She would be so famous for her performance that they'd print out postcards of her in the role.

A Friend Of the Family, a farce translated from the original German, would feature Alice Johnson and George W. Barnum, who enjoyed some acclaim as an actor and director on Broadway.

And on Monday, the 21st, the longest night of the year, was Mrs. Deering's Divorce. It was an English comedy starring a recognizable actress who'd been here at least once before: Lillie Langtry. At 50, still one of the world's most famous actresses, "the Jersey Lily" had been admired by G.B. Shaw; Walt Whitman; Teddy Roosevelt; Oscar Wilde, who called her the most beautiful woman in the world; Judge Roy Bean, who named his saloon after her; and King Edward, who was rumored to have fathered her only daughter.

Knoxvillians may have heard rumors of the still-beautiful grand dame's personal problems, which were more baroque than the plots of any of her plays: Edward had been Lillie's lover, but her daughter had actually been fathered illegitimately by Edward's cousin, never mind her husband, and raised as Langtry's niece. Rumor had banned Langtry from London social circles, but she'd married a nobleman 20 years her junior and embarked on a coast-to-coast American tour with Mrs. Deering's Divorce. With her was the Imperial Theatre Company of London. She played opposite Frederick Truesdell, a recognized Broadway star himself, who would go on to star in silent movies, including some of the first gangster films.

The play, which included a risque undressing scene, was condemned by the New York Times. She still had an admirable figure that had been a draw on the tour. Neither Knoxville daily mentioned it. She was, at 50, a "distinguished beauty," gushed the Journal's critic, "as charming and beautiful as when she first landed in America." The slightly less dazzled Sentinel critic noted that she would never have been a famous actress if King Edward hadn't been so impressed with her beauty, and her beauty had "passed its zenith." But, the critic allowed, she still put on a pretty good show.

Oddly, even after the scandals, onstage and off, it wasn't a sellout. There were empty seats. But the hundreds who did show up were "appreciative" and "gave Langtry as many curtain calls as she would respond to."

If folks weren't there, it may have been because they had shopping to do. Market Square was full of Christmas greenery, both for sale and for decoration: Christmas trees, wreaths, holly, mistletoe. It fooled a screech owl, who mistook it for a forest and descended on Market Square to hunt. Maybe it was the greenery, or maybe it was the smell of fresh meat. Market Square was exhibiting hundreds of fresh turkeys—editors remarked that turkey was replacing the duck and the goose as the Christmas bird—plus venison, ducks, chickens, quail, oysters, and an unusual traffic in fish, both fresh and saltwater. Christmas fell on a Friday that year, and in 1903, Knoxville's considerable Catholic population preferred to dine on a big Christmas fish.

Folks on the square somehow captured the owl and handed it over the Will Shugrue, the desk sergeant at the police station on the square. He kept it as a pet for a few hours before releasing it to its urban hunting.

On the 25th, the Journal hailed the holiday: "Today is Christmas Day, the day of the firecracker and the toy cannon in the South. Knoxville will have her share of celebrations, from the man who attends religious services down to the boy who loses a finger or two fooling with cannon crackers."

It was quieter than the old days. In the latter part of the 19th century, Christmas Day had often been a melee of drunkenness, murder, and detonations, but in 1903, downtown had "the appearance of Sunday," surprised reporters noted. "Even a number of saloons took a half-day off."

There were plenty of things to do, of course. There was the traditional Knoxville Bowling Club tournament, with some rather extravagant gifts for the winners. They included an automobile, 20 head of cattle, and 20 shares of Standard Oil stock.

And at Staub's, as always, there were big sold-out shows on Christmas Day, two performances of George Washington Cable's Civil War idyll, The Cavalier. The theater turned people away, even from the afternoon matinee.

It was the day after Christmas that the sheriff announced arrests of some young men in connection with the Christmas-season robberies: Dennis Graves, Huck Fountain, and James Shoemaker, all local street kids with rap sheets, who were believed to be in their early 20s. Fountain was a well-known bicycle thief. Their connection to the Rowe killing was suspected but unclear. The rumor had been spreading that the real killer might have been a middle-aged suitor who was jealous that his mistress had seemed distracted by this young man closer to her own age.

By then, of course, Knoxvillians were distracted by other holiday murders. On Christmas Eve, walking home with his family from a Christmas party in a Baptist church in Powell, well-respected Knox County Deputy Sheriff L.R. "Dock" May turned and shot 55-year-old Lee Lewis, apparently in cold blood. May rode the train into Knoxville and turned himself in for murder but wouldn't talk about his motive. The word was that it had to do with an old grudge.

Just after Christmas, at the Butt In Saloon on Central, patron Frank Rogan shot the bartender Dan Leahy, better known as a Knoxville baseball star. Witnesses said Leahy had intervened when Rogan had been ridiculing Leahy's assistant, a black man named Bad Eye McGuire.

And 18-year-old James Householder committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid at his girlfriend's house on Clinch downtown. He allegedly feared being implicated in a murder case in Atlanta. He shouldn't have worried so much. The more-seasoned killers of 1903 could be confident the each new murder that made the newspapers pushed their own crimes back in the police files, and in the public consciousness, that much more. And 1904 was a whole new year.