Was It Wakeman’s First Murder?
EDITOR’S NOTE: It was 89 years ago this month that news of a tragic mill fire in Wakeman filled much of the front page, and much of the inside pages, of the daily "Cleveland World" newspaper.
The article makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of the area.
We thank Mila Traicoff, one of the owners of the Pine Bar, east of Wakeman, for supplying us with their copy of "Cleveland World" from March 3, 1899.
Most of the article is reprinted below. A small part of it had deteriorated too badly to read.
BY ARTHUR SPERRY
WAKEMAN, O., March 3, 1899 -"The whole countryside for miles around is in a ferment of excitement over the Wakeman mills murder of yesterday morning, already mentioned in the World’s dispatches.
Here, in a village of 400 inhabitants, where every one of the people knows every other one, a man, who was one of the best known and best respected of all the villagers, a leading citizen, was murdered in his own flour mill, and that mill used to cremate his body so thoroughly that what was left could barely be identified as human.
The ruins of the burned flour mill still smoke and smolder, and the whole village reeks of the fire smell rising strongly into the still sky. If the smoke is an appeal for the punishment of the murder and the arson that concealed it, the appeal is vain as yet and bids fair to remain so.
A MYSTERIOUS
CRIME.
For this Wakeman mills murder is one of the mysteries that seem unfathomable. The man whose mill made much of a rye four that Cleveland lovers of rye bread have eaten for a half century past, the mill that made nearly all of it at one time, was the victim of a crime as mysterious as its scene was romantic.
It would be the old mill nested against the bank at the Vermilion river, the southern division line of the Lake Shore railroad crosses its age-mossed, stone-arched bridge. Lower, almost under, is the wagon road bridge from which the accompanying picture of the burned mill was taken. Close to this road, at the left, is the home of the father of the murdered miller, and here lives with him his daughter Alice.
It is all like "Hazel Kirke" in real life, venerable miller, pretty daughter and all. But in this case the miller’s sorrow is the murder of his son, not the love of his daughter.
MURDERED MAN’S
HOME.
Back on the hill on River Street and looking down over the valley with its mill is the home the murdered miller left at 3 o’clock Thursday morning to go to his death. Though the mill was owned by S. T. Gibson & Son, the father has been so crippled by rheumatism for years that the son was really the head of the firm.
This son, Willis A. Gibson, was the victim of the mysterious murder.
All winter flour has been stolen from time to time at night from the big bins in the mill. Willis Gibson’s was one of those sturdy natures that hates a thief as a terrier does a rat. His hate was as determined as it was fearless, and they say in Wakeman that he would fight a thief against any odds. So the thief had to kill him.
Last Monday more flour was stolen. Next to Willis Gibson in the active control of the mill was Fred C. Abbott, the brother of the murdered man’s wife.
FLOUR OVER
FOOTPRINTS.
Tuesday morning Fred Abbott found in the mud the tracks of the thieves who had been at the mill the night before. They had sprinkled the miller’s good flour over their footprints in the hope that this would obliterate them somewhat, but instead it attracted attention to them.
"Don’t say anything to anybody about this, and I’ll catch the thieves," the murdered miller said to his brother-in-law. That he caught them nobody in Wakeman doubts, but all that is left of the brave man is a charred lump so small and burned that the doctor had to dissect it find from the bones whether it was human or not.
A few years ago a brother to the murdered man, George Gibson, train dispatcher on the Wheeling & Western railroad, was killed in a railroad bridge accident. He had been a lover of big game hunting in the Michigan woods and after his death his widow gave Willis Gibson his Winchester repeating rifle.
TOOK WINCHESTER
RIFLE.
Thursday morning between 2 and 3 o’clock Willis Gibson got up and went from his house to the mill to catch the thieves, taking with him the Winchester repeater.
Less than an hour later all Wakeman glowed redly in the glare of the burning Wakeman mills. The hand fire engine could do nothing more than sprinkle the two houses and barn nearest the blazing mill, but all Wakeman was there to watch the fire.
Then there came through the crowd a little girl of 14 asking of everyone, "Where is my papa?"
She was Willis Gibson’s eldest daughter, Cecile. They told her he was in the crowd.
"I don’t believe it," said Cecile. "I believe he is burning up in the mill."
SHE WAS RIGHT.
There were hurried inquiries. No one had seen him. The two streams from the hand fire pump on wheels were turned on the fire. An hour later the fragment of flesh and bone that had been the miller was dragged out of the ruins of his mill. Little Cecile had been right.
The mill and all that had been in it were totally destroyed. Loss $3,600, insurance $700. The long history of the Wakeman mills was ended in tragic mystery.
Fred Abbott, who lives in the home of the old miller whose son was murdered, close to where the mill stood, was one of the first at the fire, and the whole thing was ablaze then. He burned his hands saving the bill file and ledger from the office. But he did not know Willis was inside. The bills and book were already blackened by fire when he seized them. When he got to the mill the door was locked, but he had a key.
Early Thursday Squire Samuel D. Rowlands, deputy coroner of the county, held an inquest at his residence on River street, from the kitchen windows of which the waiting witnesses looked down onto the still burning ruins of the mill.
LITTLE EVIDENCE.
There was little evidence for the coroner and his jury. Dr. Roberts, the village doctor, told how he cut up the remains and proved that they were human. Fred Abbott identified the Winchester repeater, the key to the mill and the big pocket-knife, all found near the body, as the property of Willis Gibson.
A little of the base of the skull and a shred of fabric around the neck were found, though the arms and legs and most of the body were burned away. The shred of fabric was identified as the collar of the sweater Miller Gibson had worn to his death.
Mrs. Hubbel and her daughter, Miss Mary, whose house is the one nearest the burned mill, said that in the night they heard two men talking as they sat for an hour on the "stoop" of their house. Men sitting there would have been able to see every one who approached the mill, to have seen the murdered miller as he went thief-hunting with his dead brother’s Winchester bear-gun.
HEARD THREE SHOTS.
Squire Rowlands, deputy coroner, as he was, testified himself that he had heard three shots. Three other witnesses said the same thing.
The assistant postmaster, Miss Annie Van Fleet, said she heard shouts for help, followed by three shots.
The murdered miller’s hired girl testified that she had heard Mr. Gibson get up and go out of the house.
His sister, Alice, told her tearful story, though it amounted to little or nothing, as the first she knew the mill was a great blaze.
The coroner’s verdict was that Willis A. Gibson was killed by some person or persons unknown.
Wakeman has neither police, detectives nor street lamps. There is Deputy Sheriff Scott, but he has no direct responsibility for the solving of the murder mystery.
A VIGILANCE COMMITTEE.
So at the conclusion of the coroner’s inquest Squire Rowlands, in his capacity of justice of the peace, appointed Dr. Roberts, John J. McMann and James Corkins what they would call out west a vigilance committee to investigate Wakeman’s first murder. They are investigating.
The mill was so old that its present owner, venerable S. T. Gibson, with his 67 years, remembers it all his life. He bought it in 1871. The oldest inhabitants do not remember when it was built. Wakeman is an old town, and in the old days Wakeman mills flour was famous all over the northern part of Ohio. Once afire the old wooden structure burned like matches.
Willis A. Gibson, the murdered miller, would be 43 years old in a week or so. He left his invalid and now almost deranged wife and three children, Cecile, Willis, Jr., and Mildred, his $2000 insurance in the Woodmen of the World and a $600 accident policy.
It was Willis Gibson’s custom to carry money. The day he was murdered he had with him about $300 in cash and a check for $115 sent him by Charles Lederer’s Son of Cleveland in payment for rye flour. When the body was found there was no money with it save a single, fire-blackened one-cent piece. Of course his paper money was burned, but it is thought he must have had some silver.
Ten or twelve dollars in silver was found in another part of the ruins from where the body was, this money being near where the till in the office had been. The body was at the other corner of the mill, in the engine room, where it had fallen during the fire from one of the upper floors. This is proved by the fact that the body was found on top of the wheat that had fallen with the floors from the bins on the first floor, the engine room being in the basement.
MOST ACCEPTED
THEORY
The theory in most minds is that Miller Gibson entered his mill while the flour thieves were at work and that they killed him. He would naturally have locked the door after him and put the key in his pocket. Whether this killing was done with a club, knife or gun is part of the mystery. Gibson would naturally have fired three shots from his rifle, or as many shots as he had in the weapon. Then he would have called for help in his fight in the black darkness and used the knife with the dagger-like blade that was found close to his body.
Having murdered the miller it would have been natural for the thieves, for it is agreed that there were two, as shown by the footprints left by the robbers Monday, to set fire to the old mill.
WHO IS THE
MURDERER?
But these thieves who came so often to steal flour must have lived in Wakeman, and in Wakeman everybody knows everybody else. There are not many people in Wakeman, some 400, and the murderers may have sat on the coroner’s jury, perhaps.
There is another theory. Someone who knew Miller Gibson had hundreds of dollars in his pocket may have waylaid and killed him outside the mill and taken his body into the mill and fired it afterward.
No theory is in the least degree interfered with by the possibility of anybody seeing anything. When the sun goes down in Wakeman nobody sees again, out of doors, till next day, unless there be a moon.
There is not a single street light in all Wakeman. Willis Gibson’s murderers may have killed him where they liked and walked away in the black night with the certainty that no one would see them or him.
FINDING OF
AN ADZ
Friday morning brought one of the pieces of evidence that may be important if any evidence in this case is ever important.
An adz that belonged to the mill, that was kept in the office or near it, was found by searchers of the ruins close to where the murdered man’s body was found in the engine room, clear at the opposite side of the mill.
Of course it can not be known on which floor either adz or body was when the fire started, but it is assumed that Gibson got the adz to defend himself in his supposed fight with the thieves or that the thieves used it to kill him.
Still another theory is that Miller Gibson may have left the door into the mill unlocked and been followed into the mill by his murders.
Willis Gibson is said not to have had an enemy in the world. He was uncommonly quiet and even-tempered. He did not drink or use tobacco. He never went to church, and while not active in politics, he was an ardent free silverite. He belonged to no organization save the Woodmen. He was afraid of nothing. Two of his cousins live in Cleveland and he had many friends there whom he used often to visit.
THE FUNERAL.
The Woodmen’s lodge met in the lodge room over the Bright hotel, the one caravansary in Wakeman, last night to arrange for the funeral. It is expected to occur Saturday afternoon, and the Rev. Jesse Hill, pastor of the Congregational church, is to officiate. The remains will be kept in a vault for some months in the hope that something will develop that will enable the corner to reopen his inquest.
But already Wakeman is settling down to the idea that the Wakeman mills murder will always be a mystery.
Just below the other side of the great stone Lake Shore bridge from the burned mill is one of the Standard oil company’s great pipe-line pumping stations. Here, day and night, are at lease three men, looking after the 800 horse-power engines and pumps that force the oil through the two eight-inch mains to the next station at Berea, 20 miles away; but no one heard anything the night of the murder because of the noise the pumps make. When the men saw the fire they blew the pumping station whistles, but the fire was then well under way.
This pumping station, the Wakeman flour mills and a couple of saw-mills were about all there were of the sort in Wakeman.
SAD GATHERING.
It was a sad family gathering at the home of the old miller Thursday. There are two brothers, Charles, who came from Pittsburg, and S. D., who works for the Standard oil company at Portage, and the weeping sister Alice. They are all convinced, as is also the father, that the flour thieves killed Willis Gibson. The amount of flour stolen at a time was so small it could not well be sold. That thieves could steal only what they could carry. All this is evidence that the thieves, who are also regarded as certainly the murderers, must live in or near Wakeman. But here comes again the difficulty of anybody in Wakeman doing anything unknown to the rest of Wakeman.
For a suicide theory there is no possible stand, for the dead miller’s character disproves it, as does also the fact that his death and the destruction of the mill meant ruin for all those who were dear to him.
Equally impossible is the accident theory for while it would account for the miller’s death it would not account for the fire. The mill is run by water power from two big turbines when there is water enough in the Vermilion river, which there has been the last two weeks. The boilers have not been fired up for a fortnight.
So Wakeman can only guess, horror-strickened, and try to forget its murder mystery.
THREATS OF
LYNCHING.
Gibson’s Neck Not Broken
--Bullet Marks Found
WAKEMAN, O., MARCH 3, 1899 County Prosecuting Attorney S. R. Craig is here today from Norwalk, the county seat.
He visited the ruins of the mill and smelled the odor of burning flesh, whether human or animal, for the old mill was full of rats, no one can tell.
He went also to the undertaking rooms of Justice of the Peace Pease, where Dr. Roberts is dissolving the pieces of the dead miller’s body in a hot solution of caustic potash to clean the charred flesh from the bones in his search for a bullet mark.
"It is a mystery, that is all I can say," said Prosecutor Craig.
Everyone who smells the odor of burning flesh rising from the smoking ruins of the mill rages at the neglect to have the place searched. They believe the body of the man who killed Gibson may be there. The scent of burning flesh fills the air, but there is none in Wakeman who has authority to order or pay for the search.
An angry crowd surrounds the burned mill, and if there was a shred of actual evidence to connect anyone with the crime, so deep is the anger of the villagers that there would be a lynching if the law was still idle. The vigilance committee has done nothing.
All ground for an accident theory is swept away by the finding of the adz, and the fact that the grain was piled three feet deep under Gibson’s body. Had he fallen into the basement and killed himself the grain would have covered him.
Dr. Roberts, who is making the autopsy, inspected the spinal cord thoroughly. It was not injured and the neck was not broken.
In stripping the flesh from the right hip bone Dr. Roberts has found a bullet mark. There was a hole through the big common iliac artery and a blood clot, as though from a wound. These holes are smaller than the 45-caliber loads of Gibson’s Winchester, three of the discharged cartridges from which were found in the ruins.
The coroner will reopen his inquest tonight and a verdict may not be expected until next week. The coroner has a theory that Gibson entered the mill by a window; that the thief or thieves followed him in the same way and murdered him with the adz as he came up stairs from the boiler room.
Local historian David Graves of Wakeman supplied the WRap-up with some more information on the tragic mill fire of 1899.
His uncle, Lyle Denman, was about 4 years old at the time of the fire. He told Dave that he remembers going to the mill in a horse and buggy, along with his parents and grand-parents.
NATURALLY, THE fire was the talk of the town for many years.
Denman told Graves that many people felt that Gibson did not die in the fire. Some said they thought the fire had been set, and that Gibson left the area.
Some people said that there were not enough bones found in the mill to constitute a human body.
Others said that if a person did die in the fire, it was not Gibson.
ANYWAY, GRAVES said, there never was enough proof obtained to classify the situation as a murder, suicide, or accident.
Graves said there were also reports that the daughter, Cecile, who is mentioned in the "Cleveland World" article, would often go down to the bridge over the Vermilion River in the middle of the night, and let "blood-curdling screams for her father.