Unsolved crimes, particularly murders, are troubling. Berkshire has had its share of puzzling deaths. Who did it? Why? Is the perpetuator still out there?
The last is not an issue with the case of one West Stockbridge crime. It happened more than two centuries ago, around 1808. The death — we’re given no actual evidence it was murder — intrigued Great Barrington poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), whose 1825 verse “The Murdered Traveler” was based on the unsolved demise of a man whose body was found near the farm of Mark St. John in a glen on the mountain road between Stockbridge and West Stockbridge. The bones were encased in ice and leaves. The old mountain road between the towns was thoroughly corrupted by construction of the Massachusetts Turnpike in the 1950s.
“When Spring, to woods and wastes around,
Brought bloom and joy again,
The murdered traveller’s bones were found,
Far down a narrow glen…”
Bryant’s lines describe passersby discovering and burying the remains (we’ll assume they had reason to believe it was a man), not considering perhaps the dead individual’s family at home was uncertain and sorrowful not knowing what had come of him. The message, it seems, is when we die, some will mourn us, many will not; it’s better to somehow leave our name and good works behind.
In a volume of Bryant’s poems published in 1854 by H.C. Edwards, there is the following note: “Some years since, in the month of May, the remains of a human body, partly devoured by wild animals were found in a woody ravine near a solitary road passing between the mountains west of the village of Stockbridge. It was supposed that the person came into his death by violence but no traces could be discovered of his murderer. It was only recollected, that one evening, in the course of the previous winter, a traveler had stopped at an inn in the village of West Stockbridge; that he had inquired the way to Stockbridge, and that, in paying the innkeeper for something he had ordered, it appeared that he had a considerable sum of money in his possession. Two ill-looking men were present, and went out about the same time the traveler proceeded on his journey. During the winter, also, two men of shabby appearance, but plentifully supplied with money, had lingered for a while about the village of Stockbridge. Several years afterward, a criminal about to be executed, for a capital offense in Canada, confessed that he had been concerned in murdering a traveler in Stockbridge for the sake of his money. Nothing was ever discovered respecting the name or residence of the person murdered.”
Bryant’s poem was widely read; the Pittsfield Sun for 18 August 1859 mentions “the ravine in which the sad tragedy was enacted which is commemorated in Bryant’s little poem entitled the Murdered Traveler is ranked as a tourist destination in the same category as Ice Glen and Jones Hill: all extremely interesting localities, on examination of which would serve to entertain the sojourner for many days.”
In 1930, Mrs. Arthur Nelson of Ellington, New York, made a case that the victim was her great-uncle, Hiram Andrus, about 24 at the time of his presumed demise. Andrus, she told the Berkshire Eagle, had the government mail contract from Vermont into northern Massachusetts. His family migrated from near Rutland to Ellington in the spring of 1807 and Hiram was to join them in the fall. He never showed up.
His brother Norman was sent to search for Hiram, who had departed Vermont with his latest wages in his pocket. “He followed the trail as far as West Stockbridge where he learned that his brother had put up at a tavern here,” the Berkshire Eagle said in 1930, based on information Mrs. Nelson had sent in a letter to Stockbridge Postmaster C. Edgar Searing:
“At West Stockbridge, the trail ended for Norman Andrus but Bryant and [writer William Pitt] Palmer [who also wrote of the tragedy] picked it up not knowing that what they wrote would aid in establishing in all probability, the identity of the murdered traveler.”
A newspaper writer searched for mention of the death in issues of the Berkshire Star and other newspaper sources and town records to no avail. Palmer, though, once wrote about a trip to Albany to see General Lafayette — then on tour of America — in June 1825 and stated his fear as he approached the West Stockbridge glen, where the body of a murdered man had been found. Bryant wrote his poem sometime between 1821 and 1825.
Frederick A. Remington recalled searching local deeds and finding one that gave a measurement “to a stake which marks the spot where an unidentified man was found murdered.” He believed the deed was recorded in Great Barrington in about 1830.
West Stockbridge town historian Fred C. Tobey doubted the story, he told those attending a parent-teacher association gathering in 1931. He said the exact spot where the body was found was “about one half mile out of the village on the road to Stockbridge … soon to be marked by a mound of stones to be erected by the Boy Scout Troop of West Stockbridge,” the Berkshire Eagle said. Tobey said it was down a ravine from the main road — somewhere, this sounds like, below Stockbridge Sportsmen’s Club.
Tobey said he disagreed that the body was that of Andrus. He said he learned of the spot from Lt. C.W. Kniffin of West Stockbridge, who told him it was by a large tree and a small mountain stream. “The new state highway leading from West Stockbridge to Stockbridge is but a few rods from the site to be selected for the new marker.”
Tobey said Andrus knew the Berkshires and had in fact delivered mail in Stockbridge and West Stockbridge. He had two uncles living in West Stockbridge Center. One, Theodore Andrus, had lived in Vermont. There were many Andruses in Vermont and western Massachusetts, Tobey said. Thus, if the traveler was Hiram Andrus, he was not “unknown.”
Still, given the described condition of the body, it may have been unrecognizable.
The newspaper revealed that Seymour Churchill of Stockbridge, a Civil War veteran and great-uncle of John Palmer, cashier of the Housatonic National Bank at Stockbridge, was the one who found the body.
Palmer said his great-uncle, William Pitt Palmer, once wrote of walking over Stockbridge mountain at night on his way home and a “flash of lightning illuminated ‘Dead Man’s Rock’ where the body had been found” and “it made his hair stand on ends and he ran the rest of the way home.”
Derry D’Oench, writing in the Eagle 18 January 1952, said: “The town records of West Stockbridge contain no references to the slaying, yet the story has been retold in many old Berkshire publications as fact. In West Stockbridge today the tale is both believed and disbelieve. There is even a middle ground that holds that a body was found atop the mountain, and the story invented to go with it. The stones that once marked the grave have long since blended into the hillside and even the old tavern is just a cellar hole.”
Rising Paper papermaker Robert H. Beckwith, writing as David Buckman, fictionalized the incident and combined it with the story of the notorious Alford miner and cannibal Oscar Beckwith in “The Mountain Tulip Legend,” published in 1962.
In 1963, Katie Mills of New Haven, Michigan, wrote in an issue of the Detroit Society for Genealogical Research magazine that the victim might have been Zebadiah Coburn Sr., who, around 1808, had departed on foot from Rutland headed for Rome, New York, to visit a son.
“He started to return on foot as he had come,” Mills wrote, but was never heard from again, and no news of his fate ever reached Rutland. He had another son in Guilford, New York, and if he also visited him, his return trip home would have been through West Stockbridge.”
The original story was reprised in “Once-Told Tales of Old New England,” a small collection published by Berkshire Traveller Press of Stockbridge in 1969. Richard V. Happel, Berkshire Eagle columnist, wrote the essay.
But he didn’t solve the mystery.
“They little knew, who loved him so,
The fearful death he met,
When shouting o’er the desert snow,
Unarmed, and hard beset;…”
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This essay is expanded from a chapter in the writer’s new book, ‘The Past Unmasked,’ in which he traces poet-editor William Cullen Bryant’s activities in Great Barrington and the Berkshires. The book is available through area independent book retailers.
