No. 706
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
June 30, 2025

Allan Pinkerton.

The Eye that Never Sleeps.
March 27, 2012
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Dagworth Hall as it looks todayAs I believe I’ve mentioned before, medieval chronicles are a gold mine for those of us who like our history to be laced with a bit of the bizarre.  In between descriptions of wars, plagues, and other notable events, you are apt to suddenly find deadpan accounts of events that can be best described as barking mad.  Ralph of Coggeshall was a monk in
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Strange Company - 6/30/2025
Wouldn’t you love to have interviewed Lizzie’s physician, Dr. Nomus S. Paige from Taunton, the jail doctor, ? He found her to be of sane mind and we can now confirm that he had Lizzie moved to the Wright’s quarters while she was so ill after her arraignment with bronchitis, tonsilitis and a heavy cold. We learn that she was not returned to her cell as he did not wish a relapse so close to her trial. Dr. Paige was a Dartmouth man, class of 1861. I have yet to produce a photo of him but stay tuned! His house is still standing at 74 Winthrop St, corner of Walnut in Taunton. He was married twice, with 2 children by his second wife Elizabeth Honora “Nora” Colby and they had 2 children,Katherine and Russell who both married and had families. Many of the Paiges are buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Taunton. Dr. Paige died in April of 1919- I bet he had plenty of stories to tell about his famous patient in 1893!! He was a popular Taunton doctor at Morton Hospital and had a distinguished career. Dr. Paige refuted the story that Lizzie was losing her mind being incarcerated at the jail, a story which was appearing in national newspapers just before the trial. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Taunton, courtesy of Find A Grave. 74 Winthrop St., corner of Walnut, home of Dr. Paige, courtesy of Google Maps Obituary for Dr. Paige, Boston Globe April 17, 1919
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 5/24/2025
How did New Yorkers get through sweltering summer days before the invention and widespread use of air conditioning? Well, a lot of it depended on your income bracket. If you were wealthy, you likely waited out the summer at a seaside resort like Newport or on a country estate cooled by mountains or river breezes. […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/30/2025
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
A boatman working near the foot of Little Street in Brooklyn, on October 3, 1864, saw a package floating on the water. Thinking it might contain something of value, he took it into his boat. He unraveled the enameled oilcloth surrounding the package, and inside, covered in sheets of brown paper, was the trunk of a human body. The head, arms, pelvis, and legs had been cut off with a saw or sharp
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/28/2025
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 20 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge) oapy Smith's early empire growth in Denver.Operating the prize package soap sell racket in 1884. This is page 20, the continuation of page 19, and dated May 6 - May 29, 1884, as well as the continuation of pages 18-19, the beginning of Soapy Smith's criminal empire building in Denver, Colorado.&
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 6/1/2025
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
Buying the Christmas Turkey. | Burlesque Comes to America.

Allan Pinkerton.

نحن لا ننام أبدا

Allan Pinkerton, and the organization he founded in 1850, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, embodied all the traits that have come to be associated with the mythic American private detective. They were tough, honest, incorruptible, fair-minded, dogged and independent. The Pinkerton logo—a vigilant eye with the motto “We Never Sleep” –was the source of the term “private eye.” But not everyone has been pleased with Pinkerton’s work. Some detractors, then and now, have characterized the Pinkertons as little more than a private army for capitalists.

آلان بينكرتون

Pinkerton came to America from Scotland with his young bride at age 24 and set up a cooperage in Dundee, Illinois. After accidentally discovering a counterfeiting operation, Pinkerton contacted the sheriff of Kane County and assisted the sheriff and his men in arresting the counterfeiters. This series of events led Pinkerton to turn to a career in law enforcement and in 1849 became the first detective in the Chicago Police Department.

He left the police department less than a year later due to “political interference,” and after a brief but successful stint as Special Agent for the U.S. Post Office, Pinkerton opened his own detective bureau, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.  One of the company’s first clients was the Illinois Central railroad who had been plagued by train robberies. He was hired by the company’s vice-president, George McClellan; the contract was drawn up by Illinois Central’s attorney, Abraham Lincoln.

Pinkerton’s was not the first private detective agency in America. In an era with no national law enforcement and when state and city police forces were notoriously corrupt and inefficient, private forces had sprung up in most eastern cities. But these organizations tended to provide private substitutes for regular police functions such as recovering stolen goods.; Pinkerton’s was the first agency to specialize in the type of undercover operations commonly associated with modern detective work.

Pinkerton’s agency also differed from other law enforcement groups, public and private, in the high moral standards set for the organization and its operatives. In a document entitled General Principles Pinkerton outlined the company’s moral parameters:

"The Agency will not represent a defendant in a criminal case except with the knowledge and consent of the prosecutor;  they will not shadow jurors or investigate public officials in the performance of their duties, or trade-union officers or members in their lawful union activities; they will not accept employment from one political party against another; they will not report union meetings unless the meetings are open to the public without restriction; they will not work for vice crusaders; they will not accept contingent fees, gratuities or rewards. The Agency will never investigate the morals of a woman unless in connection with another crime, nor will it handle cases of divorce or of a scandalous nature."

وردي 2 Allen Pinkerton, Pres. Lincoln, Maj. Gen. McClernand

Following the Presidential election of his long-time associate, Abraham Lincoln, Allan Pinkerton uncovered a plot to assassinate the President-elect in Baltimore, en route to his inauguration. He convinced Lincoln to change his travel plans, probably saving his life. When the Civil War broke out, Pinkerton, who had always been an ardent abolitionist, rallied to the Union cause, volunteering his agency's services. He established the Secret Service, and supplied intelligence for another of Pinkerton’s old friends, George McClellan, now General of the Army of the Potomac.

After the Civil War the Pinkerton Agency, hired by railroad and express companies, actively pursued outlaw gangs and train robbers, such as the James gang and the Reno gang. “The eye that never sleeps” was well known to outlaws of the old west who had reason to fear the incorruptible and unyielding Pinkertons.

The Pinkerton name began to tarnish when the agency became involved in the labor struggles at the end of the 19th century.  In 1873 they were hired by the Philadelphia and Reading Railway, Coal and Iron Companies to investigate the Mollie Maguires, a particularly violent Irish-American secret society that had been terrorizing northeastern Pennsylvania in the name of labor reform. An undercover operation by the Pinkertons led to the arrest and execution of twenty Molly Maguire members. The question of whether these hangings were justified is still debated today.

In 1892, eight years after Allan Pinkerton’s death, the Carnegie Steel Company hired the Pinkertons to break a strike at the Homestead Steel Works, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Workers opened fire on a barge containing 300 Pinkerton agents. The resulting battle lasted several hours and caused the death of three Pinkerton agents and seven strikers.  Though they were outnumbered ten-to-one the Pinkertons have been portrayed as the aggressors. 

At the start of the 20th century, it became apparent that America needed a public law enforcement agency at the national level. In 1908 the Federal Bureau of Investigation was established, using Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency as its model. The Pinkerton agency still thrives today as Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations, a leader in the field their founder virtually invented.


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