No. 513
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 24, 2020

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive.

March 24, 2020
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Via Newspapers.comFile this one under “Life’s random little oddities.”  The “Miller County Vidette,” May 6, 1875:A correspondent of the Toledo Blade, writing from Hastings, Michigan, says:About ten miles south of this place, a farmer, while driving some cows through a deep forest adjoining his fields, unexpectedly came upon an unusually large buck, stretched out upon the ground, and moaning
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Strange Company - 9/2/2026
  [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
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
 When John Keys and Eva Dickenson were married in Cincinnati on August 21, 1890, they told their relatives that they planned to honeymoon on the Atlantic coast, but John had another plan. He purchased an Ohio River shanty-boat and planned a slow trip downriver to St. Louis. It would not be their last deception; in fact, what transpired on that fateful journey would remain forever shrouded in
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Murder By Gaslight - 8/29/2026
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
"Assisted Emigrant" | An Irishman and a Yankee Settle a Dispute.

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive.

Stale Beer Dive

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive Late at Night in Mulberry Bend.

The low concert halls and stale-beer dives offer the fullest field for night mission work. These vile places are most often in cellars. The rooms are small, the ceilings low, and the air is always full of the fumes of tobacco and stale beer. The men are thieves, loafers and “crooks” often of the most dangerous order. The women are of the most degraded type. Here beer and spirits are sold in buckets, pails and bottles, and the inmates spend what they have earned, begged, or stolen for these vile drinks. Children are often sent to these places for liquor.


Campbell, Helen, Thomas Wallace Knox, and Thomas Byrnes. Darkness and daylight, or, Lights and shadows of New York life: a woman's pictorial record of gospel, temperance, mission, and rescue work "in His Name" .... Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington, 1897.