Dynamiting the Echo Chimney
The final chapter in Commonwealth v. Russ
This is the eighth in a series on Commonwealth v. Russ. Prior installments are here, here. here, here, here, and here.
The jury deliberated for twenty-three hours, before convicting Oscar Russ of second degree murder1 on February 9, 1916.
Four months later, in June of 1916, the defense submitted a motion for a new trial on the basis of newly-discovered evidence.
The evidence appeared in an affidavit from Clara Woodin:
I, Clara Woodin, on oath hereby depose and say my name is Clara Woodin and I live with my husband, Albert Woodin, at 11 Elmwood street, Roxbury, Mass. I do housework by the day.
I am of German nationality and on the twenty-third day of August last, on the morning of that day, which was Monday, I was looking for a tenement which would be near the Plant Shoe Factory where my son was then working.
I left my home, which was number 8 Dunlow street, Roxbury, and went through Centre street toward Columbus avenue, and I saw a “ to let “ sign between the doors in the house numbered 178 and 180 Centre street, bearing the name of O’Connor I saw in the window of the lower suite of the building, numbered 178 Centre street, a tall light-complexioned woman with yellow hair.
She was dressed in a kimono which had some kind of pink trimming down the front and had either pink flowers on a gray ground or gray flowers on a pink ground.
I could see her nightdress under the kimono which she kept partially closed with her hand. I asked her where the tenement was which was to let and she said she did not know unless it was in some of the other houses as Mrs. O’Connor had more than one house. I went into the building numbered 180 and spoke to Mrs. O’Connor who came to the head of the stairs.
I asked Mrs. O’Connor if she had any tenements to let and she said not just then, but she expected to have one on some other street. I have forgotten the name of that street, but I did not care to go and see that tenement.
I saw about the death of Mrs. Russ in the Boston American on the day following.
When I rang the door bell at number 180 a boy came to the door. I had left my house at Dunlow street at about twenty-five minutes past seven or half past seven and it was about twenty minutes later that I saw the woman at 178 Centre street. I did not know Oscar F. Russ or any of his people at this time.
I have not talked about seeing Mrs. Russ to anyone because I did not want to get drawn into the case and I knew my husband would not want to have me brought into it. I learned that Mr. Murray was counsel for Mr. Russ from the newspaper accounts at the time of the trial.
I had intended to see the District Attorney first but changed my mind because I thought I might be of some advantage to Mr. Russ. My family consists of four people, my husband, who is employed at present by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, and a son named Leslie Sandwell, who was then employed by the Plant Shoe Factory and who now works for the Bay State Cloth Steaming people. My other boy, Elmer Woodin, attends the Dudley School.
Taking a critical eye to the above, let’s see whether it rings true.
Albert Woodin, a teamster, lived at 8A Dunlow Street, Roxbury, in 1915,2 and Elmwood Street in 1917.3 “Leslie Sandwell” was born to John Sandwell and Clara Sandwell, born Riedel, originally of Germany, in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1897.4
By 1920, there was a family in Framingham, Massachusetts, consisting of Albert Wooden, wife Clara, and Albert’s stepsons Leslie and Elmer Standwell, and step-daughter-in-law Caroline Sandwell.5
Clara existed. The people in her affidavit, existed.
The description, next.
Emilie was described by witnesses as having light brown hair. She was “tall” for a woman, at 5’9, notably so – average height for a woman born around 1900 in the United States was 5’0.6
Clara recalls a grey and pink kimono. The medical examiner and police testified that the kimono was white with red. There were no descriptions of the kimono in the press; however, it was entered into evidence at trial, so anyone in the courtroom would have seen it.
The front doors at 178 and 180 Centre would have been just far enough apart to put a “to let” sign between them; the windows at 178 Centre. This wasn’t a visit to another building, confused, after years, with one that seems similar.
Mrs. O’Connor had been mentioned in the press, as landlady. It was not explicitly mentioned that she lived next door, although it was plain she lived nearby. That said, witnesses are often asked to give their address on the stand. Her name and address also appear in newspaper advertisements, concerning furnished rooms to let.
It all feels true, doesn’t it. The problem is:
If, a hundred and nine years later, with public records in one hand, newspaper clippings, and trial transcripts in another, I can look and say “this rings true,” that means that someone who’d sat and watched the trial, and knew the neighborhood, could’ve constructed it from whole cloth.
We can consider the circumstances, perhaps: The affidavit was signed in June. Four months after trial. Oscar was confined in the Charles Street Jail. He hadn’t been sentenced yet. Appeals were in process.
The timing is wrong, for despair and panic.
It is about right, for regret. A witness who wished-they’d-said. Maybe watching the papers after trial to see if someone else would come forward first, and do the hard work, instead.
We can’t know.
Perhaps, let’s roll things back. All the way to the beginning. Or even further.
Maybe all the way back to the third decade of the nineteenth century.
Roxbury is a farm town, mostly, with suburban fringes.
A railroad that crosses the town, from east to west, and a fort at the top of a hill, leftover from the revolutionary war. Small scale industry is starting to accumulate along the banks of Stony Brook, a shallow, flood-prone tributary of the Charles River.
Many of these ventures are typical. Breweries. Mills. Distilleries. Smaller factories. Beer, liquor, fabric, lumber. The kinds of things one might imagine, when thinking about this period.
Also, though, chemicals.
By 1832, this small town had three separate chemical works. One was known as ‘the Laboratory’ just north of the Dedham Turnpike. There was a lead factory on Davis Street, by the canal.
And Roxbury Colour & Chemical Works7, where Stony Brook meets Centre Street. Roxbury Color & Chemical produced, at various times, Prussian blue8 , white lead, red lead, sulfuric acid, muriatic acid, nitric acid, nitrate of lead, and alum.9
The wooden buildings comprising the works frequently caught fire, or exploded. The fumes were acknowledged as a source of sickness. Industrial accidents were common, and gruesome.
After a few decades of operation, Roxbury Color & Chemical Works was required to erect a massive chimney to alleviate the effects on the neighborhood.
Construction was fraught. Scaffolding collapsed when the brickwork reached a height of one hundred and eighty feet. One man was killed, two mangled, and one stuck, suspended, with two broken legs, until new scaffolding was erected.
When complete, the chimney reached a height of two hundred and seventy five feet. It wasn’t enough. People, animals, were still getting sick. The chemical works closed in 1857. The wooden structures were demolished. The equipment was auctioned off.
The chimney, however, remained.
It was a tourist attraction. A word, shouted into the chimney would reverberate twelve times. A gunshot sounded like thunder. They called it the Echo Chimney.
After a while, though, the chimney became distressingly unstable10. Cracks appeared. Bricks fell, with greater frequency. An attempt was made to demolish it, using barrels of gunpowder, hung with ladders. It was hailed as a success, although it wasn’t – all it did was take the top hundred feet or so off the tower.
A few decades later, a second attempt was made.
This time, dynamite was used. The Boston Globe reported:
The tall brick chimney of the Roxbury chemical company, which for years stood on a high ledge on the Sargent estate at the corner of Columbus ave extension and Center st. Roxbury was blown down yesterday afternoon by dynamite. At the same time, about 75,000 tons of rock were thrown out in the upheaval. The ledge had been cleared away up to the point where the chimney stood and to cause this to fall so as to clear the ledge was the idea of the contractor.
[...]
Close observers say the first force of the dynamite was seen about midway up the chimney, where a number of the outside bricks were knocked off. The bricks fell in a heap off the face of the ledge, and all that remained of the old “echo” chimney was a small section on the northerly side, about 20 feet in height.
[...]
With the fall of the chimney the ledge was quickly overrun with relic seekers….An examination of the ledge showed the tremendous force exerted by the dynamite. Blocks of stone weighing hundreds of tons were thrown up from their resting places and set out where they can be utilized...Mr. Coleman has three years to clear away the ledge, and when the land is cleared it will be placed on the market.11
During the day, I do occasionally work with tradesmen, engineers, architects, and the like, including people who handle environmentally-sensitive cleanup and demolition.
However, I’ve declined to ask whether it is a good idea to use dynamite to blow up the highly porous, brick-and-putty chimney of a chemical plant, whose products included three kinds of lead, and the brightest and prettiest and most cheerful cyanide and arsenic compounds12.
Oscar Russ was a painter.
He’d been one for seven years, he testified at trial.
One of the tasks that he performed, on August 23, 1915 — as he did many, many times before — was “breaking up the lead13.”
This was done by mixing white lead, in either a powdered or paste form, with pigment, linseed oil, and solvent. A witness testified this took him about a half hour.
How much lead? A fuckton.14 Generally. A grand imperial fuckton15.
A hundred pounds of lead, mixed with three gallons of linseed oil, and an equal quantity of turpentine, and maybe a bit of another solvent, made ten gallons of paint. After the paint was mixed to an appropriate consistency, and opacity, pigment could be added until the right hue was reached.
A study published two years after the Russ trial found that of four hundred and two painters, one hundred and sixty-three had “active lead poisoning” characterized by “definite clinical signs of plumbism.16” An additional thirty-five had levels of lead in their urine suggesting poisoning, without reported symptoms.
Notably, certain key indicators of lead poisoning in other populations — a lead line on the gums, and paralysis of the hands and wrists — were less frequent in this group than expected.17
Lead poisoning in the wives of housepainters had been observed and described, clinically, by 191418. The mechanism was believed to be laundry. Wives would wash lead-dust covered overalls, exposing themselves to high levels of lead.
Lead accumulates in the bones. The risk of lead poisoning is particularly acute in the post-partum period,19 and for breastfeeding women, because of exposure to past, bioaccumulated lead as a result of weight loss and physiological changes. Exposure to lead dust is also more dangerous when fasting, as lead is more bioavailable when exposed to stomach acid.
Lead poisoning in adults can cause symptoms such as stomach pain, constipation, fatigue,20 anemia, headaches, depression, hallucination, paranoia, and seizures.21
Oscar Russ was sentenced to life in prison in October of 1916.
Despite Ms. Woodin’s affidavit, he did not get a new trial. He appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, as of right. His appeal was denied in 1919.22
He was pardoned on parole conditions23 in 1939, at Christmas. He died of lobar pneumonia, secondary to heart disease24, in Alexandria, New Hampshire, in 1959.
Second degree murder is an intentional killing, without “deliberate premeditation” or “extreme atrocity or cruelty,” per the instructions given the jury by Judge Sisk.
Boston Valuation Records, 1915. Book 95, Page 412.
Index to Assessor’s Poll Tax Book, 1917. Page 343.
Corrected Birth Certificate, Leslie John Standwell, issued by William E. Gilmore, town Clerk of Manchester, New Hampshire, on August 30, 1929.
United States Census, 1920.
See, e.g., Russ Appellate Record, Autopsy Report.
Property history and land use are usually fairly easy to trace. Here, that was incredibly not the case.
There were three complicating factors:
(1) Suffolk County, Massachusetts, the county consisting of Boston, Winthrop, and Revere, has deeds indexed and searchable back only to the 1970s. The parcel at Highland Street and Center, however, was part of a regulatory taking in the 1960s, for the never-built Southwest Expressway, and hasn’t changed hands since, so there was no starting point;
(2) Roxbury was annexed by Boston in 1868. Before that, Roxbury was in Norfolk County, which complicated tracing a chain of title forward from initial ownership;
(3) The Echo Chimney — which was a big deal from roughly 1860 to 1872 — when written about, was rarely written about in connection with the Chemical Works.
A cyanide compound.
Much, but not all of the information on operations comes from this report, written in 1856.
Perhaps because people kept shooting guns into it, for fun.
Old Echo Chimney Demolished, Boston Globe, November 26, 1899.
Flues and chimneys used in processing lead were known to get so coated with the metal that enterprising thieves would climb up and scrape the walls, at their great peril. See Oliver, T., infra. at Footnote. 6.
Oscar did this, it’s reported, before lunch.
“Recipes” for various tints of lead paint are available here, at page 50, though targeted to homeowners.
Much information on lead — because its use was never hidden, but rather promoted — is available on archive.org.
Harris, Louis I, A Clinical Study on the Frequency of Lead, Turpentine, and Benzin Poisoning in Four Hundred Painters. Archives of Internal Medicine, August, 1918.
By 1930, lead poisoning was known to cause remarkably varied symptoms.
Oliver, Sir Thomas, Lead Poisoning, from the Industrial, Medical, and Social Points of View, Lecture at Royal Institute of Public Health, 1914.
Another thing that occurs in the post-partum period: Post-partum depression.
Lead poisoning has been theorized as a factor in Vincent Van Gogh’s suicide.
There is a very odd notation, in the appellate record, that Judge Sisk permitted Oscar Russ to remain at Charles Street Jail, rather than going to prison, because thought it very likely that the verdict would be overturned on appeal.
This seems to be a way of release-without-exoneration, before there was much flexibility in sentencing.
Heart disease is a frequent cause of death for lead-exposed adults; it’s also a frequent cause of death for everybody else.