They poisoned deadbeat husbands, tossed unwanted infants out of tenement windows, and chopped off the heads of lovers. They shoplifted and forged checks. And their misdeeds led them to a temple on a hill in Ossining, New York—the state’s premier housing project for gilded age female malefactors.
There’s was a tarnished corner of the gilded age preserved for posterity in a photograph…
Aprons were all the rage for New York’s naughty demimonde. On a stereograph card produced by G.W. Pach sometime between 1871-1875, five female inmates of Sing Sing’s sister prison take a break from sewing buttons to pose in their prison-issued couture. They don’t look entirely happy, which is understandable in light of their milieu.
This G. W. Pach stereograph from 1870-1875 captures the mood inside “Mount Pleasant” Female Prison. A “sister image” exists depicting four black female convicts in front of the same barred window.
These jail-hens inhabited the women’s wing of the Sing Sing Prison complex in Ossining, New York, which housed female inmates during its forty-year lifespan. According to some sources, the “Mount Pleasant” portion of Sing Sing marked the first time an American prison contained an all-female complex. It was also unique in that it was overseen by an all-female staff of matrons, which all but eliminated the ubiquitous issue of rape by horny guards or male inmates.
It was just such a seedy scenario that led to the construction of “Mount Pleasant” in the first place.
Rachel Welch—a convict in Auburn Prison—was raped and subsequently impregnated while confined in an isolation cell. Welch later died in childbirth, her cause of death cited as an earlier whipping she received for misconduct.
“Mount Pleasant Female Prison” opened for business in 1839.
The Greek Revivalist structure, sometimes called the “Temple of Tragedy,” sat on a bluff overlooking the men’s prison and with a majestic view of the Hudson River in the valley below.
The matrons ran a tight ship. They closely supervised the day labor, which consisted of making buttons and stitching them onto clothes. Inmates who misbehaved faced a menu of punishments that would be downright Draconian by today’s standards. These penalties ran the gamut from mildly humiliating (hair cropping) to moderately painful (gagging and straight jackets) to severely torturous (long periods of confinement in isolation cells and flogging).
From its construction in 1839 until is closure in 1877, the building was home to inmates who ranged from those with sticky fingers to some of the state’s most dangerous women, including disenchanted wives who used arsenic to arrange divorces and distraught mothers who perpetrated horrific infanticides.
Inside the prison, the sound of children’s cries echoed off of the marble walls. During the prison’s lifespan, several inmates gave birth and were allowed to keep their children with them in their cells.
When the female prison was closed in 1877, the remaining inmates, including seven lifers, were transferred to the Crow Hill Penitentiary in Brooklyn.
The all-female penitentiary fell to the wrecking ball in 1919 to make way for the new men’s prison. The Sun ran an interesting “obituary” as the marble building came tumbling down.
So, who were these five forlorn females who posed for photographer Gustavus Pach and achieved immortality in his stereograph? Identifying them would be akin to finding a name in a hay field of genealogical documents. But, a study of head matron Rebecca A. Townsend’s report from the one-year period of September 1869 to September 1870 reveals who they might be.
In that year, “Mount Pleasant Female Prison” housed 166 convicts, most of them short-timers serving a year or two for larceny. Seven were serving life sentences for murder: Jane Brooks (convicted in 1863), Elizabeth Higgle (1866), Polly Frisch (1859), Mary E. Johnson (1865), Catherine Johnson (1868), Henrietta Robinson (1855), and Mary Tuttle (1857).
These women led interesting lives behind bars.
Mrs. Henrietta Robinson was known by the morbid epithet “Veiled Murderess” because wherever she went during her trial and subsequent imprisonment, she wore a heavy veil. Convicted of murdering two of her friends by spiking their ale with arsenic, the “Veiled Murderess” was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life behind bars. After eighteen years inside “Mount Pleasant,” she lost her mind and was transferred to the Auburn Lunatic Asylum. While there, she wiled away her time by creating a set of false teeth out of buttons, although no one would ever see her ersatz dentures; she continued to conceal her face with the heavy veil up until her death in 1905 after fifty years of confinement. Then, and only then, was the veil raised.
Convicted slayer Jane Brooks hated prison and wanted out, so she hatched a unique plan for midnight run. She created a false key, managed to unlock her cell with it, and darted into the night. Her “furlough” ended forty-eight hours later when detectives found her in Matteawan and dragged her, kicking and screaming, back to her cell in the “Temple of Tragedy.”
Did one of these lifers pose for Mr. Pach? With the exception of the “Veiled Murderess” who refused to show her face, it is certainly possible that one of the photographer’s models poisoned her husband, burned down a building, or smothered her child.
It is also possible that Pach photographed one or more of the prison’s escape artists, who periodically gave authorities conniptions with their clever schemes.
In 1870, Mary Smith and Sarah Ann Christian decided to parole themselves and went over the wall in a simple plot remarkable for its simplicity. The enterprising pair stole civilian clothes from the matrons’ lockers and simply walked to the Ossining Depot and boarded an outbound train. At the time Matron Townsend penned her report in December 1871, they had yet to be captured. They might have been captured for posterity, however, by Gustavus Pach’s camera.
Mary Brown, a kleptomaniac also known as Frances Stanley, engineered an audacious escape that would become a classic of Sing Sing lore. While a sheriff deputy escorted Brown from the courthouse to “Mount Pleasant,” a passerby in on the plot tripped the deputy, giving the veiled Brown enough time to switch places with a stand-in who was wearing identical clothing including an identical veil to cover up the switcheroo. By the time the deputy recognized the ruse, Brown had simply walked away. Investigators later collared her at the house of a friend (and former inmate of “Mount Pleasant”) named May Little. To add insult to injury, they tossed Brown into Little’s former cell.
Her escape, it appeared, was too little, too late.
Another female convict made an Escape-from-Alcatraz style escape by fashioning a dummy in her likeness and sneaking away in the night. Another shimmied down a rope she smuggled into her cell under her prison-issued dress.
Any one of them—lifer or escape artist—could be glaring at the camera when Pach snapped the photograph. Nevertheless, the photograph captures a slice of life inside one of the Gilded Age’s gilded cages.
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