Alice and Emeline (Alice Meaker, Part 1)
An old man died and left two children, a boy and a girl. No one wanted them. Their father settled them on the town and the town sent them to the poor farm.
The boy gave no trouble, but the girl proved difficult, old enough to remember what she’d had, what was taken from her. The overseer of the poor farm described her as “a very hard child to manage… obstinate, cunning, mischievous, and disobedient.”
He didn’t like her. Didn’t believe her when she accused a neighbor of attempted rape. The man was questioned and released and the town determined to be rid of the girl, her brother too. Letters were written, a price negotiated. $50. That’s how much the overseer agreed to pay a half-brother to assume the care of his younger siblings.
The girl had little to pack, few possessions of her own save for a hat given to her by a cousin and a small china mug from her mother. Remember me, its inscription read, and she did, a year later, after drinking poison from the same cup.
“Mother!” she cried, but no one wanted her, no one came.
* * *
Alice Meaker was nine years old when she died of strychnine poisoning in the spring of 1880. Three times she called out for her mother before falling quiet. Possibly she meant her biological mother Mary Meaker, who had gifted her the china cup, or perhaps her sister-in-law Emeline Meaker, with whom Alice had lived for eleven months prior to her death.
Emeline Lucy Meaker was 40 in 1879 but appeared much older, haggard and gaunt, withered by a life of privation and hardship. She was the seventh of twelve children born in Barre to Asa and Phebe Bates. At eighteen she married Horace Meaker, an itinerant farm laborer, then followed him from town to town in the early days of their marriage, going wherever there was work.
They ended up in Plainfield, where in 1858, their daughter Nellie was born. They purchased a property in town which they traded for another and they were living there when they welcomed their second child, Cecil, in 1859. A year later they sold up and returned to Barre. Horace worked as a farmhand while Emeline stayed at her sister’s with the children.
Another son, Almon Lewis, was born to the couple in 1861, but Cecil contracted diphtheria in October of that year and died before his second birthday. By then the country was at war, and the next year, Horace enlisted in the Sixth Vermont infantry. He was away for years, fighting at Marye’s Heights and Gettysburg, leaving Emeline to raise the children and work her father’s land. She plowed fields, hauled sap in springtime.
Horace was discharged in May 1864 with a surgeon’s certificate. Pension records indicate he suffered from “epileptic fits” resulting from heat stroke, as well as unspecified “wounds.” He was awarded a small pension and sent back to his family and the transient life of an unskilled laborer.
His health never recovered. In later accounts he is described as “sickly” or “feeble,” and by the 1870s, he was nearly deaf. Emeline’s hearing also suffered. She lost the use of one ear and then the other until she was reduced to reading lips, words scratched on the slate she carried with her.
The cause of this shared hearing loss isn’t known but could have been related to severe malnutrition or infectious disease, such as syphilis, which would have been common enough among returning soldiers. Some were even placed into quarantine, as at the “syphilis house” in the town of Waterbury, just across the river from Duxbury, which is where the family finally settled in 1878.
Horace spent his pension to mortgage the Deline farm west of Duxbury Corner. Nellie was 21 and living near Barre but seventeen year-old Almon remained at home to help his parents about the farm. Almon’s reputation, locally, was that of “simple-minded” or “mentally deficient” young man, inclined toward religion, who attended the Sabbath School in Waterbury, while Emeline was said to be a “virago,” given to angry outbursts and frequently described as “ugly” or “coarse,” not a proper lady, as it was understood.
Social niceties were likely beyond her. Emeline had known no life but toil, took no pleasure but in her tobacco pipe. She churned butter and peeled potatoes, baked bread and scrubbed the linens, and when Horace was sick, as he often was, she worked the fields in his place.
In her own words:
I have worked out doors a good deal ever since I was married, I used to work sugaring for father when Mr. Meaker was in the army, have carried 50 buckets of sap in a day, have done much other farm work, planted potatoes, held the plow, shoveled manure […]
40 years old in 1879 and already she was spoken of as an “old woman.” Farming had aged her prematurely, would be her death, and Horace was likely thinking of his wife and of his own infirmity when he received a letter from Joseph Barton.
Barton was Overseer of the Poor in Charlotte and wrote to Horace in early 1879 concerning his half-siblings Alice and Hilie Meaker, currently residents of the town poor farm. Horace’s father Orrin was a widower who’d married again in old age and fathered two children with the much younger Mary Haight. Orrin’s daughter Mary Jane, called Alice, was born in August 1870, with a son Henry, called Hilie, following in July 1872.
Orrin died in or around 1874. Their mother Mary wasn’t considered “a fit person” and the children were placed instead at the poor farm. This was apparently Barton’s decision and he later justified it, saying of Mary, “her character for chastity has always been bad” and that she had “abused the children formerly, when they were under her control.”
The rural institution of the poor farm was similar to that of the Victorian workhouse in that it offered long-term housing to the elderly and disabled and a home of last resort to those who couldn’t support themselves or had nowhere else to go. Conditions were unsanitary and often harsh with the overseer permitted to whip residents or withhold meals as punishment.
Alice and Hilie Meaker spent four years there. Hilie behaved himself, mostly, but Alice wouldn’t settle. She was beaten, probably starved, and in 1877 or 78, she accused a neighbor of attempted rape. State’s Attorney C.S. Palmer interviewed the accused but ultimately let him go, convinced Alice had fabricated the entire incident.
Barton was of the same opinion. The overseer regarded Alice as a troublesome child, and after four years, he was likely anxious to be rid of her. To this end he wrote to Horace and proposed an arrangement whereby the town would pay Horace $50 if he consented to take in Alice and Hilie and raise them until they were of age.
$50 in 1879 would be equivalent to only around $1,000 in 2020, but the children themselves had value, the work they’d do: pulling weeds, picking potato bugs. Hilie was young but could drive the plow in time while Alice was already of an age to help with housework.
They needed the help, could do with the money. Horace agreed to bond himself to his siblings’ care, and on May 5, 1879, Barton accompanied Alice and Hilie to Waterbury. Horace “appeared well,” Barton thought, and he handed over the children without reservation, returning to Charlotte while Horace drove them back across the river to Duxbury and their new home, new mother.
Only she didn’t want them. Horace meant well, maybe, but Emeline was furious. Hilie she could just about abide, but she disliked Alice intensely, instinctively, resenting the girl her youth or the life that lay before her where Emeline’s was nearly spent, wasted in farmwork and childbearing.
The injustice angered her. God had taken Emeline’s son from her but had preserved this girl that no one loved and no one would miss. The months passed. Emeline’s resentment curdled into hatred.
She despised the girl, called her “Grandma.”
Alice called Emeline “Mother.”
* * *
The old Deline farm encompassed 50 acres on the Duxbury side of the Winooski River and included two houses situated a quarter-mile apart. The Meakers lived in one house and rented out the other.
In the spring of 1879, this second house was occupied by Charles Armington and his fifteen year-old daughter Jennie. Their place had a clear view of the Meakers’. Mornings Jennie would watch Alice and Hilie leaving for school and sometimes spied Alice with Emeline, the old woman always looking “very cross,” as she remembered, though Jennie had no reason to suppose anything was wrong.
Not until summertime, anyway, one evening after haying, when she heard a girl’s scream from the Meaker house, followed by a percussive sound like “sticks striking on folks,” as the beating went on, and the wind sang in the hayfields.
Jennie’s father wasn’t home. He didn’t hear the whipping, not then, but there were other beatings, countless others. Emeline worked Alice hard and would punish her mercilessly she acted out or failed to make herself useful.
Charles Armington witnessed one incident in which Emeline struck Alice repeatedly with a piece of shingle and wouldn’t stop though the child cried and pleaded. Emeline told the girl she’d “better mind,” that she’d “whip [her] to death and not leave [her] alive.”
Such beatings were common. Early one morning, around eight o’clock, a Waterbury man named Cliffus Drugg stepped out of his house. He had his axe with him and intended to do some wood-chopping but heard a commotion from the Meaker place across the river.
Alice was outside with Emeline. The old woman battered the girl with a broom-handle, swinging it one-handed then taking it in both hands to strike Alice about the head and shoulders.
Drugg called to his wife, who came outside, and the Druggs were joined by neighbor Richard Thorndyke. They didn’t intervene, just watched. Heard Emeline call Alice “a “damned little bitch” and threaten to kill her again if she wouldn’t listen, “wouldn’t mind.”
Neighbor Harvey Henry witnessed multiple incidents of abuse during the summer and fall of 1879. Emeline thrashing Alice with a stick. Emeline grabbing Alice’s throat or dragging her by the hair, chasing after her with a barrel-stave.
On one occasion, Henry’s team drew up outside the Meaker farm and Alice and Hylie dashed out to meet him. Emeline wasn’t far behind. She snatched at Alice’s ear and lifted her off the ground by it, saying, “I’ll learn you to run out every time a team comes up.”
But Alice got away, somehow, and fled up the hill behind the farm. Emeline gave chase but fell behind, then rounded on her husband, saying, “What in hell did you ever bring that thing here to torment me?”
That was at harvest-time, mid-September 1879. Later that month, the Armingtons left Duxbury for Northfield but not before Charles lodged a complaint of child abuse with the town’s Grand Juror Willard Atkins.
Atkins would take no action. He didn’t want to become involved, it seems, and neither did Frank Atherton, a sheriff’s deputy and lifelong resident of Duxbury, who lived about a mile upriver from the Meakers.
Around the time Charles Armington contacted Atkins, Richard Thorndyke approached Atherton. “Something ought to be done,” he said, “in regard to Mrs. Meaker abusing the little girl.”
Atherton had recently purchased the farm from his father and was acquainted with the Meaker family. Horace, Atherton recalled, was “feeble, but most always busy,” while Emeline was a “hard working woman” who took in washing but rarely left the house on account of her deafness.
He’d seen the children only once, piling fieldstones on Scrabble Hill, but that was enough, it seems, because he didn’t take the allegations seriously. Thorndyke made his complaint, and Atherton, by his own admission, “paid no attention to it.”
The snow swirled and settled, softened and ran.
In the winter of 1879-80, Almon Meaker, now 18, took steps toward trading the Duxbury property for a larger farm in Waterbury. Meanwhile he came to a temporary arrangement with Joseph Somerville of Duxbury Corner by which the family would take over Somerville’s farm in the village until the Waterbury trade was concluded.
In later years the details of this proposed trade were cited as evidence that Almon wasn’t in fact “a dull fellow” or “intellectually below par,” as was widely believed. However an unsigned letter to The Montpelier Daily Journal implies Almon was being cheated: that he had agreed to pay $1,800 above the assessed value of the Waterbury property and was only prevented from signing the agreement by “the interference of a man who had some mercy for him.”
If Almon wasn’t “mentally deficient,” he was certainly naive, a child at age 18, and his relationship with Emeline was, unsurprisingly, close. Certainly he shared his mother’s antipathy toward Alice, remarking that “she wasn’t a very good girl” and “hard to get along with.” He must have known about the beatings but it appears he wasn’t bothered, just got on with things.
They all did: Willard Atkins, Frank Atherton, Harvey Henry. Few took any notice of the Meakers or of the children in their care. Not until the family moved to the Duxbury Corner within walking distance of Waterbury. Their neighbors at the Somerville Farm included prominent local figures such as Duxbury’s town clerk and treasurer Eber Huntley as well as Jacob Foss, who’d recently replaced Willard Atkins in the role of Grand Juror.
Joseph Somerville’s son Nathan was of much an age with Almon and employed by the Meakers as a day-laborer. His time he spent in the barns, mostly, working alongside Almon and Horace, but he was also obliged to call into the house on occasion.
At a certain time I went to the house, Alice was playing in the house with the cat, Mrs. Meaker spoke cross to her about the room she was taking up; Alice would frequently read picture books; one day she was reading and Mrs. Meaker was very cross with her when she wished to go change her book; Mrs. Meaker told her to go out and pile wood in the shed, and she did go; the child always obeyed commands as though she was frightened; I never saw her have any playthings or amusements at all.
The Huntley family occupied the house opposite the Somerville Farm. Husband and father Eber Huntley had little interaction with the Meakers, though he took notice of Alice, recalling how “she would stand in the window some times, watching the children at play in my yard.”
His wife Minta made multiple visits to the Somerville Farm, thinking to welcome the new neighbors. First time she saw Alice in the yard with Hilie, digging potatoes, but the next time, she found Alice in tears, sobbing, until Emeline sent her out. Minta’s own daughter Myrtie was 10 years old, Alice’s age, and Minta returned to the Somerville Farm for a third time with the intention of befriending Alice. In her words:
“The third time I went there Alice was reading when I went in; she was quiet and Mrs Meaker paid no attention to her; I put my hand on her head, and asked her why she didn’t come over and play; she made no reply.”
Another version says she didn’t speak but only “smiled sadly,” as though she knew it were impossible, that Emeline wouldn't allow it. She might also have distrusted Minta, the woman’s apparent kindness following a lifetime of indifference and abuse.
The woman who beat her. The man who assaulted her. The Overseer who despised her, who could withhold meals as punishment.
And it was happening again. Many in the village remarked on Alice’s thinness and small stature. Minta described her as “frail-looking” while Nathan Somerville chanced to overhear a whispered exchange between Alice and Hilie Meaker in which the boy admonished his sister for “losing” her supper.
Nathan interpreted this to mean she was being starved, presumably as a punishment for misbehavior, as seems likely, because Emeline couldn’t whip the girl, not like she used to. After all, the Huntleys were just across the road -- always watching, listening -- while Grand Juror Jacob Foss lived nearby and had the power to lay charges if he were minded.
She felt trapped. She spared the rod and starved the child but it didn’t help. The days passed and the hate inside her deepened, having no outlet, building like the waters pent by an earthen dam, ice-hard in winter then showing its cracks as April warmed the snowfall into rain.
Send her back, Almon said, but it was impossible. Horace had taken Barton’s money, given his bond. He’d pledged to keep the children until they were grown and Alice was only nine. For Emeline the years stretched empty before her, cold and lifeless as deep water, and Alice, that thing, like a weight about her neck, pulling her down.
She kicked herself free.
* * *
In April 1880 George Turner lived in Duxbury Corner within one hundred yards of the Somerville Farm. He was acquainted with Horace Meaker, who told him that “he had taken some children off the town, and wanted to find some place to put them out.”
Turner expressed an interest. His wife needed help round the house and a little thing like Alice would be no trouble. A few days later Turner spoke with Horace and confirmed the Turners were indeed interested in taking Alice “on a trial.”
That was April 22nd, a Thursday. Saturday the 24th dawned cold and clear, wind from the north and frost on the ground when Nathan Somerville arrived to work at the barn. Almon was there already and the young men busied themselves in putting up the grain, making ready for sowing.
Emeline appeared, told them Alice was gone. The girl’s bed was empty and some clothes were missing. She’d run off in the night, Emeline said, stealing out of the window while the house was sleeping.
Horace was found and informed. He thought immediately of George Turner and of the arrangements he’d made for Alice’s trial. He called at the Turners, thinking he’d find her, but it was no good: George Turner hadn’t seen Alice and neither had Minta Huntley.
Minta’s husband Eber was out at the time of Horace’s visit but returned home at noon to learn of Alice’s disappearance. The girl was lost, perhaps, hungry and cold, but the Meakers made no attempt to alert authorities or even to mount a search. Instead they saw to their usual chores about the farm while the Huntleys watched, increasingly concerned.
Nathan finished his work and went home. Nellie Meaker arrived at the farm, visiting from Orange. Afternoon darkened into twilight and Alice didn’t come home. Sunday came and she was still missing. Eber questioned Horace, who admitted he hadn’t seen Alice since Friday night. The girl had been missing for 36 hours and her family had done nothing to find her.
The Huntleys were angry, suspicious. They told their neighbors who told their friends and soon the news had crossed the river to Waterbury, where new facts emerged.
On Thursday evening the 22nd Almon Meaker stopped in to H.F. Bates’ stable in Waterbury to arrange the hire of a horse and carriage for Friday evening. The next day he returned to Waterbury after 8 pm and visited W.E. Carpenter’s drug store where he purchased a small quantity of strychnine, explaining he needed it “to kill rats in the buttery.”
From Carpenter’s store Almon walked to the stable to collect the carriage he’d hired. Bates harnessed his black mare and readied an open buggy with raised or “booted sides.” The men made conversation and Almon mentioned he intended to drive toward Stowe along the Little River. He would need feed, then, which Bates provided, filling a bag with oats and western corn and sending the boy on his way. Almon drove off, returned the buggy seven hours later.
These stories reached the Meakers’ neighbor Jacob Foss, who might have harbored his own suspicions. Foss had recently succeeded Willard Atkins as Grand Juror for Duxbury and was likely aware of the abuse either because of Charles Armington’s complaint or because of his teenage daughter Gertrude’s friendship with Charles’ daughter Jennie.
In fact the two girls had visited the Meaker house only a few weeks before. On that occasion they had found Emeline in the pantry and spoke with her there when Alice came in crying, probably on account of hunger. Emeline told the girls “she didn’t think it was right to keep her,” meaning Alice, “that she was going to send her away.”
A week later, Alice was gone.
Monday morning Foss called at the Somerville place and pleaded with the Meakers to look for Alice. He even offered to pay the costs of a search himself, but Emeline was unmoved.
“If she had chosen to go off,” Emeline said, “she might stay; they wouldn’t go after her.”
A few hours later, Foss returned to the house, this time accompanied by Eber Huntley. Again the Grand Juror urged the Meakers to make a search. Again he left unsatisfied.
From The Argus and Patriot:
At about tea time on Monday afternoon Mr. Foss visited the Meaker’s again; told them that people were accusing them of a dreadful crime, and that they must hunt the child up and produce her, or there would be trouble made at once. Under this exhortation Almon Meaker, the son, seemed to exhibit some feeling, but he said nothing. The mother appeared as unconcerned as ever.
Not long after this meeting, Jennie Armington arrived at the Meaker house along with a friend named Carrie Gaborie. Emeline came out to greet them. Foss and Huntley had unsettled her, it seems, as she appeared upset and was plainly in no mood for visitors. She “supposed that she and Horace and Almon would have to go to jail,” she said, adding, “she knew where the child was, but Almon didn’t.”
Almon wasn’t at the farm. The boy was in Waterbury at the time of the girls’ visit, attending to errands with his sister. Eber Huntley and Jacob Foss also had business in Waterbury. They were intent on “making trouble” as they’d promised, and had crossed the river to seek legal advice at the offices of attorneys E.F. Palmer and William P. Dillingham. An investigation, plainly, was required, and the lawyers advised the two town officials to send for Deputy Sheriff Frank Atherton.
It was early evening, perhaps seven o’clock. Atherton, a farmer, would have been finishing his supper and getting ready to turn in when he learned he was needed in Waterbury. He left his house without delay and drove to Palmer and Dillingham’s. There he met with Huntley and Foss, who told him of Alice’s disappearance, of the family’s refusal to search for the girl, and of Almon Meaker’s actions on the 23rd: the strychnine he purchased, the buggy he hired.
Atherton agreed to make inquiries. The worst, it seemed, had happened, and he was himself to blame, at least in part. He thought of Richard Thorndyke’s complaint of abuse, his own failure to act, and of the young girl he’d seen on Scrabble Hill. Gathering fieldstones, as he remembered. She filled a tinpan with them which she emptied into the Winooski, watching the stones disappear as the river swept over them, indifferent as the whips that struck her or the weight of water over her where she lay, a year later, two feet deep in the grave they all made for her.
Episode 10: Alice Meaker Part 1 was sourced from public records and newspapers of the period, including The Vermont Watchman and The Argus and Patriot as well as Steven R. Hoffbeck’s academic paper “Remember the Poor: “Poor Farms in Vermont,” which appeared in the journal Vermont History in 1989.
Music by Jon Mills. Researched and written by Daniel Mills.
