The Disappearance of Victory Ploof
The hills were on fire.
It was the spring of 1877, windy and dry. In West Jay, Vermont, Mitchell Ploof was at work in his clearing when he smelled smoke and heard a rustling in the undergrowth.
Rabbits. They poured out of the forest, “whole droves” of them running, and there were other animals too, squirrels and chipmunks.
The fire followed, ten minutes behind. It torched the treetops and swept through the clearing, fanned by a roaring wind. The deadwood blazed. Saplings blackened and burst.
Afterward Mitchell told the papers about the rabbits, how they’d fled across the clearing. They didn’t believe him. “This story sounds a little ‘fishy,’” the St Albans Advertiser remarked, “but we give it for what it’s worth.”
Two years later, and Mitchell was back in the papers. Again his world had collapsed and this time without warning. His daughter Victory, three years old, had disappeared while gathering beechnuts. She was missing, probably dead. Foul play was suspected.
* * *
Mitchell Ploof was born Michele Plouffe in the province of Quebec but adopted an anglicized version of his name after relocating to Worcester, Massachusetts.
Ploof was one of an estimated half-a-million French Canadians who settled in New England in the years after the Civil War. They weren’t always welcome. Migrants from Quebec typically spoke French, which slowed their integration into New England Society, and their Catholic beliefs were commonly viewed with suspicion.
In Worcester, Mitchell Ploof met Mary Bruno, another French Canadian immigrant. They married in 1868 and four children followed: Henry, George, Frank, and Melvina. Their fifth child, Victory, was born in 1876.
Around this time, Kimball, Brainard, and Company opened a sawmill and tray factory in West Jay, Vermont. The mill was located 2 miles from the village of East Richford at an elevation of around 1,500 feet.
The terrain was mountainous and wild, thickly wooded, but the factory promised steady employment. Lumberjacks and woodchoppers felled trees in the surrounding forests then dragged them to the mill for processing. Millworkers stripped the branches and burned them in kilns to make charcoal as well as acetate of lime, a dye fixative. The trunks they cut and sent to the adjoining factory to be fashioned into wooden trays.
A settlement formed, grew quickly. Mitchell Ploof and his family were among the many newcomers to the region, arriving in 1876 or 1877. They boarded in West Jay at the home of an elderly French Canadian woman named Julia Papineau, described in some sources as a “half-breed,” indicating First Nations ancestry.
Papineau was a longtime resident of the area as was her neighbor John Bell, who had been in West Jay since at least 1860. Bell was said to “[bear] a bad reputation” among the locals and may have resented the latest wave of incomers, the Ploofs among them. Later reports would hint at a feud between the two families, but it seems the men were able to resolve their differences, as their children often played together in the woods and clearings of West Jay.
By 1877 the factory and sawmill had been in operation for over a year, and the woods about West Jay must have resembled a moonscape of stumps and deadfall, shrubs and bracken edging into deeper shade. In April of that year a meteor flashed over Jay Peak, and in May, the wildfires swept through, burning the felled timbers and driving the rabbits into Mitchell’s clearing.
The Ploofs welcomed a sixth child, Alexander, in April 1878, and around one year later, their relationship with Julia Papineau turned sour. The reasons for this aren’t known, though it seems the old woman threatened the Ploofs, who made plans to move out.
Mitchell started work on a log cabin. He acquired a tract of land in the woods around 550 yards uphill from the Papineau House and there he set to work felling trees, hewing timber. He fashioned walls from cut logs and sealed the gaps with mosses which his children collected in the nearby woods.
October 21, 1879 was a Tuesday, snow on Jay Peak and winter fast approaching. Mitchell spent the morning working on the cabin while his boys played with the Bell children.
At half-past-ten, the three oldest Ploof boys went up toward the clearing to gather moss, accompanied by their youngest sister, three year-old Victory, who followed them outside though she had no shoes or hat and was sick with whooping cough, besides. Her mother may have thought the air would do her good.
Near John Bell’s farm, the track passed by a stand of beech trees. Frank Ploof, who was six, spied the burred husks of beechnuts amid the leaf-litter and stopped to collect them. The older boys went on without him and Frank was left behind with Victory.
He was angry, took it out on his sister. Go home, he told her, then slapped her face and ran after his brothers. Victory was alone among the beech trees, their long shadows, dead leaves rattling.
The Ploof boys returned home for dinner at noon and Mary asked after their sister. Where was she? But the boys didn’t know and neither did Mitchell. No one had seen Victory -- not since Frank had left her in the beech trees -- and that was 90 minutes ago.
The Ploofs must have been near-panic. Victory was scarcely older than a baby. She wasn’t dressed properly and the weather was changing, the sky gone dark with scuds of snow. Time was short. The family raised the alarm.
The community’s response was extraordinary. Kimball & Brainard closed its doors for the day so that “all hands” might attend to the search. Workmen formed lines to beat down the brush. They set dogs to the scent and called her name into the woods.
Victory was last seen at half-past-ten in the morning. At that time John Bell was at work in his fields less than 100 yards away. He saw nothing, he said, heard nothing. Later that afternoon, however, he observed animal tracks near the beech trees, which led him to speculate that a bear had attacked the child and carried her off to its den.
The other men scoffed at this suggestion. The tracks were nothing like a bear’s, they said, and there was nothing to indicate an attack had taken place, no blood or torn clothing, and besides, she hadn’t even screamed. Bell would have heard her.
It was getting late. The day’s shadows lengthened down the mountain, joining with the dusk. By nightfall Victory had been missing for 10 hours. Searches continued into the night but the weather was against them. Temperatures dropped and snow accumulated, “several inches” by some accounts, enough to hide her footprints.
Search efforts on Wednesday the 22nd proved similarly fruitless despite the presence of 125 searchers while Thursday the 23rd saw the largest of all the search efforts with 400-600 men sweeping the area of Bell’s Farm and Ploof’s clearing.
Tuesday, October 28th marked 1 week since Victory’s disappearance. That morning, a party of investigators arrived in West Jay, consisting of Justice Green, Attorney Grout, and Sheriff Gallup of Orleans County, as well as the selectmen of Jay. These men were charged with discovering the facts in Victory’s disappearance and with making arrests as appropriate.
Foul play now appeared increasingly likely. From The Vermont Gazette:
In view of the extensive search [...] and the absence of any clue whatever the presumption is fair that the child was watched, and upon the disappearance of the older children, was either carried away or killed [...]
It wasn’t at all unknown. In May 1874, for instance, fourteen year-old Jesse Pomeroy of South Boston was arrested for the murder of four year-old Horace Millin. He had lured the boy away from his home and killed him during daylight. The motive was thought to be sexual.
Such things happened, in other words, and Orleans County investigators already had a suspect in mind.
John Bell was 100 yards from Victory when she disappeared and had no alibi for the time in question. He didn’t help himself either as he continued to insist that Victory had been attacked by a bear even after this suggestion was widely discredited.
Officials placed Bell under arrest and searched his house and property but without result. They arrested Julia Papineau too as she was known to have threatened the Ploofs in the past. Relations with her lodgers remained poor and she was likely made to endure greater scrutiny on account of her race.
A public hearing was held in West Jay at which Bell and Papineau denied all involvement and Bell’s son Edson came forward with new information.
Edson, who was 10, told the Justice his father had sent him to the Papineau House to borrow a sickle between 11 am and noon on the morning of Victory’s disappearance. The boy entered the house and was surprised to find a well-dressed man seated at the table and writing with a pencil in a notebook or “medium-sized diary.”
Edson didn’t recognize the man, hadn’t seen him before or since. It was implied that the stranger had traveled to West Jay by prior arrangement and taken Victory away with him.
The hearing erupted. Mary Ploof was called and questioned as to the man’s identity, but she broke down sobbing and wouldn’t answer. He’s lying, she said, meaning Edson, and maybe he was, but nothing could be proved and Green released them all.
He had little choice, really. No evidence was found to implicate anyone, nothing at all to suggest what might have happened to Victory after her brother slapped her, and told her to go home, and she didn’t.
* * *
The hearing adjourned without official finding. No charges were laid, but for many in West Jay, Mary Ploof’s emotional outburst was taken as an admission of her guilt. The community turned on her, the papers too. A child was missing. Someone must be to blame.
From The Sun newspaper:
Suspicion also attached to the mother of the child, who is reported to be very quick tempered and apt to strike one of her children when angry with anything upon which she can lay her hands. Many persons were of the opinion, and are so still, that in a moment of passion she struck the child a fatal blow, and then hid the body to cover up the crime.
Other rumors circulated. Mary had staged a kidnapping. Mary had sold the child. Mary was an adulteress who had returned Victory to her biological father.
He’s lying, Mary had said of Edson Bell, and nobody believed her, but in the days that followed, it emerged the boy had probably mistaken the date. More likely he had visited the Papineau House on the 24th, rather than the 21st, in which case the well-dressed stranger was almost certainly a journalist.
But the damage was done. From The St. Albans Daily Messenger:
The belief now is that [Victory] has either been accidentally or otherwise killed and secreted, or that she has been kidnapped or given away by her parents’ consent, the latter for the purpose of creating sympathy and aid in their extreme poverty. The child is without doubt in good keeping, and is being better cared for than it could have been with its parents.
This characterization of the family is essentially inaccurate, perhaps informed by anti-French prejudice. Certainly there’s no reason to suppose the Ploofs were incapable of caring for their children and a correspondent for The Richford Gazette even felt compelled to respond to these allegations in print.
The assertion that [Victory] has been given away by her parents’ consent… is as devoid of truth as the writer is of intelligence. While they are not wealthy, the Ploofs are as well-to-do as people generally in their locality and they have never asked aid of any one.
The day after the hearing, October 29, one Mr Paine of Hardwick, Vermont learned of Victory’s disappearance and recalled an incident of one or two days previous.
A couple passing through Hardwick knocked at his door and asked to warm themselves at his fire. Their little girl was ill, they said, whooping cough. The girl looked to be around three years old. The family remained at Paine’s house for a short time only but he remembered the incident, thinking it strange, and wired the details to authorities in Orleans County.
In East Richford, lumbermen at the Buck & Stevens sawmill recalled a similar incident. They were at work on October 22 when an unfamiliar man and women passed by on foot in the company of a young girl. The child appeared to be frightened of the man and wouldn’t consent to be carried by him.
Authorities traced the mysterious couple from East Richford down to Eden. From there it was assumed they had continued on foot to Hardwick, stopping at Paine’s house on the 27th or 28th. It seemed a promising lead, but it came to nothing. The unknown man was eventually identified as a drifter named Charles Guilder. The girl was Guilder’s own daughter.
Early in November multiple newspapers reported the discovery of a child’s body in the woods of West Jay. It wasn’t true. The papers retracted the story and there was no further news until mid-November when police in Boston telegraphed to Richford.
Authorities believed they had the “Ploof girl” in their custody after a young girl was abandoned in a local boarding house. Police even asked Mitchell to travel to Boston to confirm the identification, but it doesn’t seem he made the trip, as the girl’s mother came forward and confirmed she wasn’t Victory.
Winter settled. Snow fell in the camps and clearings of West Jay and Victory’s name vanished from the papers. The final published mention of the “Ploof child,” as she was generally known, appeared in The Swanton Courier in January 1880:
The lost Ploof child at West Jay has never been found, and the affair remains a deep mystery. Not one trace has ever been discovered of the child, and how she could have been taken away without a faint trace of her is an enigma. The excitement long since died away. It is said that her mother feels quite indifferent about it, and does not allude to her child. Many believe she knows where the child is, and may have given it back to its true father.
The Ploofs ignored the gossips. They remained in West Jay for another 20 years, outlasting even the tray factory, which burned down in 1882. They did leave, though, in the end. Their daughter Rosa, born in 1885, died in 1898 from a hemorrhage following a tooth extraction, aged 13. Soon afterward the Ploofs returned to Massachusetts.
The 1900 census found them living in Grafton. The Ploofs’ responses to the census taker indicate Mary had birthed 11 children of whom 7 were still alive. Victory, 21 years gone, isn’t included among the living.
Mitchell passed away in 1917, followed by Mary in 1937. They are buried together in Northbridge, Massachusetts.
Victory Ploof has no headstone. No record of her birth survives, either, nothing to indicate she existed at all. In the absence of records she remains unknown, unknowable. She is fixed in time, a figure from an old photograph: three years old at the time of her disappearance and she doesn’t age, only fades. Half past ten on an autumn’s morning and Victory is alone among the beeches.
Her face is red and swollen and she’s crying. Her neighbor John Bell approaches. Don’t cry, he says. He takes her hand, leads her away. Afterward he hides the body and returns to work. He knows he will be suspected, attempts to deflect attention from himself. He invents bear tracks where there are none and coerces his son Edson to come forward with his story of meeting a strange man at the Papineau house.
That is one possibility.
Or, alternatively, maybe Bell was right. Maybe it was an animal attack.
Two years prior to Victory’s disappearance, a story circulated in the Vermont papers describing in vivid detail how one Thomas Peggington of East Richford was attacked by a “panther” or catamount in the early hours of April 19, 1877. Peggington was unarmed but wrestled the wild cat off a rocky ledge onto the frozen ground below. He hit his head, lost consciousness. Hours later he awakened and found the catamount had slunk off into the woods.
The Peggington account is likely apocryphal. The unusual name of “Thomas Peggington” isn’t found in state vital records or in other newspaper accounts of the period, while the catamount was at that time extremely rare in Vermont.
If true, however, the Peggington story suggests a catamount may have ranged near East Richford as late 1877. West Jay was, of course, just 2 miles distant, the settlements divided from one another by a dwindling swath of hill and woodland. After 1877 the forests continued to shrink and the catamount -- if there was one -- might have resorted to hunting near the camps and settlements. In West Jay it stalked the forest’s margins and found Victory beneath the beech trees, kneeling, digging with her fingers in the dirt.
It makes for a compelling, if wholly unlikely, narrative. Animal attacks, child abduction, staged kidnappings, adulterous affairs… stories like these may help to sell newspapers, but for many in West Jay, it was plain enough from the start what had happened.
Something like this:
Frank Ploof doesn’t turn around. He disappears into the trees and Victory goes after him. She reaches the woods but doesn’t see him, keeps going. He must be up ahead, she thinks, but he isn’t. She loses the path and starts to run, scared now, a rabbit in flight and no one pursuing her. Dinnertime comes and goes, and it’s colder, the air awash in wind and flurries. The shadows lengthen and run together and the woods are all one darkness. Her feet are numb. She seeks for shelter in a cleft rock, a hollow snag.
She’s still there.
* * *
This episode was sourced from public records and from newspaper accounts of the time appearing in The St. Albans Daily Messenger, The St. Johnsbury Caledonian, The Burlington Free Press, and The Vermont Chronicle, among others.
Researched and written by Daniel Mills. Music and theme by Jon Mills.
