by Kevin Murphy
The following Saturday, July 10, Constable Charles Nott arrested fifteen-year-old Jennie McQueeney for vagrancy on the grounds of Trinity College. “Squire” Gibbs, the black superintendent at the school, noticed that Jennie McQueeney “had been a frequent visitor of late upon the grounds and that ‘she sometimes brought a female companion, but more often one of the masculine gender, with her, all of which did not come up to his ideas of respectability.’ On Saturday, Gibbs ‘saw the young lady conducting herself with great impropriety . . . and he made great haste to warn her off the grounds.’ Jennie’s young male friend, who had been hiding in the bushes, emerged and took to his heels. Meanwhile, Jennie McQueeney remained on the grounds for some time.” Gibbs was angered by Jennie’s brazen behavior and made a complaint to the police, who quickly arrested her. At length, the police discharged Jennie because of her age and the fact that the evidence against her was flimsy at best.[45]
This incident is fraught with questions. Obviously, Jennie McQueeney wandered onto the Trinity College campus to meet boys. Was this a legitimate attempt to find a boyfriend above her station in life, or was her behavior as questionable as “Squire” Robert Gibbs thought? Jennie McQueeney would turn sixteen in late September, and considering that she behaved with great impropriety, was this her first clumsy attempt to trade sex for money? Perhaps she was willing, but couldn’t figure out the language or the maneuverings of the trade?
Furthermore, her refusal to leave the grounds when asked seems troublesome. Perhaps Jennie acted in the confrontational way that the McGuires and the McQueeneys always attacked life’s little problems. Did she hold Mr. Gibbs in low regard because he was just a grounds keeper or a black man—or both? Lastly, to what end? Did Jennie McQueeney lose respect for law enforcement, or at the very least, learn to keep the constables at arm’s length? The answers to these questions will unfold as we examine Jennie McQueeney’s choices in the years ahead. Interestingly enough, many of the answers are hidden in this little incident.
Helping us with these probing questions is Dr. William Sanger’s study of prostitution, a text that was published the same year that Officer Nott arrested Jennie McQueeney on the grounds of Trinity College. Dr. Sanger’s 2,000 questionnaires became the History of Prostitution. In it, Sanger came to some surprising conclusions. If one can accept Sanger’s results, 26 percent attributed their entry into prostitution to “Inclination,” while another 26 percent adjudged that it was “Destitution.” Only 13 percent blamed it on “Seduction or Abandonment,” and a final 9 percent claimed that “Drink” was the problem. Given the chance to comment, Jennie McQueeney would probably have attributed equal amounts of “Inclination” and “Destitution.”
When Howard Woolston asked the same question of 1,000 prostitutes in 1921, fully 25 percent of his sample blamed the “Influence of a Procurer.” Another 21 percent pointed to “Bad Home Conditions,” and 18 percent and 17 percent, respectively, laid it to “Bad Company” and “Love of Finery. . . . ” Jennie McQueeney undoubtedly fell under the diabolical influence of Angeline Prentice, a prostitute and madame, who we will meet shortly. That said, in Jennie’s case, “Bad Home Conditions” seemed a strong contributor and Jennie’s deprived childhood made her a natural for the “Love of Finery” category.
One last curiosity is children. Virtually all prostitutes deal with pregnancy, abortion, and children in their lives. The Morals Efficiency Commission of Pittsburgh in 1913 reported, “Out of 558 prostitutes, 406 had never had any children. Of the 152 who had, there was but one living child.” The report continued, “The sentimental delusion that many women entered upon prostitution after betrayal, in order to provide for their child, is almost utterly unfounded.”[46]
On Friday night, July 30, Jennie McQueeney’s mother, Jane, got drunk again and disturbed the whole neighborhood with her boisterous and obscene language. The watchmen picked her up about midnight and put her in the watch-house until morning. In police court, Judge George Gilman found Jane McQueeney guilty of breach of the peace and fined her $1 plus court costs. He also gave her fifteen days imprisonment at the workhouse. Aloud she snapped, “And what’s to be done with the children, Judge? His honor shot back, “They will go along with you if they can’t be taken care of without your help. You will learn to let rum alone after a while, I reckon.” Jane McQueeney countered, “I’m drunk without tasting rum at all, Judge; I get drunk on water, so I do.” The Courant reporter mused, “Mrs. McQueeney will have a chance to try the “rum,” which will be furnished to her gratuitously for the next fifteen days.”[47]
The bad economic times forced the McQueeneys to move to a cheaper rent in the old Lafayette Hotel at 22 Market Street on the north side of the Centre Schoolhouse. At the time, city officials were purchasing buildings on the opposite side of Market Street so the tenements could be razed and Market Street widened. This street continued as a bizarre collection of tenements and businesses—everything from cheap hotels, livery stables, blacksmith shops, fish dealers, and billiard halls.
At a meeting of the common council in December 1856, the men of the night watch demanded a raise. They were up to $1.25 a night, but in Waterbury the going rate was $1.50, and in New Haven, $1.75. With rents and fuel costs rising, the men of the night watch couldn’t wait any longer.[48]
In other business, the city fathers gave permission for a businessman to open a billiards parlor north of the Centre Schoolhouse, allowing the children to gaze out the window and watch billiards all day instead of learning their lessons. Meanwhile, in early 1858, three black men—John Bowen, George Brown, and Sampson Eaton—broke into the Market Street smokehouse of Joseph Woodruff and stole thirty to forty wood-smoked hams. Woodruff testified, “a little later, on January 28, someone entered the smoke house using a false key and stole eighty hams; moreover, on February 8, the door was broken open and another six to eight fancy hams disappeared.” All of these men lived in the disgusting tenements on Ferry Street near the Connecticut River.[49]
The Panic of 1857 hit Hartford particularly hard and Timothy McQueeney—on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder with loads of other laborers, porters, hostlers and hackmen—was affected badly. The Courant took stock in 1860, “The scarcity of money, as well as credit, still hangs heavily over this fair country. A merchant in this city, who for forty-two years has been a purchaser of goods from the southern market . . . tells us that never before in spring or fall has he found it so difficult to promptly forward his goods. . . . Moneyed men, with large available means, and who have in days past been able to lend their money at 12 to 15 percent per annum, find it difficult to know what to do with it; and in the matter of other investments, it is still more difficult to suit this class.”[50]
The McQueeneys were out of options. They decided to join their relatives in Providence where jobs might be more plentiful. By June 1860, the McQueeneys were en route to Rhode Island. Jane McQueeney and four of the five girls left first. Three of the girls found lodging with Timothy McQueeney’s brother, James, a forty-five year old bachelor, while Jane and another daughter found a small place nearby. Timothy McQueeney remained behind, living with his widowed sister, Bridget McQueeney Mahon, and her children—a few doors north on Market Street.
Not surprisingly, Jennie McQueeney broke with her family and started a life of her own in Hartford.
Chapter 2
Entering the Oldest Profession
Eighteen-year-old Jennie McQueeney did not go to Providence. She remained in Hartford determined to chart her own course. Jennie’s trouble with her parents has already been mentioned and this abrupt break with her family—including eight-year-old Katie—showed an iron will, but how would such a young girl survive?
While Jennie McQueeney’s parents and siblings began anew in Rhode Island, this stubborn teenager met another Irish immigrant five years her senior, Angeline Prentice (nee Bridget Creed), who became a lifelong friend, in spite of the fact that she was a terrible influence—no matter how her life was scored. Ma
ny decades later, in an effort to break Jennie’s will, Angeline claimed that she and her husband at the time, Billy Prentice, met Jennie in 1861 and started her in the prostitution business. Jennie lived with the Prentices in a roadhouse on the New Britain road just outside Hartford. Angeline also claimed that she met Jennie’s future husband, Tom Hollister, in 1863 and gave him his start too![51]
Angeline’s generosity knew no bounds when she was telling the story. As we shall see though, Angie was a prostitute, a madame, a thief, a liar, a home-wrecker, and had every ugly trait a person could possess. Strangely enough, Jennie called her a friend right up to the end—though she seems to have purposely left Angeline out of her 1893 will. Most probably, Angeline’s scheming ways proved too much for Jennie as the younger woman ran her 76 Wells Street parlor house alone and endured serious illness in the last six years of her life. Taking care of her husband, Tom, in the years before he passed in 1894, simply added to her burden.
Jennie worked for Angeline for a few years, until she could open a bawdy house in her own name. While she made plans, she got to know Tom Hollister quite well and he helped her get away from Angeline.
Tom Hollister came from a big family, in part, because his father, Joseph Hollister, had two wives. Joseph Hollister had been a New York City policeman, but eventually turned to farming in Amenia, New York, just across the line from Kent, Connecticut. In New York, three children were born before his first wife died. Later, Joseph Hollister found a young widow, Louisa (Phinney) Waters, living in Farmington, Connecticut. He quickly arranged the proper introductions and the couple began a new life in Farmington.
Louisa was originally from Hartford. In 1825, the couple resettled on Washington Street in the Charter Oak City. Joseph Hollister first worked in Hartford as a laborer. He eventually bought a small farm on Hudson Street where he raised vegetables and three- and four-year-old prize-winning milch cows. Since Joseph Hollister’s new father-in-law, Ebenezer Phinney, worked as a wholesale produce dealer, the younger man never had any trouble unloading his crops at good prices. Despite the farm, Joseph Hollister always considered himself a policeman. (Joseph Hollister may have worked the city’s night watch or some other supernumerary function, but there are no records to back this up.) In the mid-1850’s, he became a messenger of the city court, a job that lasted until his death in 1857. Joseph and Louisa Hollister, at length, had eight children. Thomas Adams Hollister, born on December 17, 1830, came into the world sixth in line. Counting his three half-siblings, Tom Hollister was ninth in a string of eleven children.[52]
After Joseph and Louisa Hollister were settled in Hartford, Trinity College—called Washington College until 1845—had just completed Jarvis and Seabury Halls, but still didn’t have enough dormitory space. Louisa Hollister organized a student boardinghouse on Lafayette Street in 1836 and continued in the business for the next seventeen years. During Louisa Hollister’s last five years in business, her establishment housed only faculty members. From 1848 to 1853, Trinity’s Rev. President John Williams made his home at Mrs. Hollister’s boardinghouse.
Tom Hollister always had an agreeable personality and possessed an exceptional baritone voice. When young, he sang in concerts. After completing a rudimentary education, he drifted into laboring jobs until he saw Drake, Brown & Company’s advertisement in the Courant for an apprentice bookbinder. Though he wasn’t the “16 year old . . . country boy” that Sidney Drake had in mind, Tom Hollister applied for the job at Drake, Brown’s High Street offices and quickly became Hartford’s newest apprentice in the book binding business. Four years later, Sidney Drake and John Parsons formed a partnership based on the stock and customers of the hard-working, wiry bookbinder, Silas Andrus, on Asylum Street near Union Station. In the early months of 1858, Drake & Parsons took wing in Silas Andrus’s new building at 254 Asylum Street (Andrus block).[53]
After Tom Hollister finished his apprenticeship, he relocated to New York in an effort to parlay his newfound training into something of real value. But New York proved a tough place to rise in the business and Tom Hollister only stayed a year. When he returned to Hartford, around the time of his thirtieth birthday, he resumed his career binding books. Tom Hollister always referred to himself as a bookbinder, but when he returned home just before the shelling of Fort Sumter, he began a slow drift into the prostitution business. As stated, Angeline Prentice took credit for getting Tom Hollister started in the business of running brothels in 1863. Since Billy and Angeline Prentice were running a roadhouse beyond the incorporated limits of Hartford and Tom Hollister’s first house of ill fame was on State Street, Angie’s boast seems improbable. However, in the absence of hard evidence, perhaps it could be allowed that Angie did offer some help.[54]
When the police arrested Jennie McQueeney on the Trinity College campus, the public and the constables saw prostitution as a necessary evil; they also thought that keeping it behind closed doors was the best course. Armed with this general consensus, the elected officials at the highest levels of government were loath to close down houses of ill fame in one mighty raid, only to expose the citizenry to the curse of streetwalkers. Men would be propositioned many times each day, and their wives and daughters would not be able to leave home for fear they would be taken for streetwalkers as well.
As a bizarre example of a city hobbled by streetwalkers, consider the case of Jennie Crane of Hartford’s lower East Side. Jennie was quite a curiosity in her way. She stood before the police court on Friday, February 14, 1900, for the fiftieth (50th) time! Her face had become as familiar as family.
Jennie had been arrested for nightwalking. She got hilariously, gloriously drunk and then walked the streets in search of a man to share her joy. The police and the court officials had gotten so used to seeing Jennie hauled into court that they missed her if she failed to return after completing her thirty days in jail.[55]
Between the streetwalkers and the shorthanded and ill-trained police force, the decision to leave bawdy houses alone didn’t require much thought. Obviously, the proprietors of these houses had to maintain a certain level of decorum, but the scofflaws had no trouble working within such simple strictures.
In larger cities of the Northeast, like Boston and New York, police courts had been in place since the early 1800s. Smaller towns still relied on justices of the peace to deal with minor infractions of the law. All civil cases, for example, were tried before a justice of the peace. Criminal cases went directly to superior court. This produced a system where miscreants were brought before justices of the peace instead of bona fide judges. The system cried out for improvement.
So said, a number of different proposals were discussed at common council meetings in the 1840s, dealing with all aspects of crime and punishment. In December 1845, the council passed a resolution appointing a committee to examine the duties of watchmen, with an eye toward abolishing the system altogether. Another proposal suggested the abolishment of the watch warden, spreading his duties among the other watchmen. After much consideration, the council had misgivings and tabled the motion.[56]
After a decade of veronicas and half veronicas by the common council, the dry goods merchant, Albert Day, and a number of other men, asked the common council to petition the legislature for the right to organize a police court. In July 1851, the General Assembly granted the motion and as one councilman noted, “The legislature yesterday, passed an act authorizing this city to have a police court. . . . We now [have[ the anomaly of arresting offenders by city constables, trying them before state officers, and committing them to town or county prisons.”[57]
Buried in the legislature’s act were some specifics: The clerk of the police court must post a $2,000 bond; judges were to serve one year; and the court had jurisdiction over all crimes and misdemeanors punishable by a maximum fine of $200 or six months imprisonment in the common jail, watch house, or city penitentiary. Meanwhile, the common council agreed that judges should be paid $400 per annum and court clerks would receive $300. The p
olice court would transact business six days a week at City Hall—on Market Street between Kingsley and Temple Streets—and justices of the peace would surrender their powers to the new city police court judges.[58]
Eliphalet Bulkeley accepted the first appointment to the police court. Judge Bulkeley eventually founded Aetna Life Insurance Company and fathered four children, including Morgan Bulkeley, a man who later served as mayor of the city for eight years, acted as governor of the state for four and, lastly, served as one of Connecticut’s U.S. senators for six—from 1905 to 1911. Morgan Bulkeley became the most powerful Republican politician in the state, and after he had served as governor, he was instrumental in building the new Hartford Bridge and ridding the city of all types of vice in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Now that Hartford’s police court was up and running, one lawman summed up the prostitution dilemma succinctly, “The inmates of a house of ill fame are arrested, tried, and sentenced to the workhouse for thirty days . . . and, yet, in less than a week’s time, the same individuals are again in the city, pursuing their old avocations . . . and the police have been foiled in their attempts to make our city more respectable and peaceful. . . .The police don’t want to be party to such child’s play. . . .When gambling saloons, with their attendant evils, are permitted to be kept on every corner . . . and when houses of prostitution are allowed to be opened in the very heart of the city . . . within the toss of a biscuit of the residences of our most respected and influential citizens, it is time that we should awake from the lethargy. . . . With an increase of population as rapid as that which we have experienced for the past few years, there will necessarily come an increase in vice and our citizens will be wise if they make provisions at the outset to keep it in check.”[59]
