Eccentrically-arranged scrapbook predominantly containing newspaper clippings, patent medicine almanac advertisements, and comic valentines. Also contains scraps, trade cards, and labels. Clippings, many published in the sensational periodicals “National Police Gazette” and “Days' Doings” primarily depict illustrations of murders and violence, crimes and punishments, human curiosities, animal attacks, human peril, women in distress, evocative theatrical performances, acts of daring, cross dressing and comic scenes in silhouette.
News print showing the Philadelphia family murdered by their farmhand Anton Probst at their farm at Jones Lane in South Philadelphia on April 7, 1866. Probst, his face partially covered by the wall above the passageway, drags the body of one of the boys through it to the crib. The goateed murderer drags the boy by his feet, face up, from the pile of corpses laying on the hay covered floor. To the left of the image, Mrs. Dearing lays face down and covered by the bodies of her older children, who lay face up and with slit throats. Her hand is outstretched and resting on the baby, whose throat is also slit. To the right, in front of a barrel below a window, Mr. Dearing lays face up, a slit in his throat, his face covered by hay, and next to family friend Miss Dolan. She lays face down, her arms outstretched and her cross visible from beneath her body. Also shows, a pitchfork and ax propped against the wall in the background across from an opening to another section of the barn where cows stand in stalls. The murdered farmhand, Cary, is not depicted. Probst, a German immigrant and swindler, was a disgruntled former farmhand of the Dearings who murdered the family by hammer and ax for revenge and money. He was convicted in May 1866 and executed the following month at Moyamensing Prison for the largest murder in Philadelphia at that time., Not in Wainwright., Philadelphia on Stone, POS 361, Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Bb 892 D 285
Date
[1866]
Location
Historical Society of Pennsylvania HSP Bb 892 D 285
