NEWCASTLE — I told myself not to be disappointed.
It’s going to be an old painting, probably not that large. Mostly likely showing its age. Probably a typically stilted pose rendered a bit awkwardly by an itinerant artist of the late 1800s.
I followed the painting’s current owner from the living room and into another room. She gestured at a large combination desk and shelf, made from gorgeous tiger-stripe maple.
“That’s his desk,” she said. “We ended up with that, too. It’s really old, maybe late 1700s. It’s made with nails, not screws.”
I blinked at the extraordinary piece of furniture, then followed her on around the corner.
“That’s him,” she said, gesturing toward the far side of the room, not that she needed to.
There was no question whom I was looking at, the instant I caught sight of one of the most powerful and strange portraits I’ve ever seen.
I was face-to-face with Old Gorum — one of them, anyway.
As detailed in a previous History Knox column, the flood of 1913 wrought havoc on the Knox County village of Brinkhaven, destroying a third of the community. A family of three was lost in the flood, and searchers were unable to locate the bodies of the Workmans and their baby boy, even as flood waters receded.
The brother of the missing man finally turned in desperation to a supernatural solution: Old Gorum.
“Old Gorum,” or spelled properly, Gorham (or sometimes rendered as Goreham), was a famous fortune teller and psychic who lived in the Coshocton County village of Newcastle, near the Knox County line.
In fact, the name referred to two Gorhams, father and son, who openly pursued their occult trade for over 75 years in rural central Ohio.
The father, William Gorham, was born in Kent, England, and learned his skills there, before moving to the United States as a young man. He lived for a time in upstate New York, in or near Cooperstown, before moving to Zanesville around 1830, and finally to Newcastle soon after.
Perhaps it is no surprise that — considering Gorham’s occult pursuits — when he got married in 1840 to Sarah Scott, it wasn’t in a church. The local justic of the peace married them.
In his early decades in Newcastle, Gorham can be found with his profession listed on federal census reports as first “day laborer” and later “plasterer.” But by the 1880s, Gorham’s profession is officially listed by a census taker with poor spelling skills as “astroliger,” indicating that by this point in his life, fortune telling was not something he did for fun or as a side job.
It’s how he made a living and supported his family. Period reports say that every Sunday, presumably after church, people from all over the region would travel by wagon, buggy, or carriage to Newcastle and form a line outside Gorham’s home, going in one at a time or in pairs to go up the stairs to the small upstairs room where Gorham would read their fortune for 25 cents.
For a premium of 50 cents, he’d even write it down for you on a piece of paper. He also invited folks to sign their names on the walls of the little room. Later reports said that every square inch of the walls was covered with layers of names left by satisfied customers.
Gorham was not just a local celebrity. He received letters from all over the United States asking for his otherwordly insight to problems and concerns. Gorham would ponder their cases (and, presumably, what money they sent), and write them back with mystical answers.
But if word of Old Gorham spread through newspapers, the press also spread the news of an occasion when he blew it in a big way. As reported in the recent History Knox column about Eddie Berger, a 9-year old Knox County boy went missing in the winter of 1876.
But there’s an additional detail that I held back for this column: After searches for the boy turned up no leads, Eddie’s father went in desperation to visit the famous psychic Billy Gorham in Newcastle. The psychic considered the case and robustly assured the grieving father that his son was alive and warm, and would soon be found.
That was profoundly untrue, for the boy had died of exposure the same day that he disappeared, though his body was not found until the spring thaw.
Had Gorham simply been trying to ease a distraught parent’s grief?
No one can say for certain, but the false hope created a situation where a con man was able to fleece David Berger of money by claiming that he knew where the boy was at, but that he needed money to travel there and obtain the boy’s release. The con man disappeared with Berger’s money, and Old Gorham’s reputation took a tumble.
While William Gorham passed away in 1889, he had trained his son Ebenezer to continue his trade as an astrologer and fortune teller. As the years passed, Billy’s shortcomings were forgotten as “Ebbie” built his own reputation, becoming himself known as “Old Gorham” in time.
Ebbie’s greatest triumph was the prognostication that the bodies lost in the 1913 Brinkhaven flood would be found in the mill race for Thompson’s Mill, as indeed they were.
Does this mean that Ebbie was a true psychic?
Well, too little evidence survives to declare these cases one way or another. As History Knox reader and frequent canoer of the Mohican River Irv Oslin commented, perhaps Gorham had a basic grasp of hydraulics, something that not many had in those days.
If Gorham knew the lay of the land around Brinkhaven, and — more importantly — the path of the river, he could well have figured out by a simple notion of fluid mechanics the most likely place for those bodies to have been washed.
All that is known for sure is that father and son managed to more-or-less maintain their reputations for well over 50 years in one of the most unlikely trades ever pursued in rural Ohio. The startling portrait of the father makes it clear that his presence was intense and otherworldly.
I came to see this painting after Knox Pages was contacted by a county resident who said that she was in possession of the painting, which was sold off at the estate auction of Ebbie Gorham in 1920.
I telephoned the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, and asked if I could come see the painting and photograph it for this column. She said that she’d be delighted, so we set up a time for me to visit.
As it turns out, she is married to a descendent of the person who originally purchased the painting. She and her husband took the painting, and Old Gorham’s desk, when no one else in the family wanted them. In fact, before its current prominent hanging, the painting had been stored in a hallway, behind a door.
As I looked at the portrait and felt its eyes follow me around the room, I could understand why some people would be uneasy with the subject’s piercing gaze.
The first two things that shocked me were the size of the painting and its style. This was clearly not the work of one of those itinerant painters that crossed the American countryside in the 1800s, painting pleasant but somewhat stiff and stilted pictures of anyone who would pay for it.
This was clearly the work of a much more sophisticated artist, who knew how to present a dramatic subject with force and flair. Additionally, the size of the painting is imposing. It is actually larger than Gorham himself would have been if he were sitting in front of you.
Besides the family story provenance, which is supported by period newspaper documentation, the style of the canvas and frame supports the pre-1900 dating. Around 1900 was when painters started using staples to tack stretched canvas to wooden frames. Before then, it was done with small nails. This painting’s canvas was attached with nails.
Interestingly, the frame itself suggests a provenance for the artist. American artists typically built frames (then and now) with mitered corners. This painting, however, has what is known as an H-framed back, something typically used by European artists. So, how could a professionally trained European artist have come to paint William Gorham, a man so poor that the patches on his clothes can be seen in the portrait?
It is probable that the painter sat with Gorham to capture his features. This makes it highly unlikely (though not impossible) that the painting could have been done by an artist in Europe working from a photograph.
It would have been a considerable expense to ship such a portrait internationally without damaging it, though such a scenario might arise if a wealthy benefactor sought Gorham’s advice.
There is a more likely scenario, though. And it is just as surprising as a professional astrologer in an Ohio farm town of the 1880s. Though nearly forgotten today, it is a fact that Coshocton, Ohio, was at the forefront of national advertising art in the 1880s!
The city was the home to manufacturing plants making use of new technologies which made it possible to print bright painted images on metal signs and plates. This led to the first explosion of modern advertising and Coshocton was one of the leading producers of this sort of advertising.
It started with W. W. Shaw & Co. in 1884, who printed advertising cards and novelties. Rival printers, Jasper Meek and Henry Beach, started their own operations, adding sign printing, calendars, and more.
These companies needed skilled artists to paint these commercial images, and they brought in artists from all over the country — and from Europe as well — to make these images.
Coshocton had so many connections with Germany in those days, it even had a German language newspaper. Considering that much of the lithographic printing technology came there from Germany, it is also possible that some of the artists did, too. It is the latter that could be the source of our Old Gorham painting.
Imagine a young, sophisticated artist from Europe, forced to channel his art into cutesy paintings for advertisements. An artist with a longing to do serious work may have painted other things in his own time.
One could imagine such an artist leaping at the opportunity to portray a well-known local character like William Gorham. Perhaps the painting was even done in exhange for fortune-telling services. After all, how else could Gorham have afforded such a grand portrait? While he was able to make a living as an astrologer, he and his wife Susan had seven children, all of them living in a small house.
It’s hard to imagine him having the spare money to spend on a larger-than-life portrait.
Alas, the painting is not signed, and there are no known lists of the artists who worked in Coshocton in these early years, thanks to the fact that the 1890 U.S. Census was lost in a fire in the National Archives many years ago and couldn’t be replaced.
I checked with the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Cochocton, which has previously shown exhibitions of early Coshocton commercial art, but they knew of no way to connect this painting with a specific artist. The artist may never be known.
Even without an identification of the artist, it remains an extraordinary work for its period, one with a connection to a profoundly unusual character.
Old Gorham’s desk is a work of art, too. It is an old-fashioned desk made out of tiger-stripe maple wood in the form of a tall cabinet with a fold-down shelf for writing that covers numerous cubby holes.
The woman who called me about the painting said that the morning I was coming over to see the painting, she felt inspired to search the cubby holes of the desk, something she’d never before done. She showed me three old letters that she had discovered.
The letters were so old that they didn’t have stamps on them. Rather, the postmaster had written the postage amount on them in ink, because they were from the 1830s, before the invention of stamps.
Two were letters to William Gorham from friends in upstate New York, where he had briefly lived before moving to Ohio. They catch him up on news of friends. The third was a letter from a friend in Cincinnati who was writing about sending Gorham a packet of seeds from England through a mutual friend.
I took one of the letters and read it out loud as the portrait of Old Billy Gorham seemed to watch and listen. It was an amazing feeling to think that these words hadn’t likely been examined in well over 150 years. I hope Old Billy enjoyed catching up on news of friends once again.
Gorham senior died in 1889, and his soon took over the family trade. The portrait owner was also able to provide me with a picture of Ebenezer Gorham, from a real photo post card of the Gorham house.
Comparing a map of Newcastle from the 1870s with the village today indicates that the house is no longer standing. Ebbie, who apparently never married, lived there with his divorced sister Amelia.
When he died in 1920, the schools let out early for the day so everyone could attend the funeral of the famous soothsayer. After Amelia passed away in 1932, the contents of the house, including Old Billy’s desk and portrait, were sold at the estate sale.
During the gathering of items for the sale, the executors found an ancient musket with the date 1743 carved into the stock. They pulled the trigger to see if the mechanism still worked, and the gun blasted a hole in the wall. It brought $4.75 on the auction block. The painting of Old Billy Gorham sold for $3.10.
After visiting the painting and reading Old Billy’s mail, I made my way to the old cemetery in Newcastle, to see if I could find the final resting place of the famous psychics. I pulled into the cemetery on an overcast day threatening rain and looked around.
I saw very old stones on the west side of the place, with newer stones on the east side, so I parked by the older ones. I glanced around and noticed a tall gray monument near the center of the cemetery and thought to myself, “that’s probably it,” but went ahead and started my usual process of slowly, methodically searching the graves row by row from one end to the other.
Getting toward the middle of the cemetery, I still hadn’t found any Gorhams. I finally reached the tall gray stone near the very center, the one I noticed first. Sure enough, it was a family marker for the Gorhams, listing William, Sarah, Ebenezer, and other siblings. I paid my respects and took some photos, shaking my head at how that particular stone had drawn my attention.
It’s almost like they knew I was coming.
