EDITOR’S NOTE: This History Knox Column is Part II of a series that began last week.
On March 7, 1829, Alvin Stone was born in Tallmadge, Ohio. In July of 1832, 450 miles away in Turin, Lewis County, New York, Alonzo Cotell was born.
These two Als had no way of knowing that their lives would become tragically crossed over 60 years later in a crime that would end up bringing one of the major players, a son of Alonzo, to Mount Vernon as both a prisoner and patient.
Stone was the son of parents from Connecticut who had settled in Tallmadge, near Akron, in the 1840s.
The farm stood on the road from Tallmadge to Kent, in eastern Summit County, near the Portage County line. Stone’s father died when the son was in early adulthood, and he took over the property.
Alonzo Cotell’s family had long been in upstate New York, and were prosperous farmers. Alonzo’s trajectory did not go as well, unfortunately. He seemed to shift restlessly from job to job.
At the height of his life, he served for a time as a justice of the peace, suggesting that he had a good reputation in Turin and nearby Lowville. But after that, his life began to fall apart, perhaps due to alcoholism.
Alonzo married a woman named Florence Hitchcock, who was almost 25 years younger. The nature of their relationship is uncertain, and she seems not to have been in good health.
Alonzo and Florence married around 1876, when she was 19. The fact that their first son, Jay, was born around the same time hints that perhaps it was a hastily arranged wedding.
On Dec. 3, 1878, Florence gave birth to twins. They were named Romulus and Remulus, a slightly mangled version of the names of the twins Romulus and Remus who were, according to legend, the founders of the city of Rome in Italy.
According to later reports, Romulus was pronounced with a long ‘o’ sound, as in the city of Rome. He was called Romy for short.
It should have been a happy family of parents and three children, but things quickly unraveled. Just a couple of years later, Florence and Remulus were dead.
Over the next few years, Alonzo spiraled into alcoholism, often abandoning his boys for days or even weeks on end.
In the 1892 New York state census, Jay and Romulus are listed as living in an apartment in Lowville. Jay, 15, worked as a clerk so that his brother, 14, could continue in school. Alonzo was listed separately, living in Turin.
As economic conditions worsened, Romulus dropped out of school and sold flowers on the streets of Lowville to help raise money so he and his brother could keep their small apartment.
It was a fruitless pursuit, though, for whenever he had any money saved, their father would show up and take the money to help support his alcoholism.
By 1895, Romy was unable to tolerate his bleak existence any further. He ran away from home.
In Tallmadge, Alvin Stone had trouble finding good workers to help on his farm. He and his wife had a total of nine children, but the boys had mostly come early and already grown up and moved off to start families of their own, while their younger children were mostly girls.
While the girls contributed to the farm labor, Stone also need a farmhand to help him and his son Alvin, Jr., with the heavy labor. And good help was hard to find.
Things had gotten ugly with one of his previous farmhands, who stole from him until Stone had him arrested and put away in prison. Others had come and gone. In the summer of 1895, Stone found himself again looking for help when a shy and gangly lad showed up at his door looking for work.
“What’s your name and where are you from?” Stone asked him, not recognizing the boy. “My name is John Smith,” the boy said. “I’m an orphan from New York.”
“The city?” Stone asked.
“No,” Smith replied. “Upstate. North of Oneida and Syracuse.”
Though he had his doubts, both about the boy’s backstory and his physical frailty, he hired him. The boy proved to be not be very strong, plus he showed a tendency to drift into blankness at times, from which it was hard to rouse him.
Over the next couple of months, Stone was alarmed when his youngest daughter, Florence, reported that she thought John Smith tried to look through a broken crack in the wall to see her when she was dressing.
She then said that a pair of her panties had disappeared. Stone decided to take no chances on Smith developing too much interest in his daughter. John Smith had to go.
Fortunately, he had just found a stronger young man, Ira Stillson, who could take over the job of farmhand, and no doubt do a better job at it.
Stone was not a cruel man, so he wanted to make sure the aimless Smith boy had a place to land.
He checked with an elderly couple who lived nearby, and asked them if they could use a boy to help them keep up with yard work and house work. They did, and so John Smith was transferred to the neighbors.
Just a few days later, Stone, his wife, and their new hired hand would all be dead, bludgeoned to death in their beds.