The Eleanor Simmons Story
an M A Boyle Mystery
_
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Thomas H Stearns
Nashua, NH
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you wish to give a copy to another, please purchase an additional copy. If you're reading this book and didn't purchase it, please do so before proceeding. Thank you for respecting the author's hard work.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 The Town of Westport
Chapter 3 Probate Research; The Second Cycle
Chapter 4 Genealogy; Intestacy
Chapter 6 Fruits of the House Crawl
Chapter 7 Interviews and Anecdotes
Chapter 8 Deep Into Conjecture
Chapter 11 Lessons Learned; the What Ifs
Foreword
The Eleanor Simmons story is true; everything which follows actually happened as it's described. I worked on this case from early in its course so the story has real grit for me. The organization of the narrative is chronological and will seem strange but it had the erratic course that's described and the ultimate resolution was as surprising to us as it will be to you. There really was a 100-year-old Eleanor Simmons who fell off the back porch to her death on a hot summer day in July, 2001 leaving a million-dollar legacy to unknown heirs.
The only photograph of Eleanor we could find was on her last driver's license which forms the background image of the cover—take a look at it—that's our gal!!
We very gratefully acknowledge permission from the publisher of the South Coast Times and the New Bedford Standard Times to reprint extracts from their publications which chronicle this story at critical stages; the narrative is much improved by these snippets.
The Author
Thomas H Stearns is a genealogical researcher specializing in telephone interviews and on-line research who was involved in the Simmons investigation. An active Find-a-Grave cemetery hunter he has several hundred memorials to his credit, concentrating on New Hampshire cemeteries. He's the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook entitled Flexible Printed Circuitry and many technical papers and magazine articles in the same field. Hobbies include sailing and sailboat building, photography, high fidelity music reproduction. He lives in southern New Hampshire with his two beloved altho elderly cats.
~ ~ ~
Chapter 1
Eleanor Simmons
This is the story of a lively and adventurous young woman, a pivotal choice she made early in life and the genealogical puzzle she left at her death. It began almost a century ago with a life-changing event that occurred sometime around 1920. Nobody alive today has any recollection of the 20's and there are no written records of what she did to put the record straight. Nobody involved in the story was important enough, at the time, to draw newspaper attention or to have a personal biographer, a Boswell. But ordinary people watch and take note, comment to each other and share and remember stories which have, taken together, preserved in hand-me-down memory the rough elements of our account. This reconstruction of the unusual story of Eleanor Simmons of Westport, Massachusetts is based on many such memories captured in interviews with neighbors and town officials together with lengthy and involved research thru public records and not a small amount of science. The beginning and the end are well documented; the middle part is anecdotal.
Background
Around 1920, Franklin Palmer, Jr, a carpenter and gentleman farmer of somewhat independent means, was living with his wife, Amanda and son, Oscar, on a small farm just outside Westport, Massachusetts, when he suffered a stroke. For several years thereafter Amanda cared for him at the Adamsville Road farm, one of the oldest farms in Westport. Then, in 1923, no doubt exhausted from the effort, Amanda passed away. Oscar, sole offspring of Franklin and Amanda, struggled on singlehandedly for awhile,attempting to care for his crippled father but soon saw that more help was needed. He then set about finding a live-in nurse. And so, sometime prior to 1930, Eleanor Simmons came to the Adamsville residence to take up her duties.
There are as many stories about where Eleanor came from as there are people to tell them. Perhaps, because of the somewhat scandalous nature of a single young lady living in that isolated farmhouse with Oscar and his father, some said she was a former call girl or a dancing girl or a cigarette girl from Chicago or New York or possibly Boston. She might have been a waitress from the nearby Allen's Clam Shack on Horseneck Beach. But whatever her origin and wherever she came from, Eleanor proved to be a good nurse and housekeeper who took gentle care of Franklin through his last years. Always quiet and respectful, Eleanor did her work day in and day out, uncomplaining and efficiently. Franklin died in September of 1932. In time, Oscar, too, passed away, leaving Eleanor alone in the old farmhouse.
2001; The Mystery Begins
When Westport, Massachusetts patrolmen arrived at 138 Adamsville Road a little after 1:00 pm on the 2nd of July, 2001, firemen and a paramedic were already there. This was the so-called "Oscar Palmer" place; thirty acres of farmland and a small white farmhouse set well back from the road with a cluster of detached outbuildings, including a corn crib and smallish barn, surrounding a dooryard to the south of the house. According to the Incident Report "...the victim, Eleanor Simmons,...was dead and had been so for some time." She was "...an elderly female laying on her right side, face down with a small pool of dried blood under her head." Eleanor was known to have great difficulty walking and so was a cause for concern amongst her acquaintances. On that day a close friend who made a practice of delivering the mail to her had come to the house, found the body and called for help. In the Incident Report this friend was described as "visibly upset, fanning it (Eleanor's body) with a pillow attempting to keep the flies off it."
As the medical examiner's people removed the body the officers searched the house looking for "...any information as to whom may be related to Ms. Simmons or to locate a will...." 138 Adamsville Road was known as the Palmer place and Eleanor had lived there alone with Oscar Palmer since 1932. The officers found a will dating from the 1940's which left Ms. Simmons estate to Oscar Palmer (who died many years earlier) and Eleanor's book of personal telephone numbers. From this book they made several calls "... attempting to find any family to no avail. All the parties...identified Ms. Simmons as a very private person who apparently confided in no one. Of the people I contacted they all stated they knew of no family at all." One of the officer's inquiries was to the Assessor's office where it was learned that the farm was listed as "61A" , meaning that the Town of Westport had a legal interest in acquiring it to preserve it as farmland.
A few days later, " knowing ..(they were)..unable to find any information regarding family..." the officers returned to secure the property, locking up the buildings, turning off the water and making another search, still finding nothing to identify her next of kin.
Police Investigation: The First Cycle
Eleanor was a well known resident of Westport and had lived at the Palmer farm for more than seventy years at the time of her death. Some of the neighbors had known her for almost the full term of her residence yet when questioned none of them knew anything about Eleanor's family. The police assumed that with enough interviews of local residents they would find a confidant who would be able to give them names and addresses for "Eleanor's people"; in most cases of deceased elderly people this is what happens. In the rare instances where this technique yields nothing useful the decedent's papers— birth certificates, family photographs or address books—normally provide the names of family who can be tracked down and, eventually , through these and enough telephone calls the family will be identified. None of these techniques worked in Eleanor's case. Throughout her lifetime in Westport she had told everyone that she "had no family." Thus began the curious case of Eleanor Simmons of Westport.
Picture 1; Oscar's Farm Eleanor's body lay between the door & the bulkhead
Picture 2; Obituary for Eleanor Simmons
~ ~ ~
Chapter 2
The Town of Westport
The reader may appreciate a few words about Westport and the area where our story takes place. The New England region includes six states-Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut- as all elementary school children used to know. It anchors the northeast corner of the United States and provides protection against Canada to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. You could describe the layout as a sandwich with Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont as the top slice, Massachusetts as the fill, and Rhode Island and Connecticut as the bottom bread.
Massachusetts is almost a rectangle: her northerly border extends straight east-west across the bottoms of New Hampshire and Vermont (Maine lies off to the east and north of New Hampshire) with a slight flare northward around the southeast corner of New Hampshire. Her southerly border stretches straight west-east across the top of Connecticut and Rhode Island, curling out and down in a southerly direction to cover the eastern edge of Rhode Island. The western borders of Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut line up pretty well along a north-south axis.
The Atlantic coast of Massachusetts is a bulging curve running from Newburyport to the northeast, past Boston near the center and on to Westport at the southeast corner, looking as though God had put His thumb on the shoreline at Boston and pushed the fill westward, deeper into the sandwich. The swelling forms stumpy Cape Ann to the north and long and slender Cape Cod south of Boston. From Boston out onto Cape Cod the shoreline curves continuously around, first southerly and then north all the way around Cape Cod Bay in the long, narrow, upward-curling scorpion's tail of Cape Cod. Below Cape Cod the coastline resumes its bulginess as it sweeps to the southwest, then west enroute to Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island. Inland, Massachusetts overhangs the northeast corner of Rhode Island by thirty or forty miles— here, Massachusetts squishes out and around in a southerly direction to provide land area for Fall River and New Bedford.
The working-class city of Fall River, Massachusetts squats right on the Rhode Island border about twenty-five miles southeast from that corner and fifty or so miles south of Boston. It fronts to the west onto Narragansett Bay, home of Newport, Rhode Island and the fabled mansions.
Fall River has seen better days. Fishing and manufacturing, primarily sewing and the textile trades, has pretty much died out leaving high levels of unemployment and low incomes. You could say the same of New Bedford, which lies to the east on the Massachusetts South Shore. Fishing was the mainstay in New Bedford but it has also failed in recent times leaving high unemployment and poverty. If you travel an additional five miles or so south from Fall River and New Bedford you come to Westport, which is a different world entirely.
Westport is distributed over somewhat more than sixty square miles of southward-running fingers of land largely bounded by water. At its southerly tip, jutting out into Rhode Island Sound, is Westport Harbor and Horseneck Beach, a popular state park. The saltwater fisherman's favorite island, Cuttyhunk, southerly tip of the swanky Elizabeth Island chain which runs south from Cape Cod, is visible from here across Buzzard's Bay nine miles or so southeast. Ocean waters run northward from Westport Harbor along both sides of the Westport peninsula as, respectively, either the West or East Branch of the Westport River. Massachusetts State Route 6 runs across the northerly end of Westport and if you start there and come down the western edge - the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border— you find more water—South Watuppa Pond, Sawdy Pond, Deval Pond, then Angeline Brook, a tiny tributary of the West Branch of the Westport River starting just to the east of Deval Pond and coursing almost exactly south until it curls to the west at Adamsville Road to join the West Branch of the river a few miles above the harbor. (We'll learn more about the Angeline Brook later). Towards the northeast corner of Westport you encounter a stream which is the tip of the East Branch of the Westport River, cutting across Route 6 about midway between Beulah Corners and Berryman Corners. This stream widens at a residential cluster called Head of Westport and is navigable by small craft and kayaks from there to Westport harbor.
This area could be described as a low coastal plain. The maximum elevation in the sixty-odd square mile area which is the geographic town of Westport is 240 feet above sea level. It has been a happy and fruitful land for many centuries. Indians camped and lived here for untold millennia; the waters of the Sound are good fishing and the land is fertile and productive. Subsistence farming was the rule in this area during earlier times and medium-sized dairy farms still dot the landscape, their pastures and grazing fields separated by stone walls thick and tall built from the limitless rocky excess of the fields. There is evidence of gentrification in slick new oversize houses and ambitious landscaping that show up increasingly with time. Construction is the largest dollar-value industry in Westport, followed by trade, services, agriculture and fishing. The median income is roughly 20% above the average for Massachusetts which is itself a rich state. As a town employee put it, "Westport is upscale for the area."
Westport as a human development began in 1670 and exists today in several clusters of homes and businesses variously called Westport Factory (once, like Fall River, the site of bustling textile mills), Center Village, Head of Westport and, down at the tip, sticking out into Rhode Island Sound and overlooking the harbor, Westport Point. Whaling ships used this harbor in the 1800's.
Indian names appear everywhere in the area— Nonquit, Sconticut, Acoaxet, Sakonnet, Padanarum. In the distant past Indians regularly traveled along a coastal pathway from Narragansett Bay to the west to Cape Cod in Massachusetts to the east; this path exists today as Old County Road which wanders across the peninsula about midway between Westport Point and Route 6, crossing the East Branch at Head of Westport. Our story concerns events in a rural neighborhood close to the western edge of Westport about half-way between Adamsville, Rhode Island, a tiny village perhaps three miles from the coast, and Center Village, one of the built-up areas in Westport.
Picture 3; The Palmer Farm, 138 Adamsville Road, Westport
~ ~ ~
Chapter3
Probate Research; The Second Cycle
Police departments do like tidy files and don't like open cases. The Westport police did all they could to figure out the "Simmons heirs" problem but eventually moved on to more pressing cases, leaving the town with no closure. When a person dies in Massachusetts with no known next of kin a Special Administrator is appointed to "take charge of all real estate...collect rents...continue the business" of the decedent for the benefit of the estate. Sometime in the 1940's Eleanor and Oscar had written "companion" wills, each leaving their estate to the other. Embedded in Eleanor's was the peculiar and ominous sentence " I purposely omit from this my last will my heirs-at-law and next of kin." She wanted nothing to go to her family, whoever and wherever they were! Because Eleanor neglected to re-write this will to replace Oscar as her heir after Oscar died, her will became invalid and 138 Adamsville Road and Oscar's estate now fell, intestate, into the hands of the Bristol County Probate Court.
Standard procedure in such cases is to make a public announcement of the intestate death, and accordingly the Town of Westport advertised the death of Eleanor in the New Bedford Standard-Times, expecting that somebody would come forward and claim the Palmer farm. Nobody did. Although the buildings were badly run down, Oscar's farm included many acres of developable land in a very desirable community; a highly desirable inheritance. After several weeks of empty waiting the Town appointed Attorney Thomas R Hunt, at that time Public Administrator for Bristol county, to take charge of the matter. Attorney Hunt, recognizing that, since the police had been unsuccessful in finding the Simmons heirs, this was not going to be easy, immediately turned to Mary Ann Boyle, PhD, CG, an experienced genealogical researcher and owner of American Genealogical Research (AGR) in Boston, to find the Simmons heirs.
Picture 4; Eleanor's Will