Almira Humes
I’ve written previously about my suspicions regarding the presence of organized prostitution during the 1850s (at least) in my hometown Monroe, WI. This post presents some new clues about what I suspect was our first bordello. The owner of this establishment, Almira Humes, is prominent in our history because she was the mother-in-law of John Augustine Bingham, who along with Arabut Ludlow, set up Green County’s first bank. The Ludlow Bank, as it was informally called, became one of Lincoln’s “national banks” during Monroe’s period as headquarters of the Bonelatta international counterfeiting gang.
Almira owned a hotel— the first two-story building in the county— which doubled as a whiskey bar. For those versed in 19th century Midwestern crime history, this confluence of businesses will strongly suggest that bordello prostitution was also practiced on the same premises. Almira bought the establishment from Joseph Payne, its founder, using funds that are hard to explain.
Prior to relocating to Monroe, Almira’s life was one of desperate poverty, abuse and marital nonconformity. Immediately upon settling here, Almira opened a successful inn, officially called a boarding house for men (just like contemporary madame Nina Clifford’s notorious brothel in St. Paul, MN). After just a few years she traded this boarding house for Payne’s up-market whiskey bar/hotel.
Almira became so rich that she attracted Green County’s most ambitious men. John Augustine Bingham was a schoolteacher-cum-lawyer when he came to Monroe; registered at Almira’s; and eventually married Almira’s daughter Caroline. It seems likely that Almira’s earnings at least partially financed his banking endeavors with Arabut Ludlow. The Ludlow/Bingham banking business existed prior to 1857, when Napoleon Bonaparte Latta came to town and business exploded for the Ludlows, Binghams and Miners.
Almira Humes’ early life was tragic, but few people in town knew how tragic before her granddaughter, Dr. Helen Bingham, wrote a revealing obituary about her grandmother in the local paper [Monroe Sentinel, May 1893]. Helen tried to explain her grandmother’s bitter and ungenerous demeanor, which suggests that Almira was not well liked in town, yet respected for her wealth.
Almira Humes was born in 1806 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her father died early and what little parental care she received came from her stepfather, Silas Gardner. Almira’s mother appears to have been short on maternal affection [E. C. Hamilton 1976, The Story of Monroe]:
Some of this severe mien, Dr. Bingham wrote, could be traced to an ordeal of early childhood when her mother, Hulda, fearing death was near, gave her daughter to a couple recommended as pious. The little girl, then about eight, was gone a year when her stepfather traced her down upon hearing that she was being treated cruelly and worked like a slave. He returned her to the family fold but the scars of her experience remained in mind for life. Dire circumstances of her years in Illinois also extracted their toll.
We are not told what these Illinois experiences were, however Silas Gardner had taken the family on a nearly four year exodus from New Hampshire to Illinois via the Allegheny River— the trip should not have taken anything like that long, which suggests they were continually running out of money. Silas Gardner died along the journey. Without money or a competent guardian, the options for a poorly-educated and abused teen girl were few. Almira represented the typical demographic exploited by 19th century pimps.
At some time during this Illinois stay, Almira ‘married’ a man who Helen described as “a poor manager or hard-luck provider” named William Boardman Churchill, whose family hailed from Wethersfield, Connecticut. The Churchills were among the less respected families who appear to have settled that part of Connecticut extra-legally (without dispensations from the Massachusetts colony’s government). At least one Churchill became head of his own church in the late 1700s: the family were of the uneducated “pilgrim” religious persuasion.
Almira left William, Helen says, in 1840 at 34 years old: the end of a prostitute’s marketable life. Almira had five children while ‘married’ to William; she took them all, along with her irresponsible mother, northward to Monroe, WI where she immediately started a “boarding house”. Where the money for this endeavor came from is unclear, but Almira did have a brother in Galena, IL and another somewhere “in the vicinity” of Monroe mining lead. I have come across no evidence that these brothers helped Almira financially nor that they were even successful miners. If they hadn’t struck it rich by 1840, it’s unlikely that they ever did in the Upper Mississippi Valley lead/zinc mining region. By 1848 the best lead deposits had been claimed and miners were more interested in Californian gold.
The lead mining region of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Both lead and zinc were in abundant supply and this area was General Ulysses S. Grant’s home base. It is of note that Grant's Treasury ended patronage of Monroe’s counterfeiting Bonelatta Gang; Grant’s Galena supporters would have been well aware of the criminality taking place just over the Wisconsin border. Green County, of which Monroe is the county seat, is outlined in green. The border between IL and WI is blue.
To what sort of town had Almira fled with her family? Neither Galena nor Monroe attracted a nice group of people. I’ve already discussed Monroe’s reputation for fights and public drunkenness around the 1850s; as a mining town, Galena was even worse. Galena is described by Illinois’ former governor John M. Reynolds in his 1879 autobiography:
The great fortunes made by many, and the success of Colonel Johnson at the "Buck Lead," as it was called, near the present city of Galena, gave the mines such character and standing, that thousands and thousands of people of all grades and classes thronged to the mines…
… a most singular and mysterious medley of people... from all quarters of the earth [that] had flocked there on account of the celebrity of the lead mines... [and that] the pursuit of mineral is generally an injury to the public... [and] public morals…
Thousands of rough miners swarmed through her streets. All sorts of moving vehicles were seen in her thoroughfares, and every language was spoken, every costume worn. The miner generally spent all he made, was poor, and held his own remarkably well. And that reckless spirit, bred of all uncertain pursuits, was abundantly manifested among the miners who assembled in the lead regions. Card playing and whisky drinking, quarreling, and that rough desperate life developed among adventurers of all classes gathered about Galena, was characteristic of those of all other mines.
This was the milieu in which 34 year old Almira sought to support herself and five children.
While the vast majority of men spent every penny they earned, a few merchants in particular profited from Galena’s mineral boom. These merchants formed the core of President Ulysses S. Grant’s political support, and he took his posse to D.C. with him. One of the first actions Grant’s Treasury took was to break up Monroe’s Bonelatta counterfeiting gang with the new and dubiously-staffed ‘Secret Service’. While the gang’s operations were ended, most gang members faced no legal consequences. (Arabut Ludlow, as owner of a national bank, had underwritten Lincoln’s war effort and the source of Grant’s political success.)
Merchants, rather than miners, were more likely to strike rich in Galena, IL. This home, Belvedere Mansion, was owned by Joseph Russell Jones, a merchant who traveled between Galena and Chicago (much like Monroe’s Arabut Ludlow) and who rode General Grant’s coattails to power in Washington D.C.
This mansion was gifted to the victorious General Grant by “the people of Galena” in 1865. He got a generous monument in New York City too.
Almira’s 1840s clientele was not like the Grant-affiliated merchants described above. Her first boarding house was on “16th Avenue south of the railway bridge” which is a very imprecise location: it puts her place somewhere on 16th avenue from the Square southward. The chances are good that this building, wherever it actually was, has not survived.
16th Avenue “South of the Railway Bridge” is represented by the royal blue line running North-South. The “Friendly Inn” (where I met my husband!) and “Sinners Bar” represent “Smokey Row”, an old railway neighborhood characterized by cheese factories and light industry, but which is now mostly bars. (You can see the East-West railway arcing through “BARD Materials”.) The Suisse Haus, which I wrote about in Edith May or Emma Mariha? is also located on 16th Avenue. Most of this street would have been a bit rowdy in Monroe’s early history.
Almira’s establishment prospered to the point where she was able to buy Joseph Payne’s whiskey bar/hotel— “just north of the railway bridge” according to the 1884 history of Green County. This was a remarkable financial feat for the single mother of five children: Payne had to flee town in 1850 so at the very most Almira raised this capital in less than ten years, while presumably paying rent or paying off the construction of her first inn and raising a family of five. It’s likely she bought the inn well prior to Payne’s flight, however, because he sold it “a few years” after having founded it. It is not reasonable to attribute this kind of cash flow to keeping a boarding house alone.
The blue rectangle indicates the probable location of of Joseph Payne’s hotel/tavern. The building may well survive, and this will be the topic of a future post.
The 1884 chronicle of Green County states the following about Joseph Payne’s establishment by the rail bridge:
In 1836 Payne, Benninger & Smith put up quite an extensive building just north of the railroad bridge. It was two stories high, about 26x36 feet, with a wing. Payne opened the building as a tavern, keeping a good stock of whiskey. He ran the hotel for a few years, after which it was run by various parties. Part of the old building now forms a portion of the planing mill.
This 1884 chronicle relies heavily on a history written by one of Almira’s granddaughters, so Almira is not identified as the person who bought it from Payne, who himself owned at least one other saloon in Green County and was active founding Monroe as the county seat. (Payne also had a penchant for feuding with his neighbors.) The business practices of men like Payne birthed the Temperance Movement, which Leon Goetz exploited much later with the film “10 Nights in a Bar Room”. Alcoholism was a serious problem among the men and women who ventured into frontier mining encampments.
Payne was forced to flee Green County when he shot a man named John Bringold in 1850. Bob Elmer writes in the latest Green County Historical Society newsletter (December 2021):
The Bringold murder was, in short, the result of a dispute between Payne and Bringold over a rail fence at the Buckhorn Tavern, an inn which Bringold had recently purchased from Payne.
The Buckhorn was one of the earliest inns in Green county located in Section 6 of the Town of Cadiz on the Monroe-to-Wiota road.
Joseph Payne was able to pick the lock on his jail cell and fled to California where he died twenty-five years later. By that time, however, Almira found success with the tavern/hotel/(?) she’d purchased from Payne. From The Story of Monroe:
As she prospered, Almira took over the Joseph Payne hotel-tavern, just north of the overpass. Meanwhile, her son Norman, went to work for his half uncle, Gardner, learning the building and millwright trades.
In September 1843, Almira, having convinced William Churchill there could be no reconciliation, was married to Jesse Robertson, 13 years her junior. One child, Charles, was born of that union. Her son, Norman, opposed the marriage but in later years became fond of Jesse Robertson, working with him on major building projects. Almira and Robertson were separated in 1878 and he later obtained a divorce.
The above makes Almira’s marriage to William Churchill sound like an informal arrangement that did not need a divorce to dissolve it. Almira’s marriage to Jesse fared little better than her first. Unofficial ‘marriages’ and changing husbands was rare outside of the death of a spouse during Almira’s time, except for women involved in the commercial sex industry, where such flexible arrangements were common.
About a month after Almira married the 24 year old Jesse, her daughter by William, Caroline Churchill, married a young schoolteacher named John Augustine Bingham who lodged at Almira’s inn/saloon. As previously stated, in addition to being a teacher, John practiced as a lawyer, which was not a rigorously organized profession in those days. (Anybody could do it, much like practicing medicine.)
John made useful friends in Monroe, including Arabut Ludlow. By 1846 Ludlow had stopped being an itinerant peddler between Chicago and Monroe and set up shop on the Courthouse Square. Two years later he was able to erect his own three story brick building on the same square— all well before the railway got here. By 1854, just a few years prior to the rail lines being constructed, Ludlow and John Bingham were wealthy enough to finance their own bank [The Story of Monroe]:
The first bank in the city was established, in 1854, by John A. Bingham, and was known as Bingham's Exchange Bank. The following fall the firm became Ludlow, Bingham & Co., composed of A. Ludlow, J.A. Bingham and Asa Richardson. In 1856 the company erected a building for banking purposes, during which year J. W. Steward became interested in the business. His connection with the bank, however, was of short duration.
On the 1st of May, 1856, the bank of Monroe was organized under the State laws, which John A. Bingham, president; A. Ludlow, vice president, and J. B. Galusha, cashier. In 1861 Richardson & Ludlow became sole proprietors. [John Bingham’s health was poor and he would soon be dead.]
In addition to their banking business, Ludlow and Bingham had the cash to finance their own 1856 addition to the village of Monroe: the ‘Brodhead Addition’ development area. More city development would follow.
It is interesting that Ludlow and Bingham would organize their state bank in the months prior to Napoleon Bonaparte Latta’s transition to Monroe, and that their fledgling bank would thrive under such adverse monetary conditions. No historian recounts Bone Latta manufacturing Ludow banknotes, which were in circulation by 1856.
Arabut Ludlow at least had a legitimate cover for accumulating his capital: he was a peddler, fur trader and store-keeper, although his success came at a speed more more suited to a fairytale than (honest) real life. On the other hand, it’s hard to see where John Augustine Bingham got his seed capital— school teachers just didn’t make that much— unless it was from the same lucrative business which carried his mother-in-law from rags to riches.
We do know that Almira Humes Churchill Robertson did belong to the same political party that nurtured Napoleon Bonaparte Latta, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant:
Almira's only sober concession to humor was in naming her pet dog, “Samuel Tilden”, for the defeated 1876 Democratic presidential candidate. She was a Republican but enjoyed this little joke. Almira also insisted that “Samuel Tilden” be allowed to accompany her into the Universalist Church for Sunday services.
There is no reason to believe that the Republican Party lost support from Monroe’s wealthiest residents after 1871 when Grant ended Bonelatta’s patronage. Arabut Ludlow was “a delegate from Wisconsin to the Republican convention in 1872, held in Philadelphia, where General U. S. Grant was nominated for a second term”. [Wisconsin, Its History and People, 1634-1924. Volume IV] Considering that Grant left so many of Monroe’s wealthy inhabitants untroubled by the Bonelatta investigation, Ludlow’s support for his second term was only natural. Equally natural was Almira’s following Ludlow’s lead: she prospered under Bonelatta and also faced no legal consequences.
Below is a satellite image of the location where I believe Almira ran her bordello:
Given the dramatic topography of the land around this section of the rail tracks, the area circled in pink is the only likely area for the old Payne Whiskey Bar/Hotel. The current owner of the property tells me the history of the building is complex and originally the front entrance faced the tracks, rather than 8th street as it does currently. (The door to the building would have been about 15 yards from the trains.) I look forward to sharing more of this history in a future post.
The land encompassed by the pink square is the old town cemetery, wherein a grossly disproportionate number of women were buried with headstones in the 1850s. If I’m correct in my suppositions, trafficked women didn’t have to be moved far to be buried.
Finally, the brick portion of the current building roughly matches the footprint, “wing” and number of stories assigned to the Payne property by historians in 1884.
In the above photograph, readers may well not only be viewing Monroe’s first bordello, but the source of the Bingham and Ludlow banking fortunes, too.
