Queen Anne Home Burglarized by Vandals
A group of boys broke into an expressman's home in broad daylight, stealing weapons and massacring his poultry with the aid of dogs.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A party of boys with dogs broke into the house of H. J. Hansen, an expressman, on Queen Anne Hill on Wednesday afternoon and slaughtered his chickens. During the early part of the afternoon, Mrs. Hansen left the house, locking every door. On her return, she found that the house had been burglarized, a gun and pistol had been stolen, and seventy-five chickens killed, most of them literally torn to pieces. The boys appear to have entered by breaking a window. They stole the weapons and set their dogs on the chickens, killing all that were on the place. Some other boys in the neighborhood saw the guilty parties and saw them run away at the approach of a passer-by. Detective Roberts recovered the gun and pistol, which had been hidden in a clump of bushes near the fence. The police are in search of the boys.
“seventy-five chickens killed, most of them being literally torn to pieces.”
While framed as a simple crime story, this report captures the raw, sometimes violent, nature of childhood on the fringes of urban development. Queen Anne, now a refined historic district, was then a hill dotted with homes where expressmen kept livestock and life felt considerably more rustic.
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