Driven From Home: A Mother and Three Children at the Police Station
Found drunk in a waterfront saloon with her children in tow, a 23-year-old woman told a police matron a story of beatings and of a husband at a coal camp near Palmer who cast her out with the babies.
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 mother, intoxicated and with three children clinging to her skirts, was the sad spectacle at police headquarters last night. It is a story of domestic infelicity, but the woman, even though under the influence of liquor, denies it. Her name is Mrs. Walter Jones, and her children are named Frank, aged 6 years; Pearl, 3 years, and Bertie, 16 months.
The woman was in a water front saloon last night when some one called for the patrol wagon to take her. Before the wagon reached there she got into a gurney and started around the city. Finally the driver had so much trouble with her that he drove to headquarters. When the woman was taken out of the gurney she was in a filthy condition, although well dressed. Chief Rogers saw that she was too intoxicated to talk with, and placed her under Police Matron Taylor's care. The children are little tigers and clung to the police as if realizing that their mother was in trouble.
Frank told the matron that they lived at the mines somewhere near Palmer, and that his father used to beat his mother and use her awfully. Finally three or four days ago he drove her out of the house and told her never to return. She took him and the babies and came to this city. Then they went to an aunt's at Newcastle, but she would not have them, and they had to eat at the cook house. They came back here yesterday, some one having taken them to the Lake Washington landing in a wagon.
Mrs. Jones was traveling around the city in a hack yesterday afternoon and, as her condition showed, drank too much liquor. She is the same woman who created a disturbance in Cordray's theater last Sunday night and was removed by Officer Kent. She is intelligent, about 23 years old, and has evidently enjoyed advantages at some time in life. She told the matron that death in the family caused her trouble. Then she said: "I don't want to talk about it." Chief Rogers thinks she may be insane.
“Frank told the matron that they lived at the mines somewhere near Palmer, and that his father used to beat his mother and use her awfully. Finally three or four days ago he drove her out of the house and told her never to return.”
In 1894 a family in crisis was handled by a police matron and a patrol wagon — there was no shelter system, no domestic-violence refuge, no addiction treatment for a working-class woman. The beatings, the eviction from the home, the aunt who would not take them in — the pieces of this story map onto today's arguments over family homelessness, domestic abuse, and how a city responds when the safety net is a jail cell.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.