The Third Time: A Port Townsend Hotelkeeper Takes Poison
J. J. Hunt — twenty years behind the bar of the Townsend saloon, four marriages, a founder of territorial Democracy — is found insensible in his back room, and the doctors have given up.
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.
J. J. Hunt, an old and highly esteemed citizen of Port Townsend, was found in bed yesterday afternoon suffering from the effects of narcotic poison self-administered.
He occupied a room back of his place of business, the Townsend saloon, and when his little daughter came down in the afternoon she found her father in a stupor. The child returned home and informed her mother. Mrs. Hunt hurried to her husband's bedside and found him insensible. Dr. Willison was called and relieved the patient's stomach of a large quantity of poison.
The doctors have abandoned hope of saving his life. It is now definitely known that he took the poison with suicidal intent. Depression in business and dull times have had a deep effect on him. The recent death of his grand-niece, Frank Clapp's eldest daughter, Elvira, occasioned him much sorrow and despondency. This is the third time in recent years that he attempted to take his own life. He has been married four times and has a large family of children.
[J. J. Hunt is about 55 years old and has kept a hotel in Port Townsend for over twenty years. He was candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1888 for brigadier general of the territory. In early days he was an important factor in Democratic politics. For some years he has suffered from heart disease.]
“This is the third time in recent years that he attempted to take his own life.”
The paper prints the man's finances, his grief and his previous attempts in the same breath as his political résumé — a startling frankness about what we would now call depression and suicidality. Port Townsend, which had bet everything on being the terminus of the Northern Pacific and lost, was in the middle of exactly the kind of long economic slump that hollowed out its leading men in 1893, a foreshadowing of the year's national panic to come.
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