Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1894. Newspaper saddles up to cover hearing

One fall day in 1894, a curious sight stopped passersby on the Saundersville Pike: A man sat on a rock at the base of a telephone pole with a board across his knees and an electrical apparatus attached to the board.

A sleek race horse pounded down the road. The jockey handed a sheaf of papers to the man on the rock, then sped off back the way he had come.

This continued at regular intervals throughout the day.

The man on the rock carefully read through the papers, tapping away on a switch key, sending a coded message through the telephone wire. The electrical impulses flowed to the Providence Telephone Co.'s exchange building, then followed a newly installed wire, strung over rooftops through downtown Providence, ending in the telegraph room at The Providence Journal.

Big news was happening in the village of Richmond on Oct. 20, 1894, and The Journal wanted to provide every detail to readers of its afternoon paper, The Evening Bulletin.

Lawrence C. Keegan was to face charges in the murder of Emily Catherine Chambers, a Providence widow whom he had seduced. The village of Richmond, a part of the town of Scituate, was home to the town clerk's office, which also served as a courtroom. Under the law at the time, preliminary hearings had to be held in the town where a crime occurred. The preliminary hearing was a form of mini-trial, used to determine whether the state had enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury.

The problem for The Journal that October day was that the nearest available phone line was three miles from the Richmond courtroom. With deadlines for The Evening Bulletin passing throughout the day, The Journal could not afford to waste time carrying its story between the courtroom and the phone line on Saundersville Pike.

Emily Catherine Chambers

Lawrence C. Keegan

So The Journal enlisted a pair of race horses from A.H. Barney's stable at Narragansett Park racetrack, in Cranston.

Periodically, a Journal reporter quietly slipped out of the courtroom and handed a jockey an account of the continuing proceedings. Race horse Athalena then would speed the story to the village of Ashland. From Ashland, Jakey Joseph would take the story the rest of the way to the Saundersville Pike.

The Bulletin's final edition included the judge finding sufficient evidence against Keegan and binding him over for the grand jury.

Keegan eventually would be found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Like the race horses Athalena and Jakey Joseph, the Scituate villages of Richmond and Ashland quickly passed into history. Around 1920, they were abandoned and submerged when the Scituate Reservoir was built.