October 11, 2021 • 43 mins
Rice amassed a big enough fortune to establish a whole university – and become a target for murder. But is that actually how he died?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
a friend who sends me like historical tidbits and clips
(00:21):
from old newspapers that he digs up from time to time.
Usually these are things that are simultaneously interesting and kind
of weird. Uh, sometimes it's very weird. Earlier this year, though,
he sent a message about a reported murder from more
than a century ago, and just from the details that
(00:44):
trickled through over these texts, I thought, Okay, that's got
to go on the list. This is probably the most
well known among people from Texas and people who are
affiliated with Rice University in Houston, because it is the
of the university's founder and namesake, William marsh Rice. Today
(01:05):
we're going to talk about how William marsh Rice amassed
a fortune big enough that he was basically able to
establish an entire university by himself, and how that fortune
also made him a target for murder. Although William marsh
Rice's namesake university is of course in Texas, he was
born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March fourteenth eighteen sixteen. His
(01:30):
parents were David and Patty hall Rice, and he was
the third of their ten children, seven of whom survived infancy.
William was named for the Reverend William Marsh, a Methodist
circuit writer who established a Methodist Episcopal Society in that
area in eighteen fifteen. David and Patty were its first
two members. David worked at the Springfield Armory, which was
(01:53):
the United States first federal arsenal. He also worked as
a tax assessor and a tax collector and represent into
Springfield in the General Court of Massachusetts. Later in William's life,
he wrote a letter in which he described his parents
as very hard working and devoted to their children, and
said that his father in particular had such a quote
(02:14):
firm reliance upon providence that nothing seemed to lay heavy
on his mind. While William was still a boy, Massachusetts
passed a law requiring any town with five hundred families
or more to build a high school. William's father was
on the committee that worked to build the school in Springfield,
and the Rices were one of the families that financially
contributed to its construction. So it seems like education was
(02:39):
pretty important to them, and it would have made sense
for William to have enrolled in the school when it opened,
but there isn't any record of this, and the family
lore is that at around age fifteen he actually left
school to work at a store. Rice turned twenty one
in eighteen thirty seven, and at that point he had
saved enough money to buy a store of his own,
(03:00):
but that same year, a combination of factors triggered the
Panic of eighteen thirty seven. Rice's reasons for leaving Massachusetts
after this aren't documented anywhere, but it's extremely likely that
this business he'd started for himself suffered during this financial crisis,
and at about the same time people in the United States,
(03:21):
we're hearing about cheap land and new business opportunities that
were available in the Republic of Texas, including through advertisements
that were intentionally trying to attract more Anglos to the area.
In eighteen thirty eight, Rice moved to Texas, sending a
load of goods to Galveston by sea so that he
could set up a store there. He traveled by rail
(03:42):
and then by packet ships so that he could meet
up with it. Rice's cargo did not make it to Galveston,
though the ship that it was on was lost at sea,
and this may have been a factor in his decision
to move on from Galveston to Houston. Houston had been
founded in eighteen thirty six and in eighteen thirty seven,
and it had been named the capital of the Republic
of Texas. At that point, it was barely getting started
(04:05):
as a city, and there were more tense than permanent structures,
but Houston had obvious potential to become a bustling trading center.
It was situated on Buffalo Bayou, which connected to the
Port of Galveston through Galveston Bay, so people from the
surrounding area could send their goods overland to Houston, and
from there it could be shipped out to the Port
(04:26):
of Galveston by water. In February of eighteen thirty nine,
the Harrisburg County Board of Commissioners granted Rice three and
twenty acres of land in Houston, and then that April,
Rice got a contract to both supply and serve liquor
at the Milum Hotel. He was paid the cost of
the alcohol plus three dollars a day, and his board.
(04:50):
This job might conjure up an image of somebody who
really enjoyed or at least cared about alcoholic beverages. But
Rice himself seems to have been a teetotaler. It was
his job, it was a good business opportunity, clearly that
se he just seems to have been like, whatever I
can put my hand in to get some money, go
and it'll be good. Rice formed a series of business
(05:11):
partnerships in the Houston area. One was with Barnabas Haskell
in August of eighteen forty, but that partnership seems to
have fizzled out pretty quickly. Not long after, he became
partners with Charles W. Adams. Their joint ventures included a
sugar plantation. Around eighteen forty four, Rice started an import
export business with Ebeneezer B. Nichols, who had fought against
(05:34):
Mexico and against Indigenous nations while serving in the army,
and together they did business as Rice and Nichols Exporters,
Importers and Wholesale Grocers of Houston. This business imported all
kinds of stuff, basically anything that people living in Texas
could want our need, but they exported mostly cotton, and
(05:55):
this was true of Houston's other exporters as well. Houston's
next biggest export at this point was hides, and once
a sawmill was built in the eighteen forties, lumber joined
cotton and hides, but both hides and lumber were way
way behind the amount of cotton that moved from Houston
to Galveston and then out to other parts of the world.
(06:17):
The Texas Constitution outlawed the chartering of banks. That was
something that would continue until after the US Civil War,
so as Rice and his business partners became wealthy enough
to do it, they started offering basic banking services in
addition to their work as merchants and cotton brokers, things
like offering loans and lines of credit. Businesses in Texas
(06:39):
couldn't issue currency, though, so when people needed it, they
relied on US, Spanish, and Mexican currency, even though it
wasn't always clear what their actual value should be. Because
of this lack of a centralized currency, people also paid
their debts in other ways as well, so some of
Rice's clients paid him in land, and that, of course
added to his wealth. In eighteen forty five, Texas became
(07:03):
a US state, entering the Union as a slave state.
At this point, the United States was trying to maintain
a balance between free enslave states in the Senate. That
balance was tipped slightly in favor of slave states until
eighteen forty eight, and that's when Wisconsin entered the Union
as a free state. This was not just a political
or theoretical issue for William marsh Rice. The cotton industry,
(07:27):
which was such a central part of his business, was
profitable because of its exploitation of enslaved labor, and Rice
wasn't simply exporting cotton and selling imports to enslavers. He
was also acting as a cotton factor, loaning money to
landowners and cotton growers in the window between when they
delivered their crop and when they were actually paid for it,
(07:48):
and also just handling other business for them. William's brother, Frederick,
also owned a cotton plantation with an enslaved workforce of
at least thirty five people, and William both sold the
cotton grown there and helped his brother to run that business.
William was also more directly involved. He spent at least
a year serving on a slave patrol, which worked to
(08:10):
track down and return people who had liberated themselves from slavery.
As part of this, he posted advertisements with physical descriptions
of people who had escaped and offering rewards for their return.
In addition to notices that he placed on other people's behalf,
William's advertisements included ones for people who had escaped from him.
(08:32):
William enslaved people for most of his time in Texas
before the Civil War. Enslave schedules from the eighteen sixties
censes he is listed as enslaving fifteen people. Some had
been given to him as payment for debts and some
had been part of land deals. He bought the land
or took possession of the land as payment for a debt,
and enslaved people who were made to work the land
(08:55):
just came with it. He also purchased people directly, including
a seventeen year old named Amanda, who he bought at
a public auction for one thousand, fifty dollars. As another example,
in eighteen forty eight, he and Ebenezer Nichols were together
enslaving a seventeen year old named Ellen and Ellen's one
(09:15):
year old daughter. William transferred his portion of their ownership
over to Ebenezer's son, Frank Rice Nichols as a gift,
even though Rice participated in and massively benefited from the
institution of slavery. Some historians and biographers have concluded that
he did not support the Southern States secession over the issue,
(09:36):
which of course launched the Civil War. His business dealings
suggested that he understood how much power and wealth was
really focused in the Northern States and with the federal government.
He also had a nephew who served with the thirty
seventh Massachusetts Volunteers, who later suggested that one of the
reasons Rice ultimately moved away from Texas was that he
(09:57):
was suspected of having Northern sympathy. At the same time,
though in the early years of the war, Rice and
his wife worked to raise money for and to otherwise
support Confederate soldiers and their widows, and any statements that
Rice made after the war was over about supporting the
Union or rejecting the Confederacy really can't just be taken
(10:19):
at face value. Once the war was over, it was
absolutely in his best interest personally and financially to try
to establish the idea that he had been pro Union
all along. I'm one of the good guys. We have
gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. In the chronology
of this discussion of William marsh Rice's history as an enslaver.
(10:41):
So we are going to take a quick break, and
then we're gonna rewind a few years before the Civil
War started. On June twenty nine of eighteen fifty, thirty
four year old William arsh Rice married eighteen year old
(11:02):
Margaret C. Bremen, with newspapers describing their wedding at the
Capitol Hotel as splendid. William bought them a house in Houston.
This was actually one that his business partner, Ebeneezer Nichols
had started building but not finished yet, before deciding to
move to Galveston to manage their operations there. At some
(11:22):
point around this time, William also started attending an Episcopalian
shirts rather than a Methodist church, possibly because Margaret was
Episcopalian and the Nichols family were Episcopalians as well. In
eighteen fifty one, Rice helped establish the Houston and Galveston
Navigation Company. After his brother Frederick moved to Texas, they
(11:43):
established William Rice and Company. In eighteen fifty eight, William
bought a brig he named the William M. Rice, which
he used to import ice from Massachusetts. We are not
sure whether this was connected to Frederick Tutor's ice business
that we have covered on the show before, but he
sold the ship at the start of the Civil War. Yeah. Unfortunately,
(12:04):
the Frederick Tutor book that might have had that information
went back to the library years ago. I actually worked
on that episode, uh, and I could not retrieve it
again in the timeline for this episode. Anyway. Even though
Rice doesn't seem to have had much formal education himself,
he does seem to have been interested in the educational
systems in the community where he was living. In eighteen
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fifty seven he became a board member of the Houston
Education Society, and in eighteen fifty nine he became a
trustee of the Ward Free School and of Texas Medical College.
By this point he had a reputation for being a
skilled and reliable businessman. He had an estimated fortune of
about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which made him
(12:48):
one of the richest men in Texas. He was probably
second only to sugar planter John Hunter Herndon, whose wealth
primarily came from his huge landholdings and the work force
that he enslaved. Sometime before the start of the Civil war,
Rice dissolved his partnership with Ebenezer Nichols. This seems to
have been an amical division of their business, with Nichols
(13:11):
doing business in Galveston while Rice focused largely on Houston.
The U. S Civil War started, of course, in eighteen
sixty one, and at first Rice continued to run his
business from Houston. He didn't join the army. It sort
of seems like it was kind of business as usual,
sort of, except with the blockade and whatnot, at least
at the beginning. But then his wife, Margaret died on
(13:33):
August thirteenth of eighteen sixty three. After her death, William
left Texas, where their home was used as a military hospital.
He drew up a will, leaving everything to his brother,
and then he went to matt to Borrow's Mexico. This
had become a popular location for people who were trying
to ship goods without having to use blackade runners to
(13:55):
get through the Union blockade of Confederate ports. After the war,
Rice claimed that he had never run the blockade. This
leaves some unanswered questions, like he was able to essentially
legally go around it from Mexico, but he was still
in Houston. For a chunk of the war. So it's
(14:16):
not totally clear whether he was being honest when he
claimed never to have used blackade. Runners. Probably not sitting
on his hands during that time, right, um, So regardless
of that, as we said earlier, it wasn't his best
interest to make it seem like he had been as
law abiding by Union standards as possible. He stayed in
(14:36):
Mexico until August of eighteen sixty five, and of course
Rice faced some financial losses as a result of the war.
Confederate currency and bonds were both worthless afterward. When applying
for amnesty after the war, he claimed that he had
been financially ruined, but really he managed to protect a
lot of his investments. He had gotten his brother to
(14:57):
sell out his stock in Houston, and he had tinued
to trade in cotton and necessary goods from Mexico. He
also had other investments besides the ones we've discussed, including
plank roads and railroads. Rice went back to Houston, as
we said, right after the war was over, but then
not long after that he moved to New Jersey, where
he worked as an agent for Houston and Texas Railroad.
(15:20):
In addition to the Railroad. He kept a lot of
business ties in Texas, including becoming a director of Houston
Insurance Company in June of eighteen sixty six. On June
eighteen sixty seven, Rice married Julia Elizabeth Baldwin Brown, known
to family as Libby. She was the widowed sister of
(15:40):
his brother Frederick's wife, and William had also acted as
her late husband's agent. Although they got married in Houston,
they went back east not long after the wedding, possibly
because of a terrible yellow fever epidemic that struck Houston
that summer. That epidemic killed nearly five hundred people. That
was the worst yellow fever at to make ever to
(16:00):
strike that city. For a lot of their marriage, William
and Elizabeth lived primarily in New York and New Jersey.
William bought a farm in Donnellen, New Jersey, and that
eventually had an orchard, a dairy in a smoke house.
They often spent winters in Houston, but there were years
long stretches where they didn't go back to Texas at all.
(16:22):
This didn't seem to suit his wife, though William really
loved the farm, but Elizabeth wanted to have friends and
social engagements and more amusements than were really available out
in the country. Eventually, William got an apartment for them
in Manhattan, and she seemed happier there, and from there
she took on various charitable pursuits. In five Rice also
(16:45):
bought the Capitol Hotel in Houston, where they stayed when
they visited, eventually having a suite built and furnace just
for their use. In eighteen eighty seven or eighteen eighty eight,
Caesar Maurice Lombardi, who was president of the Houston School Board,
came to Rice about funding a municipal high school. The
city council was not really enthusiastic about the project. According
(17:08):
to Lombardi, they thought high school was quote high falutin nonsense.
But as we've discussed, Rice was already involved in various
educational institutions. His parents had been as well. But after
considering this proposal, he decided that funding the high school
was really the city's job and he wanted to do
something different. He decided to use his fortune to build
(17:32):
the William M. Rice Institute of Literature, Science, and Art.
Mis replaced an earlier idea that he had been working
on to fund an orphanage that would have been not
far from his farm in New Jersey. Rice established a
board of trustees, and on May thirteenth, he provided a
two hundred thousand dollar endowment, quote, devoted to the instruction
(17:54):
and improvement of the white inhabitants of the City of
Houston and State of Texas through and by the establishment
and maintenance of a public library and Institute for the
advancement of literature, science, and Art. Later that month, the
institute was incorporated. Under its articles of incorporation, it was
to be devoted to the quote establishment and maintenance of
(18:16):
a thorough polytechnic school for males and females designed to
give instructions on the application of science and art to
the useful occupations of life. This document also specified that
the quote library, reading room, scientific department, and polytechnic school,
and the instruction, benefits and enjoyments to be derived from
(18:36):
the institute to be free and open to all. It
was also specified that the school would be built only
after Rice's death. I read some speculation that this was
because the Capitol Hotel had turned into kind of a
money pit and like a maintenance nightmare, and that maybe
he just didn't want to have to deal with something
like that for his institute while he was alive. The
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Rice's return to New York later in eighteen ninety one,
it was to a larger, nicer apartment. In eighty three,
William drew up a will that left most of his fortune,
which was estimated at about four million dollars, to the institute,
with the rest divided up among various people, including provisions
to make sure his wife had an income if she
(19:20):
survived him. Elizabeth didn't outlive William, though she got sick
in the winter of eighteen and in the spring of
eighteen ninety six they went to Houston, hoping that the
warmer weather would help her. After they got there, though
she had what sounds like a stroke. Afterwards, she was
paralyzed on her right side, and her cognitive abilities seemed
(19:41):
to have been seriously affected as well. But then, in
June of eighteen ninety six or in Thaddeus Holt drew
up a new will for Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother and sister
witnessed it, and Holt was named as executor. This will
claimed that Elizabeth was a resident of Texas, which meant
that under the state's community property laws, half of William's
(20:03):
estate would be hers to bequeath even if William was
still alive when she died. All of this was done
without William's knowledge, and it is really not clear how
involved Elizabeth was in the decision to do this or
the terms of the will itself. But the terms of
the will specified that the executor would receive ten percent
(20:26):
of everything that he received and paid out. Under its terms,
Elizabeth's bequeathals added up to about one point to five
million dollars, or twice that much if it turned out
William's estate was worth more than expected, so that meant
that as executor of this estate or in Holt stood
(20:47):
to make at least a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
All of this seems shady deeply. As the summer progressed
in Houston, the heat seemed to make Elizabeth's condition worse,
so the Rices went to a healing retreat in Waukasha, Wisconsin.
Although Elizabeth did seem to fare a bit better in Wisconsin,
(21:08):
the opposite was true for William. He went back to
New York, something that he said was both ordered by
a doctor and what his wife wanted. Elizabeth died on
July eighteen ninety six, at which point Williams still knew
nothing about the will that or in Holt had drawn up.
When that will was admitted to probate in March of
(21:29):
eighteen ninety seven, Rice filed suit arguing that although they
had been in Texas when this will was created, they
were residents of New York, so Texas's community property laws
did not apply. Around this time, Rice met a man
named Charles Jones, who was known as Charlie. Charlie had
(21:50):
been told to look after a trunk that had been
sent from Waukasha to Houston, which belonged to the late
Mrs Rice. In the spring of eighteen seventy nine, when
will and returned to New York after filing suit in Texas,
he took Jones with him as his valet. We will
talk more about this after another sponsor break. Legal action
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over Elizabeth Brice's will went on for years, and during
this time William marsh Rice mostly stayed in New York.
He became increasingly solitary, maybe a little eccentric. He spent
most of his time reading journals, writing lots of letters,
trying to look after his health. He had developed some
(22:41):
chronic digestive problems and seems to have been very focused
on trying to stay as healthy as possible. He had
folks in Houston looking after his business interests there, and
in New York, his only real companion was his ballet,
Charlie Jones. Meanwhile, or In T Holt, who had drawn
up Elizabeth Rice's contested will, was still trying to gather
(23:03):
evidence to support his case that she should be considered
a resident of Texas. This required investigations and interviews in Houston,
New York, and New Jersey, and Holt realized that he
just could not do it all by himself, so he
hired another lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, to handle things in
New York and New Jersey. Patrick's investigation naturally brought him
(23:27):
into contact with Rice's valet, and Charlie Jones later testified
that around the end of eighteen Patrick started convincing him
that they should try to get some of Rice's fortune
for themselves. In January of nineteen hundred, Walter Weatherby, who
was a clerk at the bank that Rice used in
(23:47):
New York, came to him and asked him for a loan.
Jones eavesdropped on this conversation and later went to weather Be,
describing Rice as quote old and dopey and claiming that
he could get Rice to sign anything. Jones proposed that
weather B dropped a new will for William marsh Rice,
which Jones would get him to sign. Whether By did
(24:09):
not take him up on this offer, but he also
didn't tell anyone about it. Also, at early Charlie Jones
got sick and Albert Patrick sent his doctor Walker Curry
to treat him. Curry, who had served as a surgeon
in the Confederate Army, prescribed a Mercury tonic. Rice decided
(24:30):
to seek some treatment from Curry as well. At this point,
Rice did not personally know Patrick, but he did know
that Patrick was doing all of these investigations and relating
to his wife's will. So Patrick told Curry that he
had to keep their whole connection a secret from Rice. Meanwhile,
Patrick was building a fake paper trail to make it
(24:53):
look like he had an ongoing business relationship with Rice.
Patrick pulled in Morris Myers and David Shore, who were
a notary and a commissioner of deeds that he knew,
and they reported back to Patrick when they signed and
notarized documents for Rice so that he could date his forgeries.
On the same day, Jones also mailed Patrick blank pieces
(25:14):
of paper from Rice's apartment, and once Patrick received them,
he replaced the blank paper with documents he had forged.
He also started practicing Rice's signature. Jones typed up correspondence
for Rice to sign, but he also brought some of
those unsigned documents for Patrick to do. Then, in the
summer of nine d Patrick drew up a new will
(25:37):
for William marsh Rice, one that left most of Rice's
fortune to him rather than to the William m Rice
Institute of Literature, Science, and Art. So at this point,
Rice was eighty four years old. He had chronic digestive
trouble and some difficulty walking thanks to an old knee injury.
He had actually jumped off of a moving train. After
(25:58):
realizing that he had accidentally, he slept through his stop,
and that was the source of that problem. Dr Curry
described him as weak, with swelling in his hands and feet,
a sluggish heartbeat, and some hearing loss. But Rice aspired
to live to be as old as his grandfather, Josiah Hall,
who had died at the age of a hundred and
one Jones later testified that in about August of nine hundred,
(26:23):
Patrick started suggesting that they try to speed things along
with Rice, but this timeline might not really be accurate.
Jones's brother back in Texas had also started buying chloroform
and sending it to the men in New York back
in July. Regardless of the details of this timeline, though,
Jones testified that on Patrick's instructions, he had started giving
(26:47):
Rice the mercury pills that Curry had prescribed to him earlier,
and larger doses than were intended, eventually giving him so
many of these pills that Patrick had to get some more.
At first, Rice seems to have thought these pills that
Jones was dosing him with were helping to improve his health. Then,
on September eight, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas. This storm
(27:12):
was catastrophic and deadly. It killed at least six thousand
people and possibly even twice that number. It also caused
enormous property damage, completely leveling much of Galveston, including buildings
that William marsh Rice owned. This is sometimes described as
the worst natural disaster in US history, and it is
covered in our prior episode five historical storms. Rice still
(27:37):
had business interests in Houston and in Galveston, and then,
to make things worse, on September six, a fire broke
out at the Merchants and Planters Oil Company, which was
a cotton seed mill that Rice owned. Rice authorized manager
Henry Oliver to draw up to a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars from his accounts to pay for repairs. All
(27:59):
of this was financially catastrophic for Rice, and all of
the associated stress and trauma aggravated his already difficult digestion.
After a friend stopped by and told him that bananas
always helped her when her digestion was bad, he went
way overboard and he ate nine bananas a day. That
(28:20):
made him feel worse, and he took even more of
those mercury pills that Jones had given him to try
to fix it. We've talked on the show before that
mercury was sometimes used as a medicine. Uh, not a
great idea. He at this point had taken a lot
of it. But Rice was still alive, and Patrick was
(28:40):
apparently terrified that if he did not die soon, he
would spend his entire fortune trying to rebuild in Texas,
and that would make that forged will worthless. So, according
to Jones's testimony, on Sunday, September twenty three, nine hundred,
Patrick gave him some poison to Sir of to Rice
(29:00):
in a t Rice actually found it too bitter and
spit it out. By this point, Rice was pretty weak,
and Jones carried him to ben Jones later testified that,
following Patrick's instructions, he dosed Rice with two ounces of
chloroform in a sponge wrapped in a towel that had
been pinned in the shape of a cone. After about
(29:22):
thirty minutes, he confirmed that Rice was dead, and he
retrieved and burned the sponge and towel. Then Patrick came
into the apartment posing as Rice's legitimate lawyer. He told
the undertaker who arrived, that Rice wanted to be cremated
and that the cremation should happen the next day. Jones
(29:43):
had actually laid some of the groundwork for this, getting
some pamphlets on cremation and staging them on Rice's desk.
There was also a letter which was probably forged, in
which Rice purportedly requested to be cremated. When the undertaker
explained that it was not possible to start the cremation process,
so quickly Patrick ordered Rice's body to be embalmed in
(30:06):
the interim. By this point, Dr Curry had also arrived
and he got a blank death certificate from the undertaker.
He filled it out with the cause of death of
old age and weak heart immediate cause indigestion, followed by
cola coo to diarrhea with mental worry. That's not real,
(30:27):
it's not a real word. Yet. I tried to figure
out what what Curry meant by cola coo to diarrhea, which,
because it's not even an order of letters that would
work in English, I don't I don't really know. At first,
Rice's death didn't really strike people as suspicious, given his
age and his health. But the next day, David Short,
(30:51):
that Commissioner of Deeds that Patrick had been working with,
tried to cash a check for twenty five thousand dollars
at S. M. S. Winson and Sons Bank, but the
clerk at the bank thought something was a miss. Number one.
Rice did not typically right checks that large number two.
The check was made out to Albert's T. Patrick, but
(31:13):
it was endorsed Albert T. Patrick, the clerk refused to
process the check and Short left, returning a bit later
with a check that had all of the names spelled correctly.
The clerk still was not convinced and called Race's apartment
at the Berkshire and got Jones on the phone. Jones
was evasive, but eventually told the clerk that Rice was dead.
(31:36):
Derreck Swinson, who was one of the sons and s
w Swinson and sons went to an attorney and they
sent word to Houston about Rice's death. Rice's Houston attorney,
James A. Baker, contacted Rice's brother, Frederick, and the two
of them left for New York. When they got there,
Albert Patrick produced the will that he had written back
(31:58):
on June thirty, which left Rice's institute only two fifty
thousand dollars less any money it had received up to
that amount thanks to Rice's earlier endowment and the interest
that it had accrued. This will would have left the
institute with nothing additional from Rice's estate, and instead left
(32:18):
most of the estate to Albert Patrick. Patrick claimed that
this was because Rice was quote tired of life and
tired of business. Right sure, Rice's actual attorneys and his
brother went to the district attorney who ordered an autopsy.
This was carried out on September and Rice's body was
(32:40):
cremated on the twenty five. At this point, there was
all kinds of speculation in newspapers that Rice had been
murdered for his money, and this coverage became increasingly sensationalized,
especially as various members of Rice's extended family, including people
that he had not spoken to in decades if ever,
(33:00):
started giving statements to the press saying that they were penniless.
On October four, Albert Patrick and Charlie Jones were both
arrested for forgery, for that five thousand dollar check that
was originally spelled wrong, for the forged will, and for
various other forged checks, and then on the seven, the
coroner's office issued its report. In Rice's autopsy, the coroner
(33:23):
said that there was enough mercury and his organs to
have caused his death, plus a lot of arsenic, although
they attributed the arsenic to the embalming fluid UH. Later on,
there were medical experts who talked about um the effect
of chloroform on his lungs. It doesn't seem to have
been part of the actual coroner's report. At this point,
(33:44):
when the coroner's report came out, Charlie Jones told prosecutors
he wanted to make a statement, and he gave a
full confession to everything he and Patrick had done, although
he said that Patrick was the one who had killed
Rice with chloroform. Soon Morris Myers and David Short were
arrested for their involvement as well. Before long, though, it
(34:06):
became clear that Albert Patrick could not have been the
one who gave Rice chloroform. He had eaten dinner that
night at his boarding house, and then he had been
in the parlor singing hymns with some of the other
people who lived there before they all went to a
religious meeting, basically had an alibi. After hearing this, Jones
(34:27):
confessed that it was he, not Albert Patrick, who had
chloroformed William marsh Rice. As all of this was happening,
or in Holt settled the lawsuits related to Elizabeth Rice's
will out of court. William Rice's murder had added a
whole other layer of complication, and it had become clear
that he could not build an airtight case that she
(34:48):
should have been considered a resident of Texas. Albert T.
Patrick was tried for murder and was found guilty. On
March twenty six, nineteen o two, he was sentenced to death.
The media spectacles surrounding all of this got another jolt
a couple of days later when he announced his engagement
to Mrs Addie Francis, who owned the boarding house where
(35:10):
he lived. He made that announcement, of course, from prison.
Two months later, when past podcast subject Hetty Green was
granted a permit to carry a pistol, she told reporters
that it was for her own protection, citing, among other things,
the case of William marsh Rice. Do you suppose Valet
Jones would have molested him if he knew Mr Rice
(35:31):
had a pistol? Of course he would not have done so.
I don't want evil disposed people to repeat that sort
of thing on me. On April twenty nine, nineteen o four,
all the legal and probate issues were settled surrounding William
marsh Rice's will, and the Rice Institute trustees got four millions,
six hundred thirty one thousand, two hundred fifty nine dollars
(35:54):
and eight cents. But Albert Patrick's family and supporters maintained
his inn since they brought in expert witnesses who testified
that Charlie Jones's story just did not add up, among
other things, if Rice had been chloroformed, as Jones described,
the people who came into the apartment and examined the
body would have been able to smell it. After years
(36:16):
of ongoing legal proceedings, Patrick's sentence was commuted on December twenty,
nineteen o six, and he was pardoned in nineteen twelve.
He died in nineteen forty. Charlie Jones was not charged
in Rice's murder. A lot of the statements that he
gave to police contradicted one another or were implausible for
(36:38):
various reasons, and at one point he had tried to
take his own life while in custody. Ultimately, though he
was released, he seems to have gone back to Texas
with his brother, and he took his own life there
in nineteen fifty four. Most accounts of all of this
described Rice's death as a homicide, with Jones and Patrick
both directly involved in it. But in The of Old
(37:00):
Man Rice, which was published by New York University Press,
in Martin L. Friedland describes being certain that Patrick was
guilty before he started researching the book, but then becoming
more doubtful as his work went on. Friedland consulted medical
experts who raised doubts and pointed out inconsistencies between Jones's
testimony and how chloroform actually works. Some of these were
(37:24):
the exact same points that Patrick's defense team and expert
witnesses had made back in the early nineteen hundreds. It
is possible that marsh was already dead when Jones tried
to chloroform him, or that his account of the chloroform
was fabricated. The forgery is easier to substantiate at this point. Yeah,
it seems pretty clear to me that there was definitely
(37:47):
a plot going on to take his money, maybe also
to try to hasten him toward death with the mercury pills.
The chloroform has some question marks around it, uh, and
he was cremated. It will never conclusively be known at
this point. The William marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement
(38:07):
of Letters, Science and Art now William Marsh Rice University,
opened on September twenty three, nineteen twelve. A statue of
William Marsh Rice, which is referred to around campus as Willie,
was erected at the university in nineteen thirty, and Rice's
ashes were placed under it. In more recent years, there
has been a student led movement to remove this statue
(38:30):
because of Rice's enslavement of other people and because he
established the university specifically as a whites only institution. When
Rice drew up his will, people generally framed the United
States as having two races, black and white. So while
the university did enroll other non black people of color
earlier in its history, its specifically excluded black students for decades.
(38:56):
It wasn't until nineteen sixty three, after years of advocacy
by students and pressure from outside the university and things
like Brown versus Board of Education, the university trustees started
trying to find a way out of that white's only
clause in Rice's will. This ultimately involved a court case,
(39:19):
one that sought to overturn both the whites only clause
and Rice's stipulation that the university would not charge tuition.
That court case was ultimately successful, and the university's charter
was also revised to reflect both of those changes. Although
Rice had also specified that this institution would be devoted
to quote the city of Houston and State of Texas.
(39:42):
Out of state and international students had been admitted almost
from the start. Rice University's first known black student was
graduate student Raymond Johnson, who was admitted in nineteen sixty
six and earned a PhD in mathematics in nineteen sixty nine.
The first black underground du it's at Rice where Linda
Fay Williams and Theodore Marshall Henderson. They both graduated in
(40:05):
n And that is the murder kind of question mark,
William marsh Rice, do you have listener mail that is
not a question mark? I do. I mean it's still
has question marks, though I picked a listener mail that
has some question marks. This is from Liam uh and
(40:25):
Liam wrote a note that said, hello ladies, I just
listened to your Friday episode. Was the Friday episode behind
the scenes where we talked about jin and you talked
about the KLM houses. I'm very fortunate that pre COVID
I flew to the US from the UK with work
and KLEM were usually the second best choice of route
but always cheaper, so often what I ended up on.
(40:46):
So I have a small collection, and yes I have
the app, and yes people go nuts. They bring them
round on a little tray, and many people ask them
to turn the tray round so they can see the
numbers to check them off in their app Anyway, the
point in writing Klem, we're taken to court over the houses.
Once under Dutch log gifts are taxable, and the government
(41:07):
argued that these were gifts to some passengers. Klem's defense
was that, actually, know these aren't gifts because they are filled.
It's actually a farewell drink served in a special container.
If the passengers choose not to drink it and take
it home, that's up to them. It was a successful defense,
even though I've never seen anyone open their house, which
(41:27):
Kaleb absolutely no. They sealed them in those fancy bags.
If you're connecting so you can bring your liquids through.
Some of them go on eBay for hundreds of dollars,
but only if it's not been opened. And because I
know you love kiddies, here's our three legged rescue Pogo.
Um My printer attempted to print the picture of Pogo,
(41:48):
but it's so big that it cannot work out. Uh.
Liam says, thanks for all the many hours of lifelong learning.
I love this story and I tried to go learn
more about this, and it's little vague exactly what happened.
Um with the legal questions about the delf Blue houses
(42:08):
um that Kalem gives out two passengers. The most authoritative
source I found was the Kalem blog um, which described
this as being not so much about taxes, but but
about the idea that airlines were not allowed to give
passengers incentives and basically saying, is there some law that
(42:29):
says that alcohol has to be served in a glass?
Um to build a case for the idea that this
is a this is a container and not a gift um,
I found some sources that claimed that this was related
to US airline deregulation in the nineteen seventies. I was
not able to find like actual detail about it in
(42:51):
the time allowed before recording today's episode. But regardless, even
if this does turn out to be kind of like
an apocryphal myth making story around the Hail Them houses,
I still find it delightful. So thank you li Liam
for this email and for the kiddie picture. If you'd
like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. We are also all over
(43:14):
social media at Misston History That is where we will
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
and wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
(43:36):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
a friend who sends me like historical tidbits and clips
(00:21):
from old newspapers that he digs up from time to time.
Usually these are things that are simultaneously interesting and kind
of weird. Uh, sometimes it's very weird. Earlier this year, though,
he sent a message about a reported murder from more
than a century ago, and just from the details that
(00:44):
trickled through over these texts, I thought, Okay, that's got
to go on the list. This is probably the most
well known among people from Texas and people who are
affiliated with Rice University in Houston, because it is the
of the university's founder and namesake, William marsh Rice. Today
(01:05):
we're going to talk about how William marsh Rice amassed
a fortune big enough that he was basically able to
establish an entire university by himself, and how that fortune
also made him a target for murder. Although William marsh
Rice's namesake university is of course in Texas, he was
born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March fourteenth eighteen sixteen. His
(01:30):
parents were David and Patty hall Rice, and he was
the third of their ten children, seven of whom survived infancy.
William was named for the Reverend William Marsh, a Methodist
circuit writer who established a Methodist Episcopal Society in that
area in eighteen fifteen. David and Patty were its first
two members. David worked at the Springfield Armory, which was
(01:53):
the United States first federal arsenal. He also worked as
a tax assessor and a tax collector and represent into
Springfield in the General Court of Massachusetts. Later in William's life,
he wrote a letter in which he described his parents
as very hard working and devoted to their children, and
said that his father in particular had such a quote
(02:14):
firm reliance upon providence that nothing seemed to lay heavy
on his mind. While William was still a boy, Massachusetts
passed a law requiring any town with five hundred families
or more to build a high school. William's father was
on the committee that worked to build the school in Springfield,
and the Rices were one of the families that financially
contributed to its construction. So it seems like education was
(02:39):
pretty important to them, and it would have made sense
for William to have enrolled in the school when it opened,
but there isn't any record of this, and the family
lore is that at around age fifteen he actually left
school to work at a store. Rice turned twenty one
in eighteen thirty seven, and at that point he had
saved enough money to buy a store of his own,
(03:00):
but that same year, a combination of factors triggered the
Panic of eighteen thirty seven. Rice's reasons for leaving Massachusetts
after this aren't documented anywhere, but it's extremely likely that
this business he'd started for himself suffered during this financial crisis,
and at about the same time people in the United States,
(03:21):
we're hearing about cheap land and new business opportunities that
were available in the Republic of Texas, including through advertisements
that were intentionally trying to attract more Anglos to the area.
In eighteen thirty eight, Rice moved to Texas, sending a
load of goods to Galveston by sea so that he
could set up a store there. He traveled by rail
(03:42):
and then by packet ships so that he could meet
up with it. Rice's cargo did not make it to Galveston,
though the ship that it was on was lost at sea,
and this may have been a factor in his decision
to move on from Galveston to Houston. Houston had been
founded in eighteen thirty six and in eighteen thirty seven,
and it had been named the capital of the Republic
of Texas. At that point, it was barely getting started
(04:05):
as a city, and there were more tense than permanent structures,
but Houston had obvious potential to become a bustling trading center.
It was situated on Buffalo Bayou, which connected to the
Port of Galveston through Galveston Bay, so people from the
surrounding area could send their goods overland to Houston, and
from there it could be shipped out to the Port
(04:26):
of Galveston by water. In February of eighteen thirty nine,
the Harrisburg County Board of Commissioners granted Rice three and
twenty acres of land in Houston, and then that April,
Rice got a contract to both supply and serve liquor
at the Milum Hotel. He was paid the cost of
the alcohol plus three dollars a day, and his board.
(04:50):
This job might conjure up an image of somebody who
really enjoyed or at least cared about alcoholic beverages. But
Rice himself seems to have been a teetotaler. It was
his job, it was a good business opportunity, clearly that
se he just seems to have been like, whatever I
can put my hand in to get some money, go
and it'll be good. Rice formed a series of business
(05:11):
partnerships in the Houston area. One was with Barnabas Haskell
in August of eighteen forty, but that partnership seems to
have fizzled out pretty quickly. Not long after, he became
partners with Charles W. Adams. Their joint ventures included a
sugar plantation. Around eighteen forty four, Rice started an import
export business with Ebeneezer B. Nichols, who had fought against
(05:34):
Mexico and against Indigenous nations while serving in the army,
and together they did business as Rice and Nichols Exporters,
Importers and Wholesale Grocers of Houston. This business imported all
kinds of stuff, basically anything that people living in Texas
could want our need, but they exported mostly cotton, and
(05:55):
this was true of Houston's other exporters as well. Houston's
next biggest export at this point was hides, and once
a sawmill was built in the eighteen forties, lumber joined
cotton and hides, but both hides and lumber were way
way behind the amount of cotton that moved from Houston
to Galveston and then out to other parts of the world.
(06:17):
The Texas Constitution outlawed the chartering of banks. That was
something that would continue until after the US Civil War,
so as Rice and his business partners became wealthy enough
to do it, they started offering basic banking services in
addition to their work as merchants and cotton brokers, things
like offering loans and lines of credit. Businesses in Texas
(06:39):
couldn't issue currency, though, so when people needed it, they
relied on US, Spanish, and Mexican currency, even though it
wasn't always clear what their actual value should be. Because
of this lack of a centralized currency, people also paid
their debts in other ways as well, so some of
Rice's clients paid him in land, and that, of course
added to his wealth. In eighteen forty five, Texas became
(07:03):
a US state, entering the Union as a slave state.
At this point, the United States was trying to maintain
a balance between free enslave states in the Senate. That
balance was tipped slightly in favor of slave states until
eighteen forty eight, and that's when Wisconsin entered the Union
as a free state. This was not just a political
or theoretical issue for William marsh Rice. The cotton industry,
(07:27):
which was such a central part of his business, was
profitable because of its exploitation of enslaved labor, and Rice
wasn't simply exporting cotton and selling imports to enslavers. He
was also acting as a cotton factor, loaning money to
landowners and cotton growers in the window between when they
delivered their crop and when they were actually paid for it,
(07:48):
and also just handling other business for them. William's brother, Frederick,
also owned a cotton plantation with an enslaved workforce of
at least thirty five people, and William both sold the
cotton grown there and helped his brother to run that business.
William was also more directly involved. He spent at least
a year serving on a slave patrol, which worked to
(08:10):
track down and return people who had liberated themselves from slavery.
As part of this, he posted advertisements with physical descriptions
of people who had escaped and offering rewards for their return.
In addition to notices that he placed on other people's behalf,
William's advertisements included ones for people who had escaped from him.
(08:32):
William enslaved people for most of his time in Texas
before the Civil War. Enslave schedules from the eighteen sixties
censes he is listed as enslaving fifteen people. Some had
been given to him as payment for debts and some
had been part of land deals. He bought the land
or took possession of the land as payment for a debt,
and enslaved people who were made to work the land
(08:55):
just came with it. He also purchased people directly, including
a seventeen year old named Amanda, who he bought at
a public auction for one thousand, fifty dollars. As another example,
in eighteen forty eight, he and Ebenezer Nichols were together
enslaving a seventeen year old named Ellen and Ellen's one
(09:15):
year old daughter. William transferred his portion of their ownership
over to Ebenezer's son, Frank Rice Nichols as a gift,
even though Rice participated in and massively benefited from the
institution of slavery. Some historians and biographers have concluded that
he did not support the Southern States secession over the issue,
(09:36):
which of course launched the Civil War. His business dealings
suggested that he understood how much power and wealth was
really focused in the Northern States and with the federal government.
He also had a nephew who served with the thirty
seventh Massachusetts Volunteers, who later suggested that one of the
reasons Rice ultimately moved away from Texas was that he
(09:57):
was suspected of having Northern sympathy. At the same time,
though in the early years of the war, Rice and
his wife worked to raise money for and to otherwise
support Confederate soldiers and their widows, and any statements that
Rice made after the war was over about supporting the
Union or rejecting the Confederacy really can't just be taken
(10:19):
at face value. Once the war was over, it was
absolutely in his best interest personally and financially to try
to establish the idea that he had been pro Union
all along. I'm one of the good guys. We have
gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. In the chronology
of this discussion of William marsh Rice's history as an enslaver.
(10:41):
So we are going to take a quick break, and
then we're gonna rewind a few years before the Civil
War started. On June twenty nine of eighteen fifty, thirty
four year old William arsh Rice married eighteen year old
(11:02):
Margaret C. Bremen, with newspapers describing their wedding at the
Capitol Hotel as splendid. William bought them a house in Houston.
This was actually one that his business partner, Ebeneezer Nichols
had started building but not finished yet, before deciding to
move to Galveston to manage their operations there. At some
(11:22):
point around this time, William also started attending an Episcopalian
shirts rather than a Methodist church, possibly because Margaret was
Episcopalian and the Nichols family were Episcopalians as well. In
eighteen fifty one, Rice helped establish the Houston and Galveston
Navigation Company. After his brother Frederick moved to Texas, they
(11:43):
established William Rice and Company. In eighteen fifty eight, William
bought a brig he named the William M. Rice, which
he used to import ice from Massachusetts. We are not
sure whether this was connected to Frederick Tutor's ice business
that we have covered on the show before, but he
sold the ship at the start of the Civil War. Yeah. Unfortunately,
(12:04):
the Frederick Tutor book that might have had that information
went back to the library years ago. I actually worked
on that episode, uh, and I could not retrieve it
again in the timeline for this episode. Anyway. Even though
Rice doesn't seem to have had much formal education himself,
he does seem to have been interested in the educational
systems in the community where he was living. In eighteen
(12:27):
fifty seven he became a board member of the Houston
Education Society, and in eighteen fifty nine he became a
trustee of the Ward Free School and of Texas Medical College.
By this point he had a reputation for being a
skilled and reliable businessman. He had an estimated fortune of
about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which made him
(12:48):
one of the richest men in Texas. He was probably
second only to sugar planter John Hunter Herndon, whose wealth
primarily came from his huge landholdings and the work force
that he enslaved. Sometime before the start of the Civil war,
Rice dissolved his partnership with Ebenezer Nichols. This seems to
have been an amical division of their business, with Nichols
(13:11):
doing business in Galveston while Rice focused largely on Houston.
The U. S Civil War started, of course, in eighteen
sixty one, and at first Rice continued to run his
business from Houston. He didn't join the army. It sort
of seems like it was kind of business as usual,
sort of, except with the blockade and whatnot, at least
at the beginning. But then his wife, Margaret died on
(13:33):
August thirteenth of eighteen sixty three. After her death, William
left Texas, where their home was used as a military hospital.
He drew up a will, leaving everything to his brother,
and then he went to matt to Borrow's Mexico. This
had become a popular location for people who were trying
to ship goods without having to use blackade runners to
(13:55):
get through the Union blockade of Confederate ports. After the war,
Rice claimed that he had never run the blockade. This
leaves some unanswered questions, like he was able to essentially
legally go around it from Mexico, but he was still
in Houston. For a chunk of the war. So it's
(14:16):
not totally clear whether he was being honest when he
claimed never to have used blackade. Runners. Probably not sitting
on his hands during that time, right, um, So regardless
of that, as we said earlier, it wasn't his best
interest to make it seem like he had been as
law abiding by Union standards as possible. He stayed in
(14:36):
Mexico until August of eighteen sixty five, and of course
Rice faced some financial losses as a result of the war.
Confederate currency and bonds were both worthless afterward. When applying
for amnesty after the war, he claimed that he had
been financially ruined, but really he managed to protect a
lot of his investments. He had gotten his brother to
(14:57):
sell out his stock in Houston, and he had tinued
to trade in cotton and necessary goods from Mexico. He
also had other investments besides the ones we've discussed, including
plank roads and railroads. Rice went back to Houston, as
we said, right after the war was over, but then
not long after that he moved to New Jersey, where
he worked as an agent for Houston and Texas Railroad.
(15:20):
In addition to the Railroad. He kept a lot of
business ties in Texas, including becoming a director of Houston
Insurance Company in June of eighteen sixty six. On June
eighteen sixty seven, Rice married Julia Elizabeth Baldwin Brown, known
to family as Libby. She was the widowed sister of
(15:40):
his brother Frederick's wife, and William had also acted as
her late husband's agent. Although they got married in Houston,
they went back east not long after the wedding, possibly
because of a terrible yellow fever epidemic that struck Houston
that summer. That epidemic killed nearly five hundred people. That
was the worst yellow fever at to make ever to
(16:00):
strike that city. For a lot of their marriage, William
and Elizabeth lived primarily in New York and New Jersey.
William bought a farm in Donnellen, New Jersey, and that
eventually had an orchard, a dairy in a smoke house.
They often spent winters in Houston, but there were years
long stretches where they didn't go back to Texas at all.
(16:22):
This didn't seem to suit his wife, though William really
loved the farm, but Elizabeth wanted to have friends and
social engagements and more amusements than were really available out
in the country. Eventually, William got an apartment for them
in Manhattan, and she seemed happier there, and from there
she took on various charitable pursuits. In five Rice also
(16:45):
bought the Capitol Hotel in Houston, where they stayed when
they visited, eventually having a suite built and furnace just
for their use. In eighteen eighty seven or eighteen eighty eight,
Caesar Maurice Lombardi, who was president of the Houston School Board,
came to Rice about funding a municipal high school. The
city council was not really enthusiastic about the project. According
(17:08):
to Lombardi, they thought high school was quote high falutin nonsense.
But as we've discussed, Rice was already involved in various
educational institutions. His parents had been as well. But after
considering this proposal, he decided that funding the high school
was really the city's job and he wanted to do
something different. He decided to use his fortune to build
(17:32):
the William M. Rice Institute of Literature, Science, and Art.
Mis replaced an earlier idea that he had been working
on to fund an orphanage that would have been not
far from his farm in New Jersey. Rice established a
board of trustees, and on May thirteenth, he provided a
two hundred thousand dollar endowment, quote, devoted to the instruction
(17:54):
and improvement of the white inhabitants of the City of
Houston and State of Texas through and by the establishment
and maintenance of a public library and Institute for the
advancement of literature, science, and Art. Later that month, the
institute was incorporated. Under its articles of incorporation, it was
to be devoted to the quote establishment and maintenance of
(18:16):
a thorough polytechnic school for males and females designed to
give instructions on the application of science and art to
the useful occupations of life. This document also specified that
the quote library, reading room, scientific department, and polytechnic school,
and the instruction, benefits and enjoyments to be derived from
(18:36):
the institute to be free and open to all. It
was also specified that the school would be built only
after Rice's death. I read some speculation that this was
because the Capitol Hotel had turned into kind of a
money pit and like a maintenance nightmare, and that maybe
he just didn't want to have to deal with something
like that for his institute while he was alive. The
(19:00):
Rice's return to New York later in eighteen ninety one,
it was to a larger, nicer apartment. In eighty three,
William drew up a will that left most of his fortune,
which was estimated at about four million dollars, to the institute,
with the rest divided up among various people, including provisions
to make sure his wife had an income if she
(19:20):
survived him. Elizabeth didn't outlive William, though she got sick
in the winter of eighteen and in the spring of
eighteen ninety six they went to Houston, hoping that the
warmer weather would help her. After they got there, though
she had what sounds like a stroke. Afterwards, she was
paralyzed on her right side, and her cognitive abilities seemed
(19:41):
to have been seriously affected as well. But then, in
June of eighteen ninety six or in Thaddeus Holt drew
up a new will for Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother and sister
witnessed it, and Holt was named as executor. This will
claimed that Elizabeth was a resident of Texas, which meant
that under the state's community property laws, half of William's
(20:03):
estate would be hers to bequeath even if William was
still alive when she died. All of this was done
without William's knowledge, and it is really not clear how
involved Elizabeth was in the decision to do this or
the terms of the will itself. But the terms of
the will specified that the executor would receive ten percent
(20:26):
of everything that he received and paid out. Under its terms,
Elizabeth's bequeathals added up to about one point to five
million dollars, or twice that much if it turned out
William's estate was worth more than expected, so that meant
that as executor of this estate or in Holt stood
(20:47):
to make at least a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
All of this seems shady deeply. As the summer progressed
in Houston, the heat seemed to make Elizabeth's condition worse,
so the Rices went to a healing retreat in Waukasha, Wisconsin.
Although Elizabeth did seem to fare a bit better in Wisconsin,
(21:08):
the opposite was true for William. He went back to
New York, something that he said was both ordered by
a doctor and what his wife wanted. Elizabeth died on
July eighteen ninety six, at which point Williams still knew
nothing about the will that or in Holt had drawn up.
When that will was admitted to probate in March of
(21:29):
eighteen ninety seven, Rice filed suit arguing that although they
had been in Texas when this will was created, they
were residents of New York, so Texas's community property laws
did not apply. Around this time, Rice met a man
named Charles Jones, who was known as Charlie. Charlie had
(21:50):
been told to look after a trunk that had been
sent from Waukasha to Houston, which belonged to the late
Mrs Rice. In the spring of eighteen seventy nine, when
will and returned to New York after filing suit in Texas,
he took Jones with him as his valet. We will
talk more about this after another sponsor break. Legal action
(22:20):
over Elizabeth Brice's will went on for years, and during
this time William marsh Rice mostly stayed in New York.
He became increasingly solitary, maybe a little eccentric. He spent
most of his time reading journals, writing lots of letters,
trying to look after his health. He had developed some
(22:41):
chronic digestive problems and seems to have been very focused
on trying to stay as healthy as possible. He had
folks in Houston looking after his business interests there, and
in New York, his only real companion was his ballet,
Charlie Jones. Meanwhile, or In T Holt, who had drawn
up Elizabeth Rice's contested will, was still trying to gather
(23:03):
evidence to support his case that she should be considered
a resident of Texas. This required investigations and interviews in Houston,
New York, and New Jersey, and Holt realized that he
just could not do it all by himself, so he
hired another lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, to handle things in
New York and New Jersey. Patrick's investigation naturally brought him
(23:27):
into contact with Rice's valet, and Charlie Jones later testified
that around the end of eighteen Patrick started convincing him
that they should try to get some of Rice's fortune
for themselves. In January of nineteen hundred, Walter Weatherby, who
was a clerk at the bank that Rice used in
(23:47):
New York, came to him and asked him for a loan.
Jones eavesdropped on this conversation and later went to weather Be,
describing Rice as quote old and dopey and claiming that
he could get Rice to sign anything. Jones proposed that
weather B dropped a new will for William marsh Rice,
which Jones would get him to sign. Whether By did
(24:09):
not take him up on this offer, but he also
didn't tell anyone about it. Also, at early Charlie Jones
got sick and Albert Patrick sent his doctor Walker Curry
to treat him. Curry, who had served as a surgeon
in the Confederate Army, prescribed a Mercury tonic. Rice decided
(24:30):
to seek some treatment from Curry as well. At this point,
Rice did not personally know Patrick, but he did know
that Patrick was doing all of these investigations and relating
to his wife's will. So Patrick told Curry that he
had to keep their whole connection a secret from Rice. Meanwhile,
Patrick was building a fake paper trail to make it
(24:53):
look like he had an ongoing business relationship with Rice.
Patrick pulled in Morris Myers and David Shore, who were
a notary and a commissioner of deeds that he knew,
and they reported back to Patrick when they signed and
notarized documents for Rice so that he could date his forgeries.
On the same day, Jones also mailed Patrick blank pieces
(25:14):
of paper from Rice's apartment, and once Patrick received them,
he replaced the blank paper with documents he had forged.
He also started practicing Rice's signature. Jones typed up correspondence
for Rice to sign, but he also brought some of
those unsigned documents for Patrick to do. Then, in the
summer of nine d Patrick drew up a new will
(25:37):
for William marsh Rice, one that left most of Rice's
fortune to him rather than to the William m Rice
Institute of Literature, Science, and Art. So at this point,
Rice was eighty four years old. He had chronic digestive
trouble and some difficulty walking thanks to an old knee injury.
He had actually jumped off of a moving train. After
(25:58):
realizing that he had accidentally, he slept through his stop,
and that was the source of that problem. Dr Curry
described him as weak, with swelling in his hands and feet,
a sluggish heartbeat, and some hearing loss. But Rice aspired
to live to be as old as his grandfather, Josiah Hall,
who had died at the age of a hundred and
one Jones later testified that in about August of nine hundred,
(26:23):
Patrick started suggesting that they try to speed things along
with Rice, but this timeline might not really be accurate.
Jones's brother back in Texas had also started buying chloroform
and sending it to the men in New York back
in July. Regardless of the details of this timeline, though,
Jones testified that on Patrick's instructions, he had started giving
(26:47):
Rice the mercury pills that Curry had prescribed to him earlier,
and larger doses than were intended, eventually giving him so
many of these pills that Patrick had to get some more.
At first, Rice seems to have thought these pills that
Jones was dosing him with were helping to improve his health. Then,
on September eight, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas. This storm
(27:12):
was catastrophic and deadly. It killed at least six thousand
people and possibly even twice that number. It also caused
enormous property damage, completely leveling much of Galveston, including buildings
that William marsh Rice owned. This is sometimes described as
the worst natural disaster in US history, and it is
covered in our prior episode five historical storms. Rice still
(27:37):
had business interests in Houston and in Galveston, and then,
to make things worse, on September six, a fire broke
out at the Merchants and Planters Oil Company, which was
a cotton seed mill that Rice owned. Rice authorized manager
Henry Oliver to draw up to a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars from his accounts to pay for repairs. All
(27:59):
of this was financially catastrophic for Rice, and all of
the associated stress and trauma aggravated his already difficult digestion.
After a friend stopped by and told him that bananas
always helped her when her digestion was bad, he went
way overboard and he ate nine bananas a day. That
(28:20):
made him feel worse, and he took even more of
those mercury pills that Jones had given him to try
to fix it. We've talked on the show before that
mercury was sometimes used as a medicine. Uh, not a
great idea. He at this point had taken a lot
of it. But Rice was still alive, and Patrick was
(28:40):
apparently terrified that if he did not die soon, he
would spend his entire fortune trying to rebuild in Texas,
and that would make that forged will worthless. So, according
to Jones's testimony, on Sunday, September twenty three, nine hundred,
Patrick gave him some poison to Sir of to Rice
(29:00):
in a t Rice actually found it too bitter and
spit it out. By this point, Rice was pretty weak,
and Jones carried him to ben Jones later testified that,
following Patrick's instructions, he dosed Rice with two ounces of
chloroform in a sponge wrapped in a towel that had
been pinned in the shape of a cone. After about
(29:22):
thirty minutes, he confirmed that Rice was dead, and he
retrieved and burned the sponge and towel. Then Patrick came
into the apartment posing as Rice's legitimate lawyer. He told
the undertaker who arrived, that Rice wanted to be cremated
and that the cremation should happen the next day. Jones
(29:43):
had actually laid some of the groundwork for this, getting
some pamphlets on cremation and staging them on Rice's desk.
There was also a letter which was probably forged, in
which Rice purportedly requested to be cremated. When the undertaker
explained that it was not possible to start the cremation process,
so quickly Patrick ordered Rice's body to be embalmed in
(30:06):
the interim. By this point, Dr Curry had also arrived
and he got a blank death certificate from the undertaker.
He filled it out with the cause of death of
old age and weak heart immediate cause indigestion, followed by
cola coo to diarrhea with mental worry. That's not real,
(30:27):
it's not a real word. Yet. I tried to figure
out what what Curry meant by cola coo to diarrhea, which,
because it's not even an order of letters that would
work in English, I don't I don't really know. At first,
Rice's death didn't really strike people as suspicious, given his
age and his health. But the next day, David Short,
(30:51):
that Commissioner of Deeds that Patrick had been working with,
tried to cash a check for twenty five thousand dollars
at S. M. S. Winson and Sons Bank, but the
clerk at the bank thought something was a miss. Number one.
Rice did not typically right checks that large number two.
The check was made out to Albert's T. Patrick, but
(31:13):
it was endorsed Albert T. Patrick, the clerk refused to
process the check and Short left, returning a bit later
with a check that had all of the names spelled correctly.
The clerk still was not convinced and called Race's apartment
at the Berkshire and got Jones on the phone. Jones
was evasive, but eventually told the clerk that Rice was dead.
(31:36):
Derreck Swinson, who was one of the sons and s
w Swinson and sons went to an attorney and they
sent word to Houston about Rice's death. Rice's Houston attorney,
James A. Baker, contacted Rice's brother, Frederick, and the two
of them left for New York. When they got there,
Albert Patrick produced the will that he had written back
(31:58):
on June thirty, which left Rice's institute only two fifty
thousand dollars less any money it had received up to
that amount thanks to Rice's earlier endowment and the interest
that it had accrued. This will would have left the
institute with nothing additional from Rice's estate, and instead left
(32:18):
most of the estate to Albert Patrick. Patrick claimed that
this was because Rice was quote tired of life and
tired of business. Right sure, Rice's actual attorneys and his
brother went to the district attorney who ordered an autopsy.
This was carried out on September and Rice's body was
(32:40):
cremated on the twenty five. At this point, there was
all kinds of speculation in newspapers that Rice had been
murdered for his money, and this coverage became increasingly sensationalized,
especially as various members of Rice's extended family, including people
that he had not spoken to in decades if ever,
(33:00):
started giving statements to the press saying that they were penniless.
On October four, Albert Patrick and Charlie Jones were both
arrested for forgery, for that five thousand dollar check that
was originally spelled wrong, for the forged will, and for
various other forged checks, and then on the seven, the
coroner's office issued its report. In Rice's autopsy, the coroner
(33:23):
said that there was enough mercury and his organs to
have caused his death, plus a lot of arsenic, although
they attributed the arsenic to the embalming fluid UH. Later on,
there were medical experts who talked about um the effect
of chloroform on his lungs. It doesn't seem to have
been part of the actual coroner's report. At this point,
(33:44):
when the coroner's report came out, Charlie Jones told prosecutors
he wanted to make a statement, and he gave a
full confession to everything he and Patrick had done, although
he said that Patrick was the one who had killed
Rice with chloroform. Soon Morris Myers and David Short were
arrested for their involvement as well. Before long, though, it
(34:06):
became clear that Albert Patrick could not have been the
one who gave Rice chloroform. He had eaten dinner that
night at his boarding house, and then he had been
in the parlor singing hymns with some of the other
people who lived there before they all went to a
religious meeting, basically had an alibi. After hearing this, Jones
(34:27):
confessed that it was he, not Albert Patrick, who had
chloroformed William marsh Rice. As all of this was happening,
or in Holt settled the lawsuits related to Elizabeth Rice's
will out of court. William Rice's murder had added a
whole other layer of complication, and it had become clear
that he could not build an airtight case that she
(34:48):
should have been considered a resident of Texas. Albert T.
Patrick was tried for murder and was found guilty. On
March twenty six, nineteen o two, he was sentenced to death.
The media spectacles surrounding all of this got another jolt
a couple of days later when he announced his engagement
to Mrs Addie Francis, who owned the boarding house where
(35:10):
he lived. He made that announcement, of course, from prison.
Two months later, when past podcast subject Hetty Green was
granted a permit to carry a pistol, she told reporters
that it was for her own protection, citing, among other things,
the case of William marsh Rice. Do you suppose Valet
Jones would have molested him if he knew Mr Rice
(35:31):
had a pistol? Of course he would not have done so.
I don't want evil disposed people to repeat that sort
of thing on me. On April twenty nine, nineteen o four,
all the legal and probate issues were settled surrounding William
marsh Rice's will, and the Rice Institute trustees got four millions,
six hundred thirty one thousand, two hundred fifty nine dollars
(35:54):
and eight cents. But Albert Patrick's family and supporters maintained
his inn since they brought in expert witnesses who testified
that Charlie Jones's story just did not add up, among
other things, if Rice had been chloroformed, as Jones described,
the people who came into the apartment and examined the
body would have been able to smell it. After years
(36:16):
of ongoing legal proceedings, Patrick's sentence was commuted on December twenty,
nineteen o six, and he was pardoned in nineteen twelve.
He died in nineteen forty. Charlie Jones was not charged
in Rice's murder. A lot of the statements that he
gave to police contradicted one another or were implausible for
(36:38):
various reasons, and at one point he had tried to
take his own life while in custody. Ultimately, though he
was released, he seems to have gone back to Texas
with his brother, and he took his own life there
in nineteen fifty four. Most accounts of all of this
described Rice's death as a homicide, with Jones and Patrick
both directly involved in it. But in The of Old
(37:00):
Man Rice, which was published by New York University Press,
in Martin L. Friedland describes being certain that Patrick was
guilty before he started researching the book, but then becoming
more doubtful as his work went on. Friedland consulted medical
experts who raised doubts and pointed out inconsistencies between Jones's
testimony and how chloroform actually works. Some of these were
(37:24):
the exact same points that Patrick's defense team and expert
witnesses had made back in the early nineteen hundreds. It
is possible that marsh was already dead when Jones tried
to chloroform him, or that his account of the chloroform
was fabricated. The forgery is easier to substantiate at this point. Yeah,
it seems pretty clear to me that there was definitely
(37:47):
a plot going on to take his money, maybe also
to try to hasten him toward death with the mercury pills.
The chloroform has some question marks around it, uh, and
he was cremated. It will never conclusively be known at
this point. The William marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement
(38:07):
of Letters, Science and Art now William Marsh Rice University,
opened on September twenty three, nineteen twelve. A statue of
William Marsh Rice, which is referred to around campus as Willie,
was erected at the university in nineteen thirty, and Rice's
ashes were placed under it. In more recent years, there
has been a student led movement to remove this statue
(38:30):
because of Rice's enslavement of other people and because he
established the university specifically as a whites only institution. When
Rice drew up his will, people generally framed the United
States as having two races, black and white. So while
the university did enroll other non black people of color
earlier in its history, its specifically excluded black students for decades.
(38:56):
It wasn't until nineteen sixty three, after years of advocacy
by students and pressure from outside the university and things
like Brown versus Board of Education, the university trustees started
trying to find a way out of that white's only
clause in Rice's will. This ultimately involved a court case,
(39:19):
one that sought to overturn both the whites only clause
and Rice's stipulation that the university would not charge tuition.
That court case was ultimately successful, and the university's charter
was also revised to reflect both of those changes. Although
Rice had also specified that this institution would be devoted
to quote the city of Houston and State of Texas.
(39:42):
Out of state and international students had been admitted almost
from the start. Rice University's first known black student was
graduate student Raymond Johnson, who was admitted in nineteen sixty
six and earned a PhD in mathematics in nineteen sixty nine.
The first black underground du it's at Rice where Linda
Fay Williams and Theodore Marshall Henderson. They both graduated in
(40:05):
n And that is the murder kind of question mark,
William marsh Rice, do you have listener mail that is
not a question mark? I do. I mean it's still
has question marks, though I picked a listener mail that
has some question marks. This is from Liam uh and
(40:25):
Liam wrote a note that said, hello ladies, I just
listened to your Friday episode. Was the Friday episode behind
the scenes where we talked about jin and you talked
about the KLM houses. I'm very fortunate that pre COVID
I flew to the US from the UK with work
and KLEM were usually the second best choice of route
but always cheaper, so often what I ended up on.
(40:46):
So I have a small collection, and yes I have
the app, and yes people go nuts. They bring them
round on a little tray, and many people ask them
to turn the tray round so they can see the
numbers to check them off in their app Anyway, the
point in writing Klem, we're taken to court over the houses.
Once under Dutch log gifts are taxable, and the government
(41:07):
argued that these were gifts to some passengers. Klem's defense
was that, actually, know these aren't gifts because they are filled.
It's actually a farewell drink served in a special container.
If the passengers choose not to drink it and take
it home, that's up to them. It was a successful defense,
even though I've never seen anyone open their house, which
(41:27):
Kaleb absolutely no. They sealed them in those fancy bags.
If you're connecting so you can bring your liquids through.
Some of them go on eBay for hundreds of dollars,
but only if it's not been opened. And because I
know you love kiddies, here's our three legged rescue Pogo.
Um My printer attempted to print the picture of Pogo,
(41:48):
but it's so big that it cannot work out. Uh.
Liam says, thanks for all the many hours of lifelong learning.
I love this story and I tried to go learn
more about this, and it's little vague exactly what happened.
Um with the legal questions about the delf Blue houses
(42:08):
um that Kalem gives out two passengers. The most authoritative
source I found was the Kalem blog um, which described
this as being not so much about taxes, but but
about the idea that airlines were not allowed to give
passengers incentives and basically saying, is there some law that
(42:29):
says that alcohol has to be served in a glass?
Um to build a case for the idea that this
is a this is a container and not a gift um,
I found some sources that claimed that this was related
to US airline deregulation in the nineteen seventies. I was
not able to find like actual detail about it in
(42:51):
the time allowed before recording today's episode. But regardless, even
if this does turn out to be kind of like
an apocryphal myth making story around the Hail Them houses,
I still find it delightful. So thank you li Liam
for this email and for the kiddie picture. If you'd
like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. We are also all over
(43:14):
social media at Misston History That is where we will
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
and wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
(43:36):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
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