A young man from Pelham moved to Vancouver in 1888 following a family tragedy. Four years later, on New Year’s Eve, a friend reported that he drowned, leaving behind a wife and two children. But did he? Rumours and reports of sightings began flooding into the police and newspapers and continued for many years, leading people to ask … Is E.A. Brown Dead?
A young man from Pelham moved to Vancouver in 1888 following a family tragedy. Four years later, on New Year’s Eve, a friend reported that he drowned, leaving behind a wife and two children. But did he? Rumours and reports of sightings began flooding into the police and newspapers and continued for many years, leading people to ask … Is E.A. Brown Dead?
[0:00:00] AH: Is E.A. Brown dead?
[0:00:03] SN: That was the headline on the front page of Vancouver Weekly World on March 9th, 1893.
[0:00:09] AH: Wait a minute. That was more than two months after he drowned, wasn't it?
[0:00:13] SN: That was the official story, but not everybody was so sure. It is a mystery that has never been solved.
[0:00:21] AH: I can't wait to get into it.
[0:00:23] JH: Uh, excuse me. But aren't you guys forgetting something?
[0:00:26] SN: Oops. Sorry, Jen. Cue the music.
[0:00:29] JH: Sheesh.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:39] JH: Welcome to The Open Door, presented by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula. Do you love a good mystery? Then this episode is for you.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:56] AH: Thank you, Jennifer. I think we all love a good mystery, and those of us who do historic research find out pretty quickly that history is full of them. Today, I’m joined by Sarah Nixon, an avid researcher and the community engagement coordinator here at The Brown Homestead, to talk about one particular mystery that we've discovered surrounding the reported death of Edward Brown in 1892. Welcome, Sarah.
[0:01:20] SN: Thank you so much. I'm super happy to be here. Now, historians are like detectives, combing the historical record for clues as to what life was like for the people who lived before us. Sometimes, gaps in the records leave us with more questions than answers. What is revealed to us is more a mystery than history, like the story of E.A. Brown.
[0:01:46] AH: Who was E.A. Brown?
[0:01:49] SN: Well, as you might have guessed, E.A. Brown, or Edward Allen Brown, is connected to The Brown Homestead. The Homestead was settled by loyalist John Brown and his family. The house they built is actually the oldest house in St. Catharines, and one of the oldest in Niagara, and it happens to be where we're recording today. How was Edward related to John and Magdalena Brown?
[0:02:16] AH: Well, he was their great-grandson. The Browns had nine children, four daughters and five sons. When John died in 1804, The Brown Homestead was over 1,200 acres and was divided up among his children, primarily his sons. In 1823, their son, John Jr. traded the land he'd inherited, which was in what's now the Short Hills Park to John Street, who built a mill there, and he traded it for a 200-acre farm and through an old township along the Welland River, or as it was known then, the Chippewa Creek. In 1829, the Welland Canal came through, and John Jr., his wife, Mary, and their family moved to Font Hill with their children.
Like his father, John Jr. was very prosperous and accumulated a fair bit of land, enough that he was able to pass on land to all of his children, sons and daughters. Among these, in 1840, he bought a 200-acre parcel along the Chippewa Creek in Pelham Township, and four years later, their son, Henry married and Elizabeth Kehoe, and moved there. It was probably very similar to the Riverside farm that Henry had grown up on in Thorold. Henry and Elizabeth would spend their whole lives there and had 10 children, including Edward, who was born there on October 9th in 1850.
[0:03:25] SN: And so, that's where Edward grew up. On the family farm, bus side, the river in Pelham. It sounds idyllic, but when we look through the old records, we can see that life wasn't all that easy. Three of Edward's siblings died in childhood, and his father, Henry Brown, died in 1869, when Edward was just 18-years-old. A year later, his sister, Mary Jane, died at just 25-years-old. Her death record said that she had been sick for several months, and that the cause was unknown.
We know from census records and early directories that Edward worked on the family farm until at least 1874, when he married Emma Van Wick, a young girl from a neighbouring farm and the sister of his brother's wife. Life was hard, but Edward was enterprising, and in 1876, was operating a shingle mill a little further down the river. Edward and Emma's son, Walter, was born there the same year, and in 1882, they had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who would later go by the name Maud. Now, this brings us to the first mystery. Things seem to be going well, so why did the family suddenly leave Pelham and move to Vancouver?
[0:04:50] AH: That was a big question for me for a long time when I was doing family history research. Because moving from Pelham to Vancouver in the 1880s was a pretty dramatic and serious undertaking. It seemed very strange in and of itself, but it came even more so, given everything that happened later, and of course, I'm talking mainly about the mysterious death of Edward Brown on New Year's Eve, 1892, and the curious events that followed soon after.
[0:05:16] SN: That a young family with so many ties to Niagara would make such a drastic move across the country could be for two reasons, for opportunity, or due to tragedy. Sadly, for Edward and Emma Brown, the decision to relocate was because of tragedy. To piece together the story, we matched long-told family lore to the available historical record. According to family history, they relocated to Vancouver after the devastating death of their young son. The historical record sheds further light onto the incident. A death record dated August 6th, 1885, confirming the death of William Hewlett Brown, age one, drowned in a tub.
There's also value here in what doesn't appear in the written record. We lose track of E.A. Brown until 1888, when he is listed in the Vancouver City Directory, living in a boarding house on Granville Street. At the time, directories listed only heads of households, or main income earners. While it is highly likely that Emma and their two surviving children are living with Edward on Granville Street, we have no written evidence of such.
Subsequent to Vancouver City directories and newspaper advertisements follow the evolution of Edward's career from carpenter to real estate agent and insurance broker. They map Brown's residence from Granville Street to just a few streets over on Hastings Street. Also, in the Vancouver City Archives are mortgage documents with his signature. Alone, these records seem arbitrary and impersonal, paraphernalia easy to overlook. Together, these little bits of information can be pieced together to form a narrative.
Vancouver offered Edward and Emma an opportunity to begin a new life, to rebuild and leave their grief behind. At least, this is the conclusion we can make with what we were able to find and not find in the historical record.
[0:07:25] AH: I agree. When we discovered the tragic death of William, I thought we at least had an answer to why the family had moved so far away suddenly. But what I didn't answer was the other mystery, which is what happened to Edward who died just a few years later on, as we said, the very curious state of New Year's Eve, 1892. I knew that answer was only going to be found in Vancouver. But at the time, we had other priorities, so Edward became a bit of a cold case again for us until recently.
[0:07:53] SN: Yeah. I know that you put it aside for a while, but I'm guessing that the new found interest, perhaps has something to do with that nameless woman who showed up at The Brown Homestead with a mysterious unmarked manila envelope a few months ago.
[0:08:08] AH: There were actually two things that happened around the same time that made me realize we needed to get out our magnifying glasses again. But yes, that was one of them. That woman was Cindy Fishburn, who's a local historian with a deep roots in Pelham herself. She had gotten curious about Edward in doing her research and discovering a little bit about his story. Then she found my family tree on ancestry.ca and wrote to me about what she had discovered.
[0:08:33] SN: Yes, this envelope she brought to the Homestead, it had several articles in it, didn't it? The first was the St. Catherine's standard article from February 7th, 1893, quoting that a letter received from Vancouver, British Columbia on Wednesday states that the body of E.A. Brown of Pelham recently drowned in that city, has not yet been found. All other parts of the world, Vancouver has had very cold weather and an unusual quantity of snow. Business at times being almost entirely suspended, says the writer.
The death had actually first been reported in Niagara in the January 5th, 1893 edition of the standard, but the cause of the death wasn't listed. Now, the second article was from the Vancouver Daily News Advertiser on January 2nd, 1893, the first page. It had a lot more information and was, importantly, the first public account of Edward's death, which included a statement made to the police by the man he was with that evening. It read, “Citizens were shocked yesterday to hear of a sad, drowning accident.” Wait a minute, you said that this was one of the things that brought you back to the story. What was the other?
[0:10:00] AH: Well, Edward and his family were always in the back of my mind, having discovered this mystery years ago. Not long before I heard from Cindy, we'd received a donation here at The Brown Homestead of some old family artifacts for the archive at The Brown Homestead. One of these items was a prayer book that belonged to Edward's mother, Elizabeth Brown, who was my great, great, great grandmother. It's very special to me. Soon afterwards, I had the opportunity to speak with Bob Brown, who had been the fifth-generation owner of Henry and Elizabeth's farm, where Edward grew up.
I was telling him about the prayer book, and on a whim, I asked him if he'd ever heard anything about how Edward died and the story of Edward, and he told me that the story that was passed down in the family, that was that after Edward died, Elizabeth took a train to Vancouver to find out what happened, because there were rumours that he'd been murdered.
[0:10:49] SN: That must have been the first indication we had that there was doubt about the official story of Edward's death. It's important to say that whatever discussions came up later that called it into question, nobody had ever disproved the original story that was recorded in the article that appeared three days afterwards. It read, “Citizens were shocked yesterday to hear a sad drowning accident in which Mr. E.A. Brown, the well-known real estate agent lost his life. The sad news was brought in about 11.00 by Mr. McCain, of the firm of Messer’s, McCain and Menzies, house movers and builders on Hasting Street's East, who narrowly escaped a similar fate himself. The two men went out on Saturday night about 8.00 to The Old Beaver to endeavour, to get some wood and other relics.” Now, that sounds pretty harrowing, but who was Mr. McCain and what in the world is The Old Beaver?
[0:11:50] AH: Okay, you're right. We probably need a little bit of background here. Mr. McCain was Charles McCain, who later wrote about the night Edward Brown died and referred to him as one of his best friends. In fact, he said he was “a brother except by kin,” and claimed that “only death itself can erase the memories of that true mutual friendship.” Now, like Edward, Charles McCain was also from Niagara. Since his records show that he grew up near Port Colburn. What are the odds of two Niagara boys finding each other and forming a friendship in Vancouver in the 1880s?
McCain wrote that they met in Vancouver, not Niagara, and there's no record to suggest otherwise. The two may have met through work since both were carpenters, or it may have simply been in a matter of proximity. We know from the city directories that he also resided on Hasting Street right beside The Browns. McCain first appeared in the Vancouver City directories beginning in 1890, but years later, his obituary said that he moved there in 1888, so around the same time as The Brown family.
[0:12:54] SN: Now, a childhood near the shores of Lake Ontario likely also inspired McCain's fascination with shipwrecks. In the account of that night that he wrote, he mentions the dramatic wreck of the schooner, the Mary Rankin nearby in 1870, when Charles and Edward were both young. Vancouver had its own famous wreck, the SS Beaver, which ran aground at Prospect Point, at the entrance into Vancouver Harbour. Launched in 1835 and operated by the Hudson's Bay Company, the Beaver was the first steamship to traverse the waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean. She served as a passenger ship during the 1858 Gold Rush at Fraser River, ferrying aspiring miners. She also served as a towboat, a general freighter, and a British Navy survey vessel.
The Beaver was in continuous service until July 26th, 1888, when she ran up on rocks upon entering the harbour. Stuck on the rocks and very visible to the people of Vancouver, the wrecked steamship became a popular attraction for thrill seekers and treasure hunters, like Charles McCain and Edward Brown. In 1892, it was washed off the rocks and sank and was only accessible at low tide. This was the reasoning for the odd hours on New Year's Eve night that Edward and Charles departed for the water.
It wasn't the first time the two men made the trek to The Old Beaver. Often, they'd be accompanied by McCain's business partner, David Menzies. But according to McCain's statement, it was just the two men on the night of December 31st. What should have been a routine trek very quickly went off course.
[0:14:44] AH: Once they got out on the water, things took a bad turn pretty quickly. McCain's statement to the police, which was published in the article you mentioned, described at length, the events that led to Edward's death. He recalled that just as their boat approached the wreck at 8.30 pm, Edward's ore caught an eddy, or a contrary current, which threw him off his seat. The boat filled with water and flipped. Now both men clung to the boat as the undercurrent pulled it down below the water surface. After some struggle, they both emerged, gasping for air, catching their breath just in time for the boat to be pulled down again.
Upon breaking the surface, the second time Edward lost his hold of the boat and was carried off by the current. The last word Charles heard from his friend was, “Oh, my. Oh, my,” before he himself was plunged underwater again. McCain said he called for Edward every chance he got, but never saw, or heard from him again. Eventually, Charles was able to turn the boat over on her keel and found a singular ore somehow still attached to one of the rollocks. Paddling to shore, he found himself and sought aid at the home of John Thomas around 9.40 pm, in shock and hardly realizing the extent of the tragedy that just folded. He accepted care from the Thomas family and waited until morning to go to the police in Vancouver and give a statement.
[0:16:04] SN: Hearing Charles McCain's recounting of this disaster never gets easier. It would have been so dark, so cold and terrifying. Yet, while I'm not sure if it's the historian in me, or the Sherlock Holmes fan, or maybe just the perpetual doubter in me, but I can't help but find a few gaps in his story. Like, how did Charles flip the boat over himself, especially after many minutes of being plunged into the cold water?
It also seems convenient that a single ore survived the ordeal for Charles to paddle his way to shore. Then, why didn't Charles mention the death of his friend to John Thomas? Lastly, that all of this takes place on New Year's Eve rings alarm bells to me. As the people of Vancouver readied for the coming of the New Year, the departure of Edward and Charles by boat may have gone unnoticed. I can't help but wonder if this was intentional.
[0:17:03] AH: Well, you may be on to something, Sarah, and you certainly not the only person who recognized that there are some unanswered questions here. Andy Linton, who owned the boat house where McCain and Brown borrowed the boat, told the Vancouver Daily News advertiser that he was not present when the man came for the boat on the evening of December 31st. Now, on previous occasions, including the night before December 30th, Linton had been there to provide the men with a larger boat that would not capsize, understanding the dangers involved with their trip out into the bay to the SS Beaver.
However, this time, unaccompanied by Linton, the two friends chose a smaller boat named The Alice to take them out to the wreckage. Now, that decision was instrumental in leading to Edward Brown's tragic fate. But Linton would only hear from Charles personally the following day about what had happened. The choice of the smaller boat is even more curious, because in his later account, McCain wrote that the goal that evening was to free up the centre portion of the main drive shaft, which is a seven-foot-long piece of forged iron with an 18-inch crank at either end.
[0:18:08] SN: Wow. The fact that they wanted to uncover this very large relic and put it on such a small boat is even more curious, certainly.
[0:18:16] AH: Well, he talks about how they considered the prized artifact to get, right? They were going out there to get it.
[0:18:22] SN: Wow. Gleaning from the newspapers, the collective sentiment seemed to agree that what happened to E. A. Brown was a tragedy. He was written on numerous occasions as a “Well-known and respected citizen, who left behind a wife and family.” But quickly, that sympathy turned into doubt. Isn't that right, Andrew?
[0:18:44] AH: That's right. That was the narrative that emerged in the newspapers. There were several articles in the following weeks about search parties of his friends unsuccessfully looking for and not finding his body. Then an article on January 9th in the Vancouver Daily World, where it was titled Idle Rumours made public all sorts of allegations. It revealed, first of all, that several people had called the police with “evidence to justify foul play that might implicate Charles McCain in what happened.” Others, on the other hand, called accusing Brown of faking his own death as part of an insurance fraud scheme. But the newspaper also noted that the police had investigated that possibility and that Edward had actually let a couple of insurance policies lapse within a few months of his death. The police at least disregarded that possibility. The public, not so much, because that article was also the first time there was any connection made between Edward and Joseph Huntley.
[0:19:41] SN: Wait. You mean, Joseph Huntley, the man who had also disappeared from Vancouver on January 5th, just a few days after E.A. Brown was allegedly swept away to sea? The deeper we get into this, the more mysterious it becomes.
[0:19:59] AH: It does. What makes it even more curious is that that Joseph Huntley was a very prominent citizen himself. He was the Vancouver health inspector. On January 5th, there was an article in the Daily News Advertiser that reported that he had “suddenly disappeared during a visit to Victoria.” Now, the article noted that a friend said he'd spoken to Huntley on the afternoon of Sunday, January 1st, the same day E.A. Brown was reported missing and likely dead.
[0:20:28] SN: Two disappearances on the same day and New Year's Day, no less. The atmosphere of Vancouver in the days following must have felt incredibly tense. I'm feeling tense. Naturally, rumours swirled around Huntley's disappearance, too. As you recall, Huntley was the health inspector for the city of Vancouver. However, apparently Joseph was also known to have a gambling habit and found himself “mixed up with some questionable debts.”
There were rumours that he stole fees paid for liquor licenses and that he bought “all of the United States currency they could let him before disappearing.” But related to Edward Brown, there were reports that he was not dead, but rather, fled with Joseph Huntley to Honolulu by way of San Francisco. These accusations came about a week after his disappearance on January 9th, 1893. The people of Vancouver were quick to spread gossip about a person that they considered a well-known and respected citizen.
[0:21:35] AH: I guess, some things never change, but two disappearances within such a short period of time was certainly cause for alarm. At the very least, the drama surrounding Joseph Huntley inflamed the stories that surrounded Edward Brown. Nonetheless, there was no evidence that Edward and Joseph knew each other at all, let alone well enough to conspire together. Nothing in the newspapers prior to their disappearances, no correspondence or memberships in the same clubs, or organizations that would even hint at a relationship.
In fact, the mystery of Joseph Huntley was actually solved pretty quickly. A reporter from the Vancouver Weekly News Advertiser tracked him down and confronted him in Seattle in mid-January. There, Huntley stated that his disappearance was “a matter concerning himself only.” There was no mention of Edward Brown. Though Huntley refused to answer to the whispers about his debts, or even the particularly nasty rumour that his real name was actually Theodore Hopkins. Before coming to Vancouver, he abandoned his first wife and family in San Diego. He did assure the reporter that “it will be all right.”
[0:22:40] SN: It sounds like Joseph Huntley's disappearance around the same time as Edward's was simply a coincidence. Joseph Huntley wanted to disappear, at least people thought. Maybe E.A. Brown did as well. I'm not so sure.
[0:22:56] AH: I agree. I tend to think there was no real connection at all. Maybe Edward Brown was the Bigfoot of the day, is when somebody reports seeing somebody who's missing, then everybody starts doing it. The mystery of Edward Brown got caught up in the hype around the mystery of Huntley.
[0:23:12] SN: Yeah. Now, speaking for myself here, the speculations of foul play do carry more weight after learning what Charles McCain was up to in the weeks and months following his friend's disappearance.
[0:23:26] AH: Yeah, mean that original reason that Edward and Charles were making all those trips out to the SS Beaver in the first place. It turns out, the relics the two friends were retrieving from the shipwreck were to be made in souvenirs of a sword. In a February 15th, Vancouver Daily World article reporters highlight Charles McCain's happy as well as profitable idea to make souvenir coins from the wreck of the SS Beaver. Less than two months after Edward's death, McCain had already copyrighted the design of a coin, which had on one side a cut of the stranded steamer and the date of its construction, 1835. On the other side, an inscription that read, “This metal is of the SS Beaver. Pioneer steamer on the Pacific and the first to cross the Atlantic.”
[0:24:08] SN: Interesting that no mention was made of Edward Brown's role in this profitable idea, or that he lost his life in the pursuit of that idea.
[0:24:19] AH: There's no doubt that this profitable idea led to some of the suggestions that Charles McCain had a role to play in Brown's death, and had something to gain from it. Now given that, what do you make of his March 9th letter to the Vancouver Weekly World that slams all the people making allegations to have seen E.A. Brown in neighbouring cities since his apparent disappearance?
If you read it, McCain seems quite flustered, even a little bit emotional and hurt by the accusation, and pleads to those reporting the sightings to “Have a little regard of those closely interested.”
[0:24:53] SN: Or are the newspapers sympathizing with McCain? Did they simply choose a side? In the same edition of the Vancouver Weekly World, March 9th, journalists published an article with the title is E.A. Brown Dead? The reporter makes clear the newspaper stance on the matter. They believe E.A. Brown is alive. The article suggests a scenario where Edward survived the boat capsizing and “being an excellent swimmer made his way to shore,” where he realized that if, “the world will think me dead, why not be dead to the world and start life afresh?”
The newspaper stance was that other men have done this very thing, so why not Edward? The newspaper gave no consideration to his wife, Emma, nor his children, not why he would leave his family or wife behind in Vancouver, nor what kind of harm this allegation would cause them.
[0:25:56] AH: A harmful allegation for sure. Maybe they felt like they had enough evidence to support it though, because that article also reports a new revelation that on the night of his disappearance, a witness claims to have seen a man matching E.A. Brown's description ferrying across the river at New Westminster in a rowboat after the steam ferry had ended its service for the night. Now a man of Brown's description was also seen at an inn on that same side of the river that evening and on the following Sunday morning, a similar man purchased a ticket in Seattle.
[0:26:31] SN: Okay, but that poor clerk was only given a verbal description of Edward Brown and he was recalling that from memory three months removed.
[0:26:41] AH: That's true. But then, there were also witnesses who came forward to state that they'd seen Brown in Seattle.
[0:26:46] SN: But why would Edward flee? We could not find any reasoning in the records. Yes, he experienced tragedy in Pelham, but then Vancouver, E.A. Brown led a good life. What we find in the mortgage records correspondence and city directories tell a story of a man with a prosperous career as a real estate agent, who owned a home and a good neighbourhood and cared for his wife and two children. I guess, the written record only tells us so much. We don't know much about the nuances of Edward's relationships, or his everyday interactions.
[0:27:23] AH: You're right. That's certainly true. Our detective work can only go so far. But as historians, our job is to make connections between the sources that are available to us. Sometimes we find other little pieces that fit neatly in those spaces, like the letter written by Edward's mother, Elizabeth, who I mentioned earlier, my great-great grandmother. That letter was referenced in an article in the Vancouver World Weekly in February 1894. About 14 months following Edward's disappearance. She wrote to a Captain Newcom of the Vancouver police asking for particulars regarding the accident. There's no real new information shared in that article, but it does clearly suggest that The Brown family was still mourning his loss. For all we know, this may have been around the time that Elizabeth made her trip by train out to Vancouver. Although, we've yet to find any record of that trip ourselves.
[0:28:14] SN: After the flurry of rumours in those first few months of 1893, the newspapers go silent on the mystery of E.A. Brown. We don't hear of him again until Elizabeth Brown's letter that following winter. Then silence follows once more. Perhaps, leads on Edward's possible whereabouts had dried up, or maybe Charles McCain hushed people up and further witnesses were afraid to speak up. Or, perhaps, simply the people of Vancouver lost interest and moved on to the next news story.
[0:28:46] AH: There definitely seems to be a quiet period, but what's interesting is the story did endure. The next big one was in January 12th, 1900. Over seven years after E.A. Brown's disappearance was an article about E.A. Brown with the title, Is Still Alive, published in the Vancouver Semi-Weekly World.
[0:29:06] SN: Ah, so the mystery bubbles to the service of public discourse once again, seemingly out of nowhere. Okay, well, somewhere. In fact, from the small town of Ferny British Columbia located in the Rocky Mountains close to the Montana border, the Ferny Free Press reported that Edward Brown paid a business visit to a town in the BC interior. This led the Vancouver semi-weekly world to dredge up their suspicions around Edward's supposed death and to state that “It has not been divulged why he so mysteriously disappeared, or why since then, he is kept away from Vancouver and those who were formerly his wife and children. It may be that E.A. Brown has a double. If so, he's an interesting man in many ways.”
The new story suggests that public interest in this case never truly faded away completely. The memory of E.A. Brown, or at least a construction of his disappearance remain in Vancouver's collective repertoire.
[0:30:16] AH: No, you're absolutely right. The fact that the newspapers were still talking about it a decade later shows that, and also, the fact that the story followed Charles McCain, who was a prominent local citizen until his death in 1933. Of course, the first half of McCain's obituary talks about the SS Beaver, although Edward Brown himself is not specifically mentioned. Of course, his family never forgot him and just like, we started with the story of his family and some of the hardships that led them to Vancouver in the first place, I think, the story of Edward Brown continues with them.
[0:30:49] SN: It still wasn't always happy, was it?
[0:30:52] AH: No. Unfortunately, not. His widow, Emma and their children, Walter and Maud, would remain on the West Coast for the rest of their lives largely. Maud was not quite 10-years-old when her father died. In 1900, at the age of 18, she married a man named Lucius Taylor Terry from St. Louis Missouri, who was 26 years older than her. Now, he was a colourful fellow who was married four times and divorced three, always to women younger than him, usually considerably younger.
Census records at the time say he was an advertising agent, or a newspaper man, but another less official story is that he was a professional gambler. Certainly, he had a curious history. By 1920, he was living in Los Angeles and is listed as an actor in the motion picture business. Although, I can't find any record anywhere of him appearing in any movies at the time. In 1930, at age 72 with his 22-year-old wife, the census lists his occupation as special deputy with the sheriff's department.
[0:31:50] SN: Wow, he does seem like quite a character. But I notice you use the word him. I take it, Maud wasn't with him in Los Angeles at that point?
[0:31:59] SN: No. Their marriage lasted only a few years before they got divorced and we're not sure exactly when, but in April of 1905, their son Edward Allen Terry was born.
[0:32:08] SN: Named after his grandfather.
[0:32:10] AH: Yes. In November of the same year, Maud married a second time to Walter Stowers in Bellingham Washington, just across the border from Vancouver. Sadly, she died not long after in Vancouver in October of 1907. We haven't found a record yet over cause of death.
[0:32:27] SN: Oh, it is so sad. Now what happened to her son?
[0:32:31] AH: Well, first, he lived with Emma in Washington, but it seems he was primarily raised by his stepfather in Washington and Alaska. He sometimes went by the surname Stowers and other times, Terry, and also appears in different records as both Edward, or Allen. He's a tricky one to track. But by 1929, he was working for the railroad in Jackson, Mississippi and later for a dairy, and he lived there until he died in 1991. Emma herself remarried in 1897 to Daniel Ratcliffe in Washington state.
[0:33:02] SN: Any link to Harry Potter?
[0:33:03] AH: Not that I could find.
[0:33:05] SN: It's interesting that she and Maud both ended up in Washington state. Isn't that where several of the alleged sightings of Edward Brown happened?
[0:33:14] AH: Now, I thought about that, too. I think I have a suspicious nature as well, especially given the rumour that Edward faked his death for the insurance money and was planning to meet with Emma later. However, there are more than enough records that prove Daniel Ratcliffe was a real person and definitely not Edward Brown in hiding.
[0:33:32] SN: Ah, it's too bad. I'm a real sucker for dramatic ending.
[0:33:36] AH: It would have been a good one. Yes. But Emma's story has a more ordinary ending. She was a widow for a second time by 1904 and worked as a dressmaker in a department store in Bellingham until her death in 1921 at age 66.
[0:33:49] SN: Oh, wow. That's also really sad. Now, I'm wondering if I should ask of a Walter?
[0:33:55] AH: Well, do you want to know?
[0:33:56] SN: I think I have to – I just hope things went a little bit better for him.
[0:34:00] AH: They did ... mostly. Walter stayed in Vancouver and married Ina Beam in 1900 a few months before his sister got married. He worked as a carpenter for his father-in-law, Eli Beam, who was a Mennonite building contractor. Now, you may want to cover your ears for this part, Sarah.
[0:34:15] SN: Oh, gosh.
[0:34:17] AH: No, sorry. Unfortunately, Ina died around 1906 as well and Walter remarried again in 1909 to Mary Ballard for Buffalo. They actually lived in Buffalo from 1915 until 1920 when he then moved back to Bellingham.
[0:34:31] SN: Oh, and this was around a year before his mother died. Maybe that was part of the reason?
[0:34:35] AH: It seems like, it's a good likelihood. Once he arrived, he continued to work there as a carpenter. He even worked at a shingle mill for a while, which is ironic if you remember that Edward had a shingle mill along the Welland River in the 1870s. According to the Bellingham directories, he later worked as a wholesale confectioner, which meant he had his own business, and the very fun job of being a candy salesman, up until his death around 1950.
[0:34:59] SN: Wow. I guess, that's the end of our story.
[0:35:03] AH: Well, for now anyway. Like you said at the beginning, historians are like detectives looking for clues in between the gaps left in the historic records.
[0:35:11] SN: I do feel like there are a few more things for us to find out. Maybe we should keep looking.
[0:35:16] AH: I'm game if you are.
[0:35:18] SN: Always! For everyone listening, we will be sure to update you whenever we find any new clues. We have one more treat for you as well. We mentioned the history of the SS Beaver that was written by Charles McCain. It includes a chapter that gives the most detailed account of the night that Edward Brown died. Andrew has done a reading of the chapter, which you can find on the webpage for this episode on our website thebrownhomestead.ca. Be sure to give that a listen and if you hear any clues in it that you think we've missed, make sure you let us know.
[0:35:56] AH: Definitely. Thank you, Sarah. This has been a lot of fun. Let's make sure we do it again soon.
[0:36:00] SN: Absolutely.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:36:07] JH: Thanks for listening. Subscribe today, so you won’t miss our next episode. To learn more, or to share your thoughts and show ideas, visit us at thebrownhomestead.ca, on social media, or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
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