The Old Yellow Tavern, Norwich NY - Part 6, Conclusion

The Old Yellow Tavern, and Allied History of Norwich

C.R. Johnson

Norwich Sun, March 13, 1920

Part 6 - Conclusion

 

Let me close this bit of Norwich history with a very pathetic incident which took place in the "Old Yellow Tavern," during the incumbency of "mein host" Capt. James Perkins.

 

A most pitiful sight suddenly appeared one day at the front of the tavern, in the person of a crazed, and had she been a normal, would have been a beautiful young lady; but her hair, though beautiful in texture, was hanging loose and very much disheveled and her clothing was very ordinary and had been put on without much care.  She was taken into the tavern and to a room.  She was from Preston or McDonough and in care of relatives and was being taken to some insane asylum.  Next day she was suddenly missing.  At once her caretaker and some form the tavern began a search for her in the spacious grounds in the rear of the tavern.  It was quite a time before she was located in a thick clump of bushes and trees, with her long fair hair flying in the breeze, and clothing torn, wildly reciting disconnected portions of poetry and love songs--

"They bid me sleep--they bid me pray--

They say my brain is warped and wrung.

I cannot sleep--I cannot pray!

 

Twas thus my hair they have me braid;

They bade me to the church repair--

It was my bridal morn they said.

And my true love would meet me there!

 

"Her frantic screams, as she was being taken back into the house, were agonizing in the extreme." Mr. Randall says, and adds --"Poor, broken-hearted Fannie Widger!  The image of your young, fair, tearful face, disheveled tresses, torn apparel, and the mournful music of that love-lorn ditty have remained in my memory for more than half a century!"

 

In a letter to Mr. Randall in 1871, John Clapp writes--"You call before me poor hapless Fanny Widger!  How cruelly she was treated, so great the ignorance of insanity and the proper mode of treatment.  I saw her in her father's house confined in a dungeon built of heavy plank, with an opening through the door, perhaps a foot square, through which came food and light.  Here the poor creature pined and mourned, singing the little fragments of songs of love.  I do not know what became of her, but it seems to me that death soon stepped in and removed her gentle spirit to a kinder home."

 

This was the John Clapp of the firm of Clark and Clapp formerly of Norwich, with whom Mr. Randall studied law.  He was living in Binghamton at the time the above was written.

 

The shows the agony the insane were compelled to endure, simply because no one at that time, and for centuries before that time knew that anything could be done with insanity except to shut the victim in solitary confinement, until merciful death separated body and spirit. We have some slight realization now of the horrible nightmare in which the tens of thousands of such wrecks of humanity lived, and some of them to a great age.  The correcting of such ignorance, and the abuses which followed, are among the triumphs--the victories of the nineteenth century.  We may in reverence and wonder exclaim with Balsam  "What hath God wrought?"

 

The End