The Life of Mary Rogers

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Character Bios

Mary Cecilia Rogers was born in 1820 in Connecticut to Daniel and Phebe Rogers. Mary’s father died in a steamboat explosion when she was a teenager. She and her mother moved to New York City where Mary found work through (presumably) one of her father’s associates, the ambitious entrepreneur John Anderson. Though it was still unusual for women to work in shops, Mary worked as a clerk in the popular cigar shop.

In October of 1838, Mary disappeared. Multiple articles were written about her disappearance wildly speculating the cause. When Mary reappeared days later, she explained she had only left to visit a friend in Brooklyn. As with her disappearance, her emergence caused more speculation. One reporter posited that the disappearance was a hoax set up by John Anderson to attract more business. Mortified by the unwanted attention, Mary left her job in Anderson’s cigar shop to work with her mother at the boarding house.

Mary’s second disappearance would prove to be fatal. On Sunday July 25, 1841, she knocked on the door of her fiancé Daniel Payne who was in the middle of shaving. Through a half opened door, Mary told him she would be visiting her aunt, returning in the evening on the horse-drawn carriage that carried commuters up and down Broadway. They agreed to meet on the corner of Broadway and Ann so Daniel could escort her home, but that evening a severe storm hit the city.

When Mary didn’t appear as planned, Daniel assumed she delayed her return due to the weather. When she still hadn’t returned by the next evening, her mother decided to place a missing person’s ad in the next day’s paper. On Wednesday, July 28th, her body was found on the Hudson River shore near Sybil’s Cave; it was assumed she was the victim of gang violence. Historians have noted how newspaper editors, government officials, and religious advocates of the time turned Mary’s death into a warning against women’s reproductive choice and independence. Mary’s death became a symbol for the city’s social and moral disintegration.

Madame Restell, originally from England, was born in Gloucestershire as Ann Trow in 1812. Widowed after immigrating to New York, she worked as a seamstress and milliner to care for her young daughter, Caroline. She married Charles Lohman in 1835 and became a midwife and abortion provider. Trow and Lohman worked as a team and sold medicine and services advertised under the name “Madame Restell.”  The “preventative powders” were to prevent conception and others  promised to “remove obstructions.”

Madame Restell provided “lying-in services” in her home at 148 Greenwich Street where women with unwanted pregnancies could give birth in anonymity. For a fee she would arrange for adoptions and also provided medically induced abortions. Abortion was legal and widely accepted at the time, but could only be performed prior to “quickening.” Restell was rumored to perform services outside of these legal bounds. As her fame, fortune and reputation grew, she attracted unfavorable attention from the American Female Moral Reform Society, conservative newspapers, and the law. Newspapers ran frequent, critical stories about her practices dubbing her “the wickedest woman in New York.” Despite brushes with the law, her services remained in high demand.

After a short sentence in jail, she relocated to a larger space at 162 Chambers Street. She was known as the most wicked woman of New York, but also one of the wealthiest. Government, church and newspaper men seemed as bothered by her wealth as by how she obtained it. After the Catholic archbishop of New York denounced her from the pulpit, she outbid the Church for the parcel of land near St. Patrick’s Cathedral originally intended to house the bishop. There, she built a lavish brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue and converted the Chambers Street space as a hospital.

Restell’s success relied on middle and upper-class women who preferred fewer children in part to maintain financial and social security. Several of Madame Restell’s advertisements appealed directly to the upper class clientele. By the 1870s, the Church played a role in influencing Congress and abortion and preventative powders were outlawed. Madame Restell continued to serve women, but was arrested for selling preventative powders in an elaborate sting operation organized by the religious crusader, Anthony Comstock. Rather than go to jail, Madame Restell, took her own life.

John Anderson‘s Tobacco Emporium’s location, conveniently located near City Hall, Newspaper Row, and the Shakespeare Tavern, made it a prominent destination for city officials, reporters, and New York’s local literati. Mary became the subject of several writers’ poems and in newspaper social notes and stories.  As Mary’s fame grew, Anderson’s business flourished.

Born in 1812, John Anderson was a laborer who became one of New York City’s leading merchants. Known for his “Solace Tobacco,” he pioneered the use of tin foil to wrap cigars to keep them dry.  Anderson was an entrepreneur and investor with political ambitions. He expanded his tobacco business and was an original investor in the Broadway and 7th Avenue Railroad Line (now the 1, 2, 3 subway line). His political ambitions were short lived thwarted after Mary’s death.

When Mary did not report to work for a few days, it sparked a short-lived hysteria that made the papers. Though it made headlines, this first “disappearance” was chalked up as a publicity stunt Anderson orchestrated. He denied these accusations, though the publicity proved to be lucrative. When Mary disappeared again in 1841, people speculated that Anderson had some hand in it.

Anderson died in Paris in 1881, but his body was returned to New York and he was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. At the time of his death, he started to speak about Mary haunting him and said her death was the biggest regret of his life.

Daniel Payne, rented a room in the Rogers’s boarding house where he met and fell in love with Mary. He was marginally employed cutting cork making cork stoppers,which were commonly used for sealing glass bottles and ceramic jugs used by doctors, chemists, brewers and winemakers. Described as “jovial” and “unfailingly cordial and eager to please,” Daniel was a frequent visitor to the Bowery; the epicenter for working-class culture. The Bowery was an area known for taverns, workshops, boarding houses, and the Bowery Theater.

Mary’s mother, Phoebe, did not approve of their dating. When she found out Daniel proposed to Mary, she insisted Mary break off the engagement. Perhaps this was because he was known to be a heavy drinker–he was also described as a “bibber” and “tosspot.” Or, maybe because Phoebe expected Mary to marry someone with more social standing.

On Sunday, July 25th, 1841, Mary told Daniel she was leaving to visit her aunt. They arranged to meet that night on the corner of Ann and Broadway, the site of the new P.T. Barnum American Museum, around the corner from the boarding house. However, there was a terrible thunderstorm and Mary failed to return. Assuming she had extended her stay with her aunt, Daniel reportedly returned to the Bowery for a night of revelry. When Mary still had not returned the following day, he began a frantic search for her and placed a missing persons notice in the Tuesday edition of the Sun. On Wednesday, July 28, 1841, Mary’s body was discovered on the Hudson River shore in Hoboken.

A few months after Mary’s death, on October 7, 1841, Daniel made his way to Nick Moore’s Tavern for brandy asking for directions to the spot Mary had been found. He left after additional rounds for another tavern in Hoboken. The following morning he was found passed out  in the grass near Castle Point. He refused help from the local farmer who found him. Later that day, his body was discovered near Sybil’s Cave where Mary’s body had been recovered, a broken bottle of laudanum nearby. His brother, John Payne, identified Daniel’s body and when interviewed said, “He was a habitually drinking man” who had been “out of his mind since the affair of Mary Rogers.”

A note was found in his pocket; “To the World-Here I am on the spot; God forgive me for my misfortune in my misspent life.” Some interpret the note as a sign of guilt, others as despair.

Frederika Loss was an innkeeper who operated Nick Moore’s Tavern in Hoboken, New Jersey. Although no official connection between Loss and Restell could be established, many at the time reported Loss was a protege of Madame Restell. Also unknown is whether Loss provided services herself or allowed the operations to occur  at the inn as an outpost for Madame Restell or other practitioners.

After Mary Rogers’s body was discovered, a witness claimed to have seen Mary near Frederika’s farm in the company of a man. At the time, Frederika denied any knowledge of Mary, but later claimed she had seen Mary in the company of a man and the two of them ordered lemonade and left the tavern.

Shortly after Mary’s death, in October, 1842, one of Frederika’s sons accidentally shot her. The shot would prove to be fatal, but on her deathbed she makes a confession. Frederka said the man Mary had been with was not a stranger, but rather a physician she knew. Mary had come seeking an abortion at the inn, but the procedure had gone wrong and she had died. Fearful of repercussions, Frederika’s sons disposed of Mary’s body in the river and confessed to hiding some of her personal belongings in the woods to make it look like she had been attacked. However, according to the police, some of Frederika’s claims did not match the evidence and so they didn’t take the confession as fact. Despite the theories claiming Mary was a victim of violence, eventually Frederika Loss’s confession was widely accepted. 

Resources

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. Replica Books, 2000.

Amy Gilman Srebnick, Professor Emerita Montclair State University, is the author of “The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York.” She sits on the Board of the Women’s History Center of the New York Historical Society, and serves as an advisor for the film “The People’s Will,” a documentary film about the Astor Place theater riots of 1849.

Abbott, Karen. “Madame Restell: The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 27 Nov. 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-restell-the-abortionist-of-fifth-avenue-145109198.:

Manning, Kate. “Abortion Wars, the First Time Around.”The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 June 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/opinion/06manning.html.

McNeur, Catherine.Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Stashower, Daniel.The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. Berkley, 2007.