So many news stories have caught our attention during the fleeing summer of 2024. A presidential election cycle that has seen an assassination attempt on one candidate, while the incumbent candidate stepped aside. Political conventions. The Olympics in France. Moody weather, in mainly bad moods.
The news cycle could be considered similarly busy in our area in the summer of 1934. One even attracted national media attention.
As The Oneonta Herald of June 21 reported, “A cold, diabolical murder plot to collect $16,000 insurance in connection with the death of Harry Wright, 49, of near Maryland, was revealed at 3:30 Wednesday morning by the signed statement of Mrs. Martha Clift of this city, who named Eva Coo, at whose home Wright lived, as the perpetrator of the deed.
“According to the statement, Wright met death on Crumhorn mountain, where Eva Coo ran a borrowed car up behind the victim, struck him down, and then ran over him several times. Later, the statement said, she threw his body out in the ditch on the state highway near her home.
“Wright’s battered body was found lying beside the highway near the Coo home Thursday. He had lived there three or four years. A triple investigation was launched immediately by state, county and city authorities, headed by District Attorney Donald H. Grant and D. Norman Getman, coroner.
The investigation and reports built throughout the summer and well beyond, with Eva Coo’s death in 1935 in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.
While Coo eventually met her death, rumors of death and violence were quelled about a house in Emmons.
As The Herald of July 19 informed readers, “Rumors of alleged whippings of slaves by their master, of an underground passage to the river, of a whipping post in the cellar, of the haunting of the house by a spirit of a murdered Negro and other numerous stories which have circulated concerning the house built by Ira Emmons on the Oneonta-Colliers road, two miles from the city limits, were emphatically denied by the surviving members of the family yesterday afternoon.”
Ira Emmons came to the area from Baltimore, Maryland in the second decade of the 19th century. Emmons brought with him a young African American boy, and began to build the mansion around 1817. He purchased about 1,000 acres of land in the area we know today as Emmons.
About the boy, descendants said, was the basis for the origination of the numerous stories that had grown in the community about the Emmons mansion.
“In direct opposition to the reported character of Mr. Emmons,” The Herald continued, “the surviving members of the family stated that on one or two occasions he had assisted fugitive slaves from the South to escape to Canada, from which they could not be extradited.” Many, like Emmons, let the escaped slaves stay during the daytime and they continued their journeys at night in the system called the “Underground Railroad.”
“From hearing the name referred to in this manner, it is highly possible that some listener of the tale misconstrued the meaning of the phrase and invented the story of the passage way to the river, for such a tunnel does not exist, nor ever has to the knowledge of anyone in the vicinity questioned on the subject.”
On the topic of railroads during the summer of 1934, despite being a time of financial stress from the Great Depression, local railroad workers had reason to be happier.
As The Herald of July 16 reported, “Over 800 employees of the Delaware & Hudson railroad in this city will benefit by the two per cent increase in pay, granted by the company July 1, it was announced last week. The new rates affect all shop crafts on the system.”
No doubt this increase was welcomed, as the story also told how workers had taken a 6% pay cut in 1932. The railroad was planning two additional 2% increases for January and June of 1935, to restore the rates.
On Wednesday, local athletes were making news in August 1954.