Oliver Haugh executed by electric chair / Pratt Street Riot - April 19

Oliver Haugh, who had been convicted of killing his family, was executed by electric chair on this day in 1907. / On this day in 1861, a riot broke out in Baltimore, Maryland, between Confederate sympathizers and state militia regiments on their way to Washington, D.C.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone. Technically you're getting two days in history today
because we're running two episodes from the History Vault. I
hope you enjoy. Hi. I'm Eves, and welcome to this
Day in History Class, a show that uncovers history one
day at a time. The day was April nineteenth, nineteen

(00:26):
o seven. The power went out at the Columbus, Ohio Penitentiary,
where Dr. Oliver Crook Hall was being imprisoned. About twenty
minutes after the blackout began, just after midnight, Hall was
executed by electric chair. An article in the day's issue
of the Los Angeles Harold said the following Hall manifested

(00:48):
an apparent indifference to his fate until the last All
visitors were excluded from the annex at the penitentiary today,
and Hall has seen no one aside from the prison
officials except Father Kelly, his spiritual advisor. As a young adult,
Oliver worked in a drug store in Ohio. He began
using a drug called Cocaine toothache drops to treat his

(01:11):
tooth pain, and he started mixing his own treatments based
on recipes he got from pamphlets for pharmacists. One of
those treatments was a medicine that contained opium, an addictive
narcotic derived from the opium poppy. A doctor noticed how
good he was at mixing medicines and suggested he go
to college to study medicine, and he did just that

(01:33):
when he started attending Cincinnati Medical College in eighteen eighty eight,
but his attendance wasn't great. Finding money for his tuition
was a struggle for his family, and he was still
using drugs. Ha had fallen in love with Anna, Margaret Eckley,
so he moved in with her family, citing his need
to save money for college. But something seemed sketchy when

(01:57):
Anna's father, William, died in February eight ninety one of
pulmonary apoplexy. Since Williams seemed healthy up until that point,
William was not fond of Oliver, so his death freed
up William to marry Anna and use William's life insurance
payout to go back to school. It's not clear that
he had anything to do with William's death, but he

(02:20):
definitely took advantage of William's passing. By he had graduated
from medical college and open to practice in Dayton, Ohio.
The next decade or so of his life is full
of a bunch of crimes and suspicious events. Influenced by
Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He thought he could make
a drug to create a new race of beings where

(02:42):
two could share a single body, but he was experimenting
on himself and ordering a ton of cocaine and morphine.
Anna said he assaulted her and filed for divorce, but
she ended up staying with him when she found out
she was pregnant. Ha had become violent and he was
soon declared insane. He spent time in asylums, and many

(03:04):
of his patients at his practices were hurt or died,
including one in Wisconsin who died for morphine poisoning, which
resulted in Haw's arrest and subsequent acquittal. He opened and
closed several practices as his negligence was exposed and his
reputation suffered. He even admitted the killing women while performing abortions.

(03:28):
Anna had another child with Oliver. He ran off and
married other women while still married to Anna, the whole time.
Oliver was embroiled in his addiction. On September twenty nine,
o five, Anna filed for divorce and Haw attempted suicide,
so his life was a turbulent one, to say the least.

(03:49):
Doctor Hall had never cared much for his family, but
when he got the news that he was no longer
in his parents will and that his brother Jesse would
get everything, he was enraged, saying he would kill his
whole family. In November of nineteen o five, Oliver alerted
a neighbor that his parents house was on fire. During

(04:11):
the chaos, he changed his story about knowing his family
was inside, from saying they weren't to saying they were.
His mother, father, and brother died in the blaze. After
questioning by county coroner Dr. Walter Klein, Haw was arrested
on three charges of first degree murder. While Hall was

(04:32):
in jail, people began coming forward with their suspicions that
he killed people they knew. Klein's corner report said that
the Haw family had overdosed on high scene hydrobromide, a
drug Oliver had been given previously in an asylum. Haw's
case went to a grand jury, for which twelve men
were selected. More than fifty witnesses were called for testimony.

(04:56):
The prosecution pointed out how easy it should have been
to escape the Maall house during a fire, how Ha
had bought a bunch of oil in hyaceine before the
fire happened, and how it did not look like the
family had been sleeping when the fire started like Oliver claimed.
The defense said that it would not have been so
easy to escape the house and that all the evidence

(05:16):
presented was only circumstantial. After a ten day trial, doctor
Hall was found guilty of drugging his mom and setting
her body on fire. He was granted a sanity inquest
on April nineteen o six, but the jury ruled that
he was saying. Ha was sentenced to death by electric chair,

(05:38):
and on April nineteen nineteen he was executed. It's not
known how many people he murdered. I'm each deathcote and
hopefully you know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you'd like to learn more about
Oliver Hall, listened to the two part episode of Stuff
You Missed in History Class titled Oliver Haw Serial Kill

(06:00):
or if you haven't gotten your fill of history after
listening to today's episode, You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook at T d I h C Podcast. Thank
you so much for listening, and I hope to see
you again tomorrow. For more tidbits of history. Hello everyone,

(06:28):
I'm Eves and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a podcast that proves history is made every day. The
day was April nineteenth, eighteen sixty one. A riot broke

(06:49):
out in Baltimore, Maryland, between Confederate sympathizers and state militia
regiments on their way to Washington, d C. To protect
the capital. Just a week before the Baltimore riot, the
Civil War had begun when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter
on December twentieth, eighteen sixty South Carolina became the first

(07:09):
state to secede from the Union. By February of eighteen
sixty one, seven southern states had succeeded from the Union.
The nation was on the verge of a civil war.
That civil war broke out on April twelfth, eighteen sixty one,
when Confederate batteries under General P. G. T. Beauregard open
fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. After Union

(07:31):
troops refused to evacuate the fort by the next day,
US Major Robert Anderson agreed to surrender the fort, and
on the fourteenth, Anderson and his Union soldiers evacuated Fort Sumter.
On April fifteenth, President Abraham Lincoln issued a public proclamation
calling for seventy five thousand militia volunteers to suppress the rebellion.

(07:54):
In the proclamation, he said the following, I appealed to
all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort
to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of
our national Union, and the perpetuity of popular government, and
to redress wrongs already long enough endured. Northern states responded

(08:16):
enthusiastically to the call. Within days, a regiment of Massachusetts
volunteers were on the way to Washington, d c. Which
was a target for the Confederates. Meanwhile, Virginia seceded from
the Union on April seventeenth, eighteen sixty one. The most
efficient way to transport large numbers of Union forces was

(08:37):
by rail, and the route to Washington passed through Baltimore.
Maryland was a border state, which were slave states that
did not secede from the Union or joined the Confederacy,
and it had both southern and northern influences. Many people
in Maryland opposed seceeding, but many also believed that it
was a state's right to choose to secede. Baltimore was

(09:00):
home to a lot of Southern and secessionist sympathizers. Baltimore
Mayor George W. Brown wrote a letter to President Lincoln
saying that people were tired of the passage of troops
through the city and that quote, it is not possible
for more soldiers to pass through Baltimore unless they fight
their way at every step. On April nineteenth, eighteen sixty one,

(09:23):
the sixth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Militia arrived at the President
Street station in Baltimore, where they had to change trains
to continue on their journey to Washington. Because city laws
prohibited locomotives from passing through busy thoroughfares, horses had to
pull the rail cars across town along Pratt Street to
Camden Station. As the sixth Massachusetts Militia made this transfer,

(09:48):
pro Confederate bystanders turned hostile and formed a mob. Since
the crowd blocked the tracks to keep some of the
cars from getting to Camden Station, more than two hundred
of the soldiers had to march there. Soon, rioting broke
out between the local Confederate sympathizers and the troops rioters
threw bricks at the soldiers, and the two sides traded gunfire.

(10:10):
With the help of Police Marshal George Proctor Kane and
dozens of police officers, the troops managed to make it
to Camden Station and board a train to Washington. The
fighting lasted for less than an hour, but four soldiers
and twelve civilians were killed in the riot. In the
weeks after the conflict, Union troops were sent to Maryland

(10:31):
and martial law was declared in Baltimore. Confederate sympathizers and
people who opposed the Civil War were arrested. By June,
a total of eleven states has succeeded from the Union,
though Maryland was not one of them. The Civil War
would continue for the next four years. I'm Eve Jeffcote
and hopefully you know a little more about history today

(10:54):
than you did yesterday. And if you have any comments
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(11:21):
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