By David Heighway, Hamilton County Historian
A version of this article originally appeared in the Aug.-Sept. 2015 issue of the Hamilton County Business Magazine.
Picture of Sarah Vert in The Indianapolis Star, 05-21-1911
I recently wrote about Isaac Cachell, a story that went viral in the 1830s. Another example of a historic local story that went viral involves a man named Eugene Woodmansee from Urbana, Illinois. He came to Noblesville in 1867 because, somehow, he had met and fallen in love with Susan Vert, the daughter of the Castleton postmaster. Eugene had proposed marriage twice, and the second time, she accepted. Her father bought them a farm on Little Chicago Road, and the wedding was set for August 15.
Woodmansee arrived in town on August 14th aboard the Peru and Indianapolis Railroad. He stayed at a local hotel that night and was supposedly carrying a large amount of cash. The wedding was set for 8:00 in the evening. Around 7:00, the minister ran into Woodmansee on the courthouse square. They had a pleasant conversation in which the minister offered to loan the couple a buggy, and Woodmansee laughingly said that he had already hired one. Then, when the conversation ended, Woodmansee walked away, turned the corner of a building, and disappeared.
Photograph of street corner where Woodmansee was last seen from The Indianapolis Star, 05-21-1911
The house at the farm was all set up for the wedding. Candles were lit, and guests were there. The time for the ceremony came and went. The bride became frantic and had to be consoled by family and friends. Most guests eventually drifted off, assuming that she had been abandoned at the altar. However, after searches were begun, it became obvious that he was completely gone.
His family in Illinois was contacted, and they hired a Chicago detective. There were no signs and no evidence of anything, so eventually they gave up. As time passed, the memory of the event started to fade. Eleven years later, Sarah Vert married another man, Daniel Jones, and died ten years after that. She was buried in the Vert family plot in Crownland Cemetery under the name Sarah Vert Jones. Daniel Jones outlived her, and when he died, he was buried in different place – in Westfield next to his first wife.
Photograph of the shed where Woodmansee’s bones were uncovered. The Indianapolis Star, 05-21-1911
Now moving ahead 44 years, we find the end of the story. In January of 1911, a Noblesville deliveryman named Bert Cloud was digging around an old shed on his property on 5th Street, adjacent to Riverside Cemetery. Suddenly, he began to turn up human bone. Since he was north of the cemetery property line, it shouldn’t have been a misplaced burial. He called some neighbors to witness and continued to dig. A few feet down, he struck a metal trunk. After clearing some space around the trunk, he broke the lock with his shovel, opened it, and found a corpse covered in lime which had decayed to a partial skeleton.
Photograph of witnesses to the uncovering of the trunk. The Indianapolis Star, 05-21-1911
At this point, he contacted the authorities, and the coroner took over the case. There were no clues at first. Then, some elderly residents began remembering the Woodmansee incident. This would have been meaningless, except an ornately carved signet ring was discovered on the skeleton. Using this single clue, the coroner tried to contact the Woodmansee family in Illinois. However, there were no living relatives who remembered Eugene. Finally, after more searching, they found the widow of his brother near Cincinnati, Ohio. They sent her the ring, which she recognized immediately, saying both brothers had one.
The leading theory about his death was that he had stopped at a notorious roadhouse that had been at that site and had been murdered for his money. However, the sister-in-law said that the family had gotten a message from him about trouble with the wedding and a possible rival. Until the ring proved his identity, the minster had thought that Woodmansee had simply skipped out in revenge for the first refusal Sarah had made. In the end, the crime was unresolved.
Scene of Noblesville Mystery. The Indianapolis News, 01-12-1911
The story went viral when many different newspapers picked it up. Ironically, the Noblesville newspapers for 1867 and 1911 have all been lost. However, the Indianapolis Star did a full-page story with illustrations, and papers around the country soon followed. The Indianapolis News and Urbana Daily Courier stories are useful for research since they were able to interview people directly connected to the event. However, the other papers usually cut the story down to a few paragraphs with an eye-catching headline. They would occasionally mangle the information to throw more emphasis on the romance, gore, and mystery of the story.
Throughout 1911, the story spread geographically in papers from across the nation – from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to Troy, New York, to Crittenden, Kansas, to New London, Connecticut, to the Washington Post, to the San Francisco Call, and even showing up in the Pittsburgh Press as late as 1914. A few newspapers in Canada and Australia picked it up. There were many more papers that carried it. A version of it appeared in John Haines’ 1915 book History of Hamilton County, Indiana.
The site where the trunk was found is now covered by the East Bank apartment building. So, while the case will probably never be solved, Mr. Woodmansee’s posthumous fame spread far beyond the bounds of where he lived. Because of the interest in it, we can even study it today.