A Visit From the Kansas Smasher?
From Time to Thyme
By Paula Dunn
Some headlines in the old newspapers just beg to be investigated. Take this one in the July 26, 1906 Hamilton County Times — “Kansas Smasher May Be Sojourning Here — Is Hard To Locate.”
“Kansas Smasher?” How could I ignore that?
According to the rather lengthy article, a woman who resembled Carrie Nation, the radical temperance crusader from Kansas, had checked into Noblesville’s Houston Hotel the previous week and speculation had immediately run rampant that she was THE Carrie Nation.
(I would hope that everyone has heard of Carrie Nation. However, given how politicized education has become, it probably doesn’t pay to assume anything these days, so I’ll pause here for a little background. Carrie Nation gained fame — or infamy, depending upon your viewpoint — in the first decade of the 1900s for waging a violent campaign against establishments that served alcohol. She marched into saloons all around the country, praying and singing hymns while using rocks or a hatchet to smash bar fixtures and destroy vast quantities of liquor.)
The woman believed to be Carrie Nation arrived here on the interurban. When a Houston Hotel porter approached her to take her bags, the first thing out of her mouth was “Is there a bar connected with your hotel?”
Apparently satisfied with the porter’s “no,” she allowed him to carry her luggage into the hotel, where she signed in as “Ada Eaby” of Chicago.
Several “traveling men” were seated in the hotel’s lobby at that time and one of them “positively” identified the newcomer as Carrie Nation. That was enough to set tongues wagging — and to spook the hotel manager, T.J. Carroll, into tossing his cigar away.
(Nation was nearly as anti-tobacco as she was anti-alcohol. She’d been known to snatch cigars right out of men’s mouths while berating them for “polluting God’s pure air!”)
Mrs. Eaby immediately retired to her room and remained there the rest of the evening, frustrating the busybodies in the lobby no end. She didn’t show herself again until the following morning.
The story that eventually came out was that she was a representative of a Chicago wholesale house and had come here to call on the city’s school teachers. She admitted, however, that she expected that most of the teachers were out of town. (It was summer, after all.)
Maybe that’s why a reporter from the Hamilton County Ledger sent to interview “Carrie Nation” found her shopping at Sowerwine’s dry goods store instead of conducting business.
It’s pretty clear that those who mistook Mrs. Eaby for Carrie Nation had never actually laid eyes on the Kansas Smasher. The Ledger reporter described Mrs. Eaby as a “heavy set lady not over five feet tall.”
Most sources indicate that Carrie Nation was nearly six feet tall and weighed around 180 pounds.
When informed that she’d been mistaken for the Kansas Smasher, Mrs. Eaby just laughed and expressed the opinion that the Smasher should be arrested.
The Times noted that this wasn’t the first time Mrs. Eaby had been mistaken for Carrie Nation. About five years earlier, while visiting another Indiana town, she casually commented on the town’s large number of saloons and later found herself attracting a crowd of looky-loos.
After all this I was curious to learn if the real Carrie Nation had ever set foot in Hamilton County.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had. One of the first things I noticed when I began doing serious research in the old newspapers was how strong the temperance movement was in this county.
However, although Carrie Nation paid many visits to Indiana — including stops as close to Hamilton County as Indianapolis, Knightstown and Crawfordsville — it appears the only time she was here was when she was a passenger on a train that traveled through in 1901.
Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at [email protected]