July 19 Thursday – In Elmira Sam wrote to Franklin G. Whitmore, enclosing a letter meant for newspaper publication. The letter is a humorous and scathing sort aimed at the city of Hartford for moving an electric lamp and post on Forest Street. A few of the more cutting excerpts:

For fifteen years, in spite of my prayers & tears, you persistently kept a gas lamp exactly half way between my gates, so that I couldn’t find either of them after dark; & then furnished such execrable gas that I had to hang a danger-signal on the lamp-post to keep teams from running into it, nights. Now I suppose your present idea is, to leave us a little more in the dark out our way, so that you can have another light to stick in front of the granite shell of the Catholic Cathedral. Or maybe you want to add it to the Park lights, so that strangers can see the open sewer you maintain there, & so be able to understand why the death-rate of Hartford has sometimes struck 28 in the thousand in the shortest month of the year….

And what curious inspirations you have had sometimes. You changed the course of the river at the bridge beyond my house without giving me any warning, & then left me to defend my land at my own cost from the resulting injury. Also, you turned a sewer into the same shallow little stream at that bridge, to drain a mile of street; & I am not able to imagine any other incredible thing that you wouldn’t do if you thought you detected “economy” in it somewhere. In the summertime that little stream — & also the little Park river down in the middle of town — contain little or nothing but mildly diluted sewage; & this creeping mess bakes & steams & rots in the August sun till it smells like — well, like West Hartford reservoir-water in the spring-time, when the pipes begin to deliver tadpoles & we stay home Sundays to dive for dead eels in our bath-tubs. If I had my way, no city government should ever own stock in the cemeteries. And what is your police department worth, except as a political-machine? For ten years Hartford has been a burglars’ paradise. House-breaking is the most thrifty of all our industries, & the only one which you seem to coddle & protect; the only one which you take a brotherly interest in & don’t try to banish to Bridgeport. …

Don’t mind us — out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, & no rights which you are in any way bound to respect. Please take our lonesome electric light & put it where you please. Put it down town by old Daniel’s dam, where you can count the catch of dead cats & forecast the rise of real estate in the cemeteries. Yours, in indestructible affection, S.L.C., Farmington Ave.

Sam directed to take the letter to the Hartford Courant, and if they wouldn’t print it “without an alteration” or apologizing for it in an editorial, take it to the Hartford Times; and if that failed, take it to William Mackay Laffan and ask to print it in the New York Sun, complaining he couldn’t get a hearing in Hartford [MTP]. Sam’s “bill of complaints was not published” [MTNJ 3: 404].