In the Barn: Luman & Alma Smith
January, 1873. Chester came home, the sickness with him.
The boy had been over the lake, working, but returned to his father Luman Smith’s house in Hinesburg, where he came down with headache, fever, pains in his arms and legs.
The illness spread rapidly. Luman took sick, as did the younger boys Almon, Cassius, and Albert, then Frank the baby, just two years old.
Luman’s wife Minerva was already in poor health, an invalid of many years. She was the first to die, succumbing to fever on January 18.
The doctors were useless. Exhaustion, headache, high fever: it could have been anything. Then Chester broke out in a rash. He had sores in his mouth, lesions on his face and body that swelled up hard and fat with pus.
Smallpox.
The house became a mortuary. Cassius died on January 22nd and Albert on the 23rd. The baby Frank died January 28. Their final resting place is unknown. They were buried, perhaps, in an unmarked plot at the Rhode Island Corner cemetery or more likely in a family grave on the Smith property for fear of spreading contagion.
Luman Smith survived. So did Chester and Almon, but the family was broken, and Luman too. The months passed. The older boys recovered, went off looking for work, and Luman was left alone with his grief in the house where he’d watched them die: Minerva, Cassius, Albert, Frank.
Then he met Alma Wood.
* * *
Alma Wood was born in 1845 to Harriet Rice and Joseph Wood. Her parents were living in Quebec at the time, just over the border in Clarenceville, but returned to Vermont and had settled in Burlington by 1861 when Alma married Heman Austin, a Williston farm-laborer. She was sixteen years old.
The couple’s first child, a daughter, was born in June 1862 but died of fits, aged 11 days, and was never named. Three more children followed: Laura in 1863, Clement in 1865, and Ira in 1870.
On the 4th of July 1871 Heman loaded a shotgun to fire a salute into the air, but something went wrong, and the gun exploded. One hand was mangled beyond saving and amputated at the wrist. Heman survived the surgery and went on to recover, though the pain was surely considerable and he must have struggled afterward to do farmwork.
The Austins suffered another tragedy in March 1872 when their son Ira died, aged 17 months. Alma was pregnant at the time and gave birth to another son, Joseph, in September 1872, but the marriage was failing, would not survive. Heman became abusive and Alma sued for divorce, citing “intolerable severity.”
In later years the newspapers described Alma’s reputation locally as “but little better than that of a common prostitute” and similarly alleged she was once “an inmate of houses of ill fame.” This isn’t necessarily accurate, but if she did engage in sex-work, it might have been during this period when she was attempting to divorce her first husband while supporting herself and the children.
It’s unknown when she met Luman Smith, or how, though it may have been through her sister Harriet who was married to Alonzo Place and lived not far from Smith’s farm. Alma was later described as a “slight woman,” small and bespectacled, while Luman would have borne the scars of smallpox. Their pain, perhaps, brought them together. Luman had lost a wife and three children to disease while Alma, then 29, had endured an abusive marriage and buried two children of her own.
The divorce went through in October 1874. Heman didn’t contest the suit and Alma was granted custody of the three children. The next month she married Luman Smith in Hinesburg with their first child, Helen Jane, following in July 1875, fewer than nine months after the marriage.
A new baby, a new beginning. The Smiths relocated to neighboring Williston where Luman acquired the life-lease of a farm near Essex Junction. Records suggest he left the Hinesburg homestead to his son Chester and settled himself to a farmer’s life in Williston.
Alma’s three children probably accompanied them, at least initially, though Laura soon married and returned to Hinesburg and Clement moved to Colchester even as Alma’s father Joseph Wood, now in his seventies, moved in to help out round the farm.
A second daughter, Bertha, was born to the couple in February 1878, but the marriage was increasingly volatile, even violent. The Smiths separated at least three times and Alma later accused Luman of abuse. He hit her, she said, knocked her down, and what’s more, he’d taken to carrying a dirk knife, making threats.
In the summer of 1879, the Smith family consisted of Luman and Alma Smith, Joseph Wood, six year-old Joseph Austin, and the children Helen and Bertha Smith, who were four and one, respectively, when Alma left home for the fourth time on August 10.
Luman forced her to leave, she said, wouldn’t allow her to take the children. She boarded in Richmond and dreamed of a life out West, thinking she might go to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she’d been promised a job. She’d need protection, naturally, and for this reason, she purchased a small pistol for himself, a seven-shooter.
The weeks passed and Alma found religion, attending a camp meeting in Essex Junction. The seasons changed. The leaves turned pale and sere and Luman changed his mind. He wanted her back, he said, couldn’t cope without her. Alma hesitated. She missed the children, God knows, but her husband frightened her, what he might do to her.
She turned to her father for help. Joseph Wood was by reputation “a quarrelsome man” who’d previously served two or three years in prison for selling alcohol in violation of the state’s prohibition laws. He was apparently quite close to Alma, if not to the rest of his family, and Luman’s conduct infuriated him. Around this time he was heard to say the man “ought to be shot,” while on another occasion, he stated, “Mrs Smith couldn’t get along with her husband and they had got to get rid of him.”
He had a plan. Alma should offer to return but only if Luman were to relinquish his life-lease on the property, signing it over to her. The house would be hers. Luman couldn’t turn her out again, couldn’t separate her from the children.
Wood put the plan to Luman but he refused. Not surprising, really, but Alma took it hard. On Sunday, October 19, she visited Luman’s daughter Susan Phillips in Hinesburg. According to Susan, Alma was in a state, overwrought and swearing oaths, threatening violence. She showed Susan the seven-shooter, saying, “there would be blood shed if [Luman] didn’t carry his head right.”
In the end, Luman relented. He met with Wood to sign over the property and on October 21, a Tuesday, Alma returned to Williston.
Or maybe it didn’t happen that way at all.
Because Luman Smith was adamant there was no abuse but on Alma’s part and that was regular enough. She frequently threatened his life, he said, and deserted him on three occasions prior to August 10, 1879 when she left for a fourth time and refused to take the children.
Luman couldn’t cope. His step-son Joseph was 6 but the girls were 4 and 1 and needed mothering. He fed them and clothed them and put them to bed, but parenting left little time for work and the weeks were passing, the money running short.
Meanwhile Alma was at the camp meeting in Essex Junction, spending “days and nights.” Her motives, Luman thought, were rather less than holy, and he assumed she’d gone back to sex-work. He hated her, maybe, had reason, but he needed her, and so did the children. He begged her to return.
His father-in-law agreed to act as a go-between. Wood spoke with Alma and afterward put the following proposition to Luman: Alma would come home but only if Luman signed over the farm. The demand was outrageous, unreasonable. He refused.
On either October 18 or 20, Luman called on state’s attorney H.S. Peck at his offices in Burlington. He told Peck of Alma’s conduct at the camp meeting and claimed to possess proof of adultery, which was then a crime. Peck believed Luman wanted Alma put in prison, but he may only have intended to compel her return by threatening prosecution.
Either way, he left disappointed. Peck took no action and Luman went home to a farm he couldn’t tend, mouths he couldn’t feed. He was cornered, being unable to support the children and equally unable to abandon them. He caved and agreed to sign over the farm.
October 21. Alma came home, and trouble with her. The quarrels continued, two against one, and bad as before, or worse, for Luman was no longer master of his house. The next day, he drove to Hinesburg and didn’t return to Williston until evening. Wood said he was acting “crazy” that night, that his face was “very red.” Luman denied he’d been drinking, but afterward, he apologized to Alma and her father.
A fragile peace, then, but it didn’t last.
The next morning, October 23, Alma and her father planned to drive to Williston Village but the wagon was kept in a locked barn to which Luman alone had the key. The barn was Alma’s now. The horse, too, she thought. She asked Luman for the key but he ignored her, said nothing, then took himself off to Essex Junction on foot.
In the Junction he called on C.M. Ferrin, a local doctor. Luman told Ferrin “he had signed his life away [...] for the sake of getting his wife back” as he “couldn’t take care of the little children himself and earn a living.” Now he regretted the decision and wanted to sell the horse. Was Ferrin interested? The men agreed to a sale and Luman said goodbye.
Also that morning he stopped in to see George Austin, a family friend, who was married to Alma’s sister Louisa and was also the younger brother of her first husband Heman. On this occasion Luman confided to George that he planned to leave the farm, “that he could not live there any longer.” He needed money, then, and maybe for this reason, he’d decided to sell the horse, though it’s also possible he acted out of spite. He expected an argument, was ready for it, telling George “he would put [Alma and Wood] where the dogs would not bite them” if they attempted to interfere with his plans. Then he walked home.
Early afternoon, not yet two o’clock.
His stepson was away from home, probably at school, while Bertha was in the house with her mother. Luman didn’t go inside. Helen ran out to meet him and they proceeded to the barn together, talking of this or that, then turning at the sound of footsteps, Joseph Wood coming over.
* * *
Testimony of Joseph B. Wood:
Smith, he said, was sometimes as good and kind as a man could be, and then at times was as ugly as a man could be… [Wood] followed [Smith] to the barn and asked him pleasantly for the key to the barn in which the wagon was locked up. The next [Wood] knew Smith came at him and struck him under the left eye, knocking him down, and then kneeled on him and tried to strike him in the face several times; [Wood] escaped the blow by dodging; heard Alma say; “Let Father alone” and Smith replied; “I won’t.” [Wood] asked Alma to help [him], she said “I can’t — he’s holding me.” [Wood] turned over and saw her lying by him with Smith’s hands on her throat. She had hold of his hands. [Wood] undertook to get up; when Smith hit him again in the face, and lay upon him. [Wood] drew his revolver, which he had carried for years, and by a great effort, though nearly exhausted, got partly out from under Smith and fired;—did this because he was afraid Smith would kill him, and in order to get away from him. Next saw Smith following up Alma; told him to let her alone, when Smith again sprang for [Wood] and he fired again; thinks he hit him in the arm. Smith then said he would not touch him […] again and started to go out of the barn; and there was no more firing after that.
Testimony of Alma R. Smith:
On the first day I returned Smith commenced to quarrel with me; on the day before the homicide Smith told my father and myself that he was sorry and asked us to forgive him; the next morning I asked him for the team; he made no reply, he went out; I never saw him again until the affray; at that time I ran out of the house; Smith had my father down and was partly on top of him; I took him by the coat and tried to pull him off; he caught me and threw me down and said he would finish us both; our little girl said, “Ma, don’t let Pa kill Grandpa;” [...] Smith took me by the throat and reached down for the revolver in my pocket; he got it partly out; I seized it and we both had hold of it; I did not fire it; I never intended to hurt him; intended to get away the best way I could; the revolver was not fired except in that struggle; in the meantime my father was trying to get away from Smith; when the pistol went off I was on my back; when I got away from him he got off, went for father again; he kept hold of me and father said, “Let go of Alma.” Smith said he wouldn’t and started for father; I ran to the house [...] after the shooting Smith started for Thompson’s; our little girl followed him.
Dying Declaration of Luman A. Smith:
The shooting took place at the barn out doors. Mr. Wood, my wife’s father, told me I should not have the horse. I did not say anything. Mr. Wood pulled his revolver and I sprang for him and took him down. [...] My wife came out and drew her revolver. I then took hold of them and had the ends of both revolvers in my hand. We then had a squabble and I fetched her down top of him and his head was between my legs holding him down. [...] I had to let go of him and they fired once or twice and did not hit me, and I kept trying to get hers away. He got up and she said “give it to him father,” and he shot three times at me, and she shot one ball into me while I was fussing with her. [...] My wife shot me twice I think. She did once anyway. My wife’s father shot at me four or five times [...] I think she shot at me first; they were both shooting. [...] My little girl was there hollering “pa, pa.” Her name is Helen. She was right there among us. [...] She came running out when she saw I was home.
* * *
Almost nothing is known for certain.
The horse belonged to Luman or to Alma. It was his to sell or it wasn’t. The fight occurred inside the barn or just outside the barn-doors when either Wood pulled a revolver or Luman attacked him unprovoked. Then Alma came in with a seven-shooter and Luman wrestled her down, fumbling for the revolver, or maybe he was strangling her, hands clamped fast about her throat. The gun discharged. He reeled back and Wood fired too. “Give it to him,” Alma said, or didn’t say, and they shot him again.
Luman suffered gunshot wounds to the neck, abdomen, and wrist. Despite his injuries he made it as far as Josiah Thompson’s farm, crossing the bridge over Allen Brook. Wood remained in the barn, it seems, while Alma went to the house and Helen ran after her father.
The distance to Thompson’s was over 200 yards and Luman was near-to-collapse by the time he turned in the dooryard, telling Sophia Thompson “he was shot and that he was dead.” A man named William Willey was present and helped Luman into the house where Sophia made ready chair. Helen lingered outside, as if afraid, but Luman turned and called to her and she came in.
The Thompsons sent for the doctor, the Sheriff. Perhaps it was William who went for help, as it was around this time his brother George Willey, a livery owner, learned of the shooting at Gero’s farm and hastened to Smith’s, meeting Wood there.
The old man’s eye was “badly blacked,” Willey observed, and there was blood down the side of his face. Wood said Luman came at him, that he’d acted in self-defense. He was quite unemotional, Willey noted, “indifferent about the affray.”
So was Alma. “She had been shooting,” she told Willey, “and would shoot another man if he knocked her down.” Her dress was torn, Willey noted, and she showed him the dirk knife Luman was given to carry, and with which he’d menaced her, explaining she’d stolen it and secreted it away.
News of the shooting reached Deputy E.D. Baker in Essex Junction who drove to Thompson’s without delay and found C.M. Ferrin in attendance. The doctor was able to confirm what Luman himself suspected. The wounds were mortal: he would not survive.
Luman told Baker what had happened in the barn. That Alma and Wood had attacked without provocation, shooting him multiple times whereas he “didn’t do anything to them except to try and get their revolvers away.” The girl Helen corroborated this version of events and Luman declared himself glad he had lived long enough to tell his story.
Baker went to the Smith farm, intending to make an arrest. He met Wood in the yard, who repeated the same story he’d told Willey. When asked why he carried a revolver he explained that he’d carried one for thirty years, that it was a kind of companion to him.
Where is it now? Baker asked.
In the house. Alma was inside too, doing the ironing. Baker doesn’t mention any visible injuries though others would testify in court to the presence of finger-marks round her throat. She inquired after her husband and Baker confirmed he was dying, that he was unlikely to survive the night.
Alma was unmoved, saying only that she hoped he might live long enough to repent. Later that same evening, interviewed at the jail, she said “it was the happiest night she had had for many months, for she was safe from her husband's abuse and brutality.”
Baker confiscated her pistol and checked the cylinder. Inside were three charges of shot, three shells, and one empty chamber, indicating the pistol had been fired up to three times recently. Wood fetched his pistol from another room, a 32 caliber. Baker observed one shot of six remaining, suggesting Wood may have fired the pistol up to four times, assuming he kept one chamber empty as a safety.
It’s known he fired at least twice because two 32 caliber rounds were removed from Luman’s body. One had lodged in the wrist and was easily retrieved while the second had buried itself in his abdomen. The third wound to Luman’s neck was believed to have been fired from Alma’s revolver but the bullet penetrated downward to the chest and vitals and couldn’t be recovered.
This third wound was probably fatal. Such was the opinion of Dr. Briggs of Burlington, anyway, when he arrived at Thompson’s to assist Ferrin. He listened to Luman’s heart and lungs and confirmed the patient was unlikely to recover.
Luman guessed as much and was resigned. To George Willey he said “he had been shot and had got to die” while he told George Austin he “would never get well” and asked him to look after the children.
Around this time, State’s Attorney H.S. Peck arrived at Thompson’s. Mere days before Peck met with Luman in his Burlington offices and Luman told him of Alma’s alleged infidelities. What is to be done? he’d asked and Peck had done nothing. He may have felt guilty, perhaps responsible. He took down Luman’s dying declaration and afterward he led the state’s prosecution of Alma and her father.
Luman survived the night, but the time was short. Dr. Briggs returned to Thompson’s on Friday afternoon and found the injured man “stupefied” with exhaustion and blood poisoning, his skin darkening to purple. He died in the night.
The body was released to Chester Smith of Hinesburg. Six years earlier, Chester had contracted smallpox while working in New York and nearly died of it. He recovered his health and settled in Hinesburg, where he farmed the old homestead and slept in the same house where his mother and brothers had died.
The funeral took place there on October 25. Helen would have attended the service and afterward it seems Chester took her in, if only for a time. As of June 1880 the census lists her as a “boarder” in the home of Chester Smith, though later newspaper reports describe her as a resident of the “orphans home.” Her half-brother Joseph likewise was placed at the poor farm in Williston, while the youngest child, Bertha, was permitted to remain with Alma during her imprisonment.
In October 1880, Alma Smith and Joseph Wood stood trial together for the murder of Luman A. Smith. Public opinion was firmly against them. From The Burlington Free Press:
The entire Woods family, we are informed, have always borne a reputation little short of infamous. Some time ago Joseph B. Woods, the probable murderer, was imprisoned in the jail in this city for selling liquor and remained there for two or three years refusing to pay his fine. The wife’s reputation is but little better than that of a common prostitute. She has repeatedly abandoned her husband, been an inmate of houses of ill fame, and otherwise brought scandal upon herself and upon her family. On the other hand all the neighbors and all who knew him speak of the murdered Smith as a peaceable, law-abiding man; a little weak in mind [...] but generally speaking a man of upright intention and conduct.
The prosecution contended that Alma and Wood had conspired together to deprive the “weak-minded” Luman of his property and livelihood then shot him once it became apparent he intended to sell the team. Their argument was primarily informed by Luman’s dying declaration, which was admitted to the court as evidence. His deposition described the attack in the barn and also provided a glimpse of a troubled marriage during which Alma had threatened to kill him “thousands of times” — and as recently as August 10.
As it was generally believed an individual wouldn’t risk eternal damnation by sinning with his or her last utterance, the defense sought to undermine Luman’s deposition by showing he “did not believe in a future state of existence and of rewards and punishment” but the judge didn’t allow it.
Their other efforts failed too. Alma and Wood repeated their earlier claims that Luman was unstable, “crazy,” an abusive husband. Various character witnesses were called on behalf of the defendants including their jailer while others described the injuries they’d received: Wood’s bloodied face, the marks on Alma’s throat. It wasn’t enough. The jury deliberated for around eight hours before finding the defendants guilty of murder in the second degree.
Alma and Wood appealed to the state Supreme Court, who issued a favorable ruling on January 1, 1881. In their opinion, the Court affirmed the special legal status of a dying declaration but concluded there were elements of Luman’s statement that shouldn’t have been admitted into evidence, including his allegations of threats and abuse by Alma.
If dying declarations… do not relate to the direct transactions and circumstances from which the death of the person murdered ensues, they are inadmissible.
The Court also determined it was inappropriate for Alma and Wood to have been tried together on the charge of murder, stating:
If one inflicts a mortal wound [e.g. Wood], but before death ensues, another [e.g. Alma] kills the same person by an independent act, without concert with, or procurement of, the first man, he, [Wood] who caused the first wound, cannot be convicted of murder, or manslaughter, or an assault with intent to kill, on an indictment charging both jointly with murder.
The guilty verdict was set aside and a new trial ordered for October 1881. Too late, as it happened. In February the Williston farm was foreclosed on and sold, while Joseph Wood died in prison awaiting his second trial. He is buried in Williston’s Morse Cemetery.
Alma stood trial alone. A year had passed since she was found guilty and the facts remained unchanged. The same witnesses were called, the same evidence presented, but this time, Alma was acquitted and released.
To the public, however, she remained a murderess. Concerning the November 1881 trial of Charles Guiteau, The Burlington Clipper remarked, “We don’t want the twelve who tried Alma Smith as a jury for Guiteau.”
Her whereabouts between 1881 and 1900 are unknown though the 1900 census shows her living in Foxborough, Massachusetts under the name of Alma Tripp. It seems she’d had another child after 1881 as she claimed six living children in her responses to the census-taker. In Foxborough she lived alone but for a lodger and worked as a laundress before relocating to Quincy Street in Brooklyn, where in 1905, she was employed as a “general laborer.” In 1910 she disappears from census records, married or dead or merely overlooked.
The children didn’t fare much better. Bertha Smith spent two years in jail with her mother before being released into poverty in 1881. Alma gained her freedom but lost a child, for Bertha was placed immediately in the Home for Destitute Children. Possibly mother and daughter remained in contact, however, as Bertha was living in Springfield, Massachusetts — around 90 miles from Foxborough — when she married John Worthington in 1898. Four years later, she married again, becoming Bertha Newell, but this second marriage ended in divorce, and Bertha returned to Vermont. She married a third time and died in 1948.
Less is known of Helen’s movements. For a time she boarded with her half-brother Chester Smith in Hinesburg and possibly spent time in the orphans home before marrying Howard Ray at age sixteen. The marriage didn’t last. Howard divorced Helen in 1895 on grounds of adultery and after that there’s nothing, no trace of her in the public record.
First Alma, then Helen: it’s so easy to disappear. The past is uncertain, at once changeless and always changing, not only unknown but probably unknowable. A marriage splinters and falls to pieces and the husband is either a crazed abuser or a weak-minded simpleton. His wife is a murderer and adulteress or she is a victim, a survivor of two abusive marriages. Her father is a criminal, “quarrelsome” and devious, or else he is “a quiet man,” a '‘peacemaker” wishing only to protect his daughter.
In the barn that afternoon, they are all of these things or maybe none of them, but Helen is there too and she’s only four years old. “Pa,” she hollers. “Pa.” Shots are fired and Luman staggers toward the road, crossing to Thompson’s with Helen just behind. She leaves the barn, follows him over the bridge.
* * *
“In the Barn” was sourced from various newspapers and public records including Vermont birth, death, and marriage records and accounts in The Burlington Free Press, The Argus & Patriot, and The Vermont Tribune, among others.
Researched and written by Daniel Mills. Music by Jon Mills.
