The institutions in Cranston have had more stories pass through their doors than will ever be known – the saddest of which affected innocent children.

Monday was payday at Harris Mill in Coventry. One such Monday during the autumn of 1897, several employees used their wages to get highly intoxicated for a two-day stretch at the tenement of Patrick Moore and his wife Maggie (O’Hare). During the second night of imbibing, Patrick physically assaulted his mother-in-law who lived with him. A warrant was already hanging over him for a previous charge of drunkenness. On Wednesday, a police officer spotted him leaving a saloon terribly drunk again and he was arrested on the strength of the warrant.

Patrick was not agreeable to being arrested and the officer welcomed the assistance of three other men in getting him handcuffed and into the police wagon. “I want to see my wife,” Patrick told the officer, who agreed to take him back home for a moment before lodging him in jail. Once they arrived at the Moore’s tenement, the officer found Maggie to be even more intoxicated than her husband. He decided to arrest her for drunkenness but she would not consent to getting into the wagon. Finally she stopped arguing and climbed in, saying, “Just to keep the old man company.”

Patrick and Maggie were each sentenced to serve ten days at the State Farm in Cranston and to pay court costs of $3.25. Unable to come up with the $6.50 which had been placed on their freedom, they had their incarceration increased by 25 days. Patrick was informed that once his sentence had been served, he would face the consequences in the form of another arrest for assaulting his wife’s mother. The following morning, police officers sent the overseer of the poor to the Moore’s tenement to decide what would become of Maggie’s 11-month-old daughter Margaret and her 69-year-old mother while she and Patrick were serving their sentences. After the overseer’s visit, he reported back that the matter was one better suited for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

On Sept. 14, an agent for the Society visited the Moore home and found the baby to be very sick and the house empty of food. The overseer of the poor was contacted again and instructed to have some food delivered to the house. The Society’s agent had decided that the baby was too weak to move but that some nourishment might strengthen the child so that it could soon be taken from the terrible environment it was in. Less than a week later, on the morning of Sept. 20, the child died from the effects of cholera. This was the second of Patrick and Maggie’s children to die from cholera, a sickness caused by contaminated food and water, and poor sanitation. Their 10-month-old daughter Mary had succumbed to the disease on Dec. 29, 1890. After Margaret’s burial at Saint Peter & Paul’s Cemetery, Maggie’s mother left the tenement and moved to Pontiac.

Before her 35 days had been served, Maggie was set free as a result of her uncle paying the court costs for her. Immediately after leaving the State Farm, she went and got drunk on strong, cheap whiskey. By the time police arrested her, she was in a horrific state of intoxication. She was returned to the State Farm – this time for six months. With their two children forever asleep in a cemetery six miles away in Coventry, Patrick and Maggie spent their time drying out in Cranston – at least until they gained the freedom to wet their whistles again. 

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.