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Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts from around the world explore the Panther Valley sites fictionalized in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel “The Valley of Fear.”
In October 2004, nearly one hundred members of the Baker Street Irregulars gathered a symposium to focus on Doyle’s novel “The Valley of Fear” and its historic basis in the murders and trial of the Molly Maguires of the 1860-1877 period.
The Baker Street Irregulars is a private organization founded in 1933 New York by Christopher Morley for the purpose of archiving and studying all things related to Arthur Conan Doyle and specifically the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Baker Street Irregulars was the named given to a cadre of street urchins that Holmes used for surveillance and information gathering on the streets.
The Baker Street Irregulars are purported to hundreds of chapters, called scions, around the world. The main group meets once each year and usually focuses on a topic related to the Holmes series of 56 short stories and four novels. This year, the program is about the last of the novels, “The Valley of Fear.”
Though this page-turner is set in England where Sherlock Holmes is tasked with a murder investigation, his deciphering of the clues leads the story to the underbelly of the story where the main character made his enemies in the Valley of Fear.
The story was based on the main prosecution witness at the Molly Maguire trail, James McParkland. McParkland testified that he and his two brothers were hired to infiltrate the secret society of the Molly Maguires. McParkland was possibly the first undercover detective. His worked in the mines under the alias of James McKenna.
Many people that believe that the Molly Maguires never murdered nor even existed in the Panther Valley and were created to break the developing union movement by the president of the Reading Railroad, Frank Gowen, and his associates Charles Parrish and Asa Packer. Some say that the violence hadn’t begun until McParkland came upon the scene.
Following the Molly Trail
Henry Boote of Hackensack, a member of the Baker Street Irregulars came to the Mauch Chunk Museum to learn about the Molly Maguires from Museum president John Drury. in preparation for his groups October conference.
Mr. Drury contacted the writer, who in turn arranged with Dale Freudenberger of the Delaware & Lehigh National Corridor Commission and a contributor to the Molly McGuire Auto Tour to lead Henry Boote on a tour of the Molly sites of interest.
The tour began at the 1871 Mauch Chunk Jail on West Broadway in Jim Thorpe where several of the convicted Molly Maguire were hung in 1877. The guided tour shows and tells the history and conditions of the prisoners at the time.
We went to Summit Hill where mine boss Morgan Powell was murdered at 146 W. Ludlow Street. He was shot by one of a group of men standing outside. Yellow Jack Donahue and Alex Campbell were found guilty of this murder in 1876 and hanged in Mauch Chunk in 1877. It was the site of the former McFadden Variety Store, During the mining period, it was a company store, operated by Henry Williams.
After a number of stops, we came to the site of the original Lansford train station of the Panther Creek Railroad outside the Lansford Hauto Railroad Tunnel. Here, John Jones and another mine superintendent were murdered as they left the train to go to work.
In Tamaqua, we saw the home of Daniel Shepp, Carroll’s Tavern, and the place where Tamaqua police officer Benjamin Franklin Yost was murdered, allegedly by the Molly Maguires. As was Yost’s usually duty to snuff out the gas lights at the end of the night, three assailants came out of the dark surroundings and gunned him down.
Yost’s brother-in-law, Daniel Shepp, is alleged to have hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate the murder. Carroll’s Tavern is where discussion of the killing of Benjamin Yost was supposed to have taken place. This implicated James Carroll, a secretary of the Tamaqua Ancient Order of Hibernians and led to his hanging in Pottsville in 1877.
After a tour of the Molly landmarks and tombstones, we came to the grave of Black Jack Kehoe. Kehoe was supposedly the “boss” of the Molly Maguires. He was buried in his wife’s family plot in Tamaqua. In 1979, Governor Milton Shapp granted a posthumous pardon to Black Jack Kehoe.
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