The case of late Miss Louisa Nottidge's 5728 pounds

Just Another One of Those Free Love Cults

I was flipping through the May 4, 1826 edition of The Coshocton Spy when I spotted a personal ad entitled "Wife Wanted" in which a poetic bachelor describes his ideal mate while not-so-subtley sprinkling in terms like "hymeneal bliss" and "conjugal band". I figured I could get an easy story by collecting an assortment of amusing antebellum personal ads. Instead of looking through the old papers and crossing my fingers, I motioned to stick with what worked and search Google's archives for "wife wanted". That's when I unintentionally came across a story about television personality Spade Cooley murdering his spouse because his wife wanted to join a free love cult.

These are all very promising ingredients, so there has to be an interesting story in here somewhere... wait, go back to "free love cult". It was striking how casually the words were repeated throughout the article, as if when the reporter wrote "free love cult", he meant: "you know, one of those free love cults that are always lying around".  Apparently the phrase used to be a whole lot more popular than it is now. Naturally I went off looking for free love cults.

The Palm Beach Daily News of January 24, 1925 inconspicuously delivers what I'm sure isn't a bad double entendre: "Free Love Cult Enlarging Self". That's where, for the first time, we meet the Agapemonites. They're a communal sect that spun off from the Church of England and lived in Spaxton on a property that they called "Agapemone" or "abode of love" or sometimes even "Agapemone or abode of love" (seriously, they would write that whole thing in legal documents).

The church was started by a man named Henry James Prince. From the late 1840's to around 1860, he was the bane of UK newspaper reporters- who, although they knew a juicy story when they saw it, were frustrated to be running out of polished Victorian ways to imply the word "fuck" (e.g. "that the rights of heathen freedom were habitually celebrated" (dabs forehead with kerchief)).

Prince's claims of divinity, his erratic behaviour, and the sexually provocative nature of his group garnered a lot of headlines. One example is a snippet that the Lloid Weekly ran in their miscellaneous section about how Prince put himself as "head of household" on the 1860 census and listed all 64 other people on the Agapemone premises as "relation to head of household".

According to court deposition papers sourced in the May 12, 1850 Lloids Weekly, Reverend Prince grew a small following while operating what should have been regarded as an extortion scheme. He met young women, and "by affectation of extraordinary piety, inoculated them with his peculiar tenets". After that, he cornered them and bullied them into marrying men who were under his control (for some reason he also insisted that they wear black dresses for the weddings). After the marriages, Reverend Prince would use his status as a messiah, some group intimidation,  and the unfortunate treatment of gender in Victorian Britain to separate the women from their money.

While the women themselves didn't often complain, their families and the public at large certainly did. That brings us to four young sisters known affectionately to reporters as "the Misses Nottidges". The four heiresses were pinnacle to the church's early growth. Three of the sisters would marry close followers of Prince. Two of these married sisters would live happily in the Abode of Love for many years.

The other married sister, Agnes, would eventually be banished from the church after angering Prince. The court deposition papers mentioned above come from an 1850 case in which Agnes' estranged husband attempted to kidnap her son. But our focus is not that case. Our focus is on a court case that happened 10 years later involving Agnes' sister Louisa.

Can You Prove Someone Doesn't Think They're Anointed by God? 

As for the fourth sister Louisa who remained unmarried: she died in 1860 after giving all of her money to Prince.

Well, that's not the whole story. Actually, 10 years earlier she was forcibly taken away from the Agapemonites by two relatives before she could give her money away to Prince, and she was held against her will in an insane asylum because it was thought that she was unfit to act on her own behalf. Then Louisa demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court her sanity. Then she returned to Agapemone and gave all of her money to Prince. Then she died.

But her brother sued Prince for the money back. On face value, it doesn't seem like a case like this could possibly stand up. The girl already proved to the court that she was sane and could act as her own guardian 10 years earlier when she was abducted. However, Mr. Nottlidge claimed that his sister was not of sound mind while giving the gift since she was seduced by Prince's claims of divinity. The case went to court, and the lawyers discussed whether or not Prince's claims of divinity constituted fraud.

The vice-chancellor in the case is quoted as saying (courtesy of an op-ed joyfully celebrating the death of the much-hated Prince in the Febuary 25, 1899 Auckland Star): "By imposing a belief in his supernatural character upon her weak mind...imposter was the influencing motive for the gift, therefore vitiating it entirely."

There's something really strange about the vice-chancellor's argument; he says: "By falsely and blasphemously pretending to a Divine mission he had imposed on these weak women, [Prince] obtained a gift of the whole of their fortunes." So in order for the vice-chancellor's argument to hold water, one would have to show that Prince: 1) was in no way priveledged with some divinely granted power, and 2) didn't honestly believe that he was.     

But it seems pretty clear that Prince did believe that he was granted with divine power. Here's a 63 page book of Prince's early letters to his congregation, complete with diagrams of souls connecting to God. And that was just his early stuff, long before the days of Agapemone. How can, with the preponderance of evidence that Reverend Prince really did believe that he was divine, a court rule that he was wilfully defrauding congregation members?

Help in the Form of an Obscure Century-Old Ruling

Fortunately for Nottidge's lawyers, this conversation became unnecessary when it was found that the law had already set precedent. The case Norton v Kelly in 1764 had established that any gift from a practitioner to a confessor would, if ever questioned legally, be deemed as being given during a time where soundness of mind had been suspended due to the confessor's capacity to exert mental control over the practitioner (seriously). So Prince had to give all the money back to the estate of the late Miss Nottidge so that it could be distributed among the next of kin.

But sit on that next of kin thing for a second, because two of the Nottidge sisters were still followers of Henry James Prince and would just give the money back anyway.

What Became of the Agapemonites?

A whole lot. The court case above is a drop in a bucket of absurdities and coincidences. From herds of spiritual widows following upright caskets to angry mobs trying to exact retribution and inadvertently putting tar and feathers on an innocent bystander to a "spiritual bride" having a  Reverend Prince love child that was later condemned as a satan-baby, the Agapemonites definitely produced a lot of offbeat stories.

After Prince's Death, the church would be taken over by John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. He named his kids things like "Life" and "Power" and was a lot less equivocal with his divinity claims; he went full Jesus on his congregation. Apparently he quelled a lot of anger by giving generously to the local community. He also geared a lot older on new recruits because he was afraid of making the local outsiders angry and fearful for their daughters' safety.

Since the church had a history of going after middle-aged women, and since hardly anyone in the church's history had kids, the whole thing fizzled out and all the members are now dead.

In 1958, the compound was sold off and developers built around and over it. Currently, Celebrity Big Brother contestant Vanessa Feltz lives on the property.

Who steals a bridge?

I opened the January 7th 1950 edition of Washington Reporter to a startling headline that read "At Least 26 Dead in Mental Hospital Fire". As I scrolled through the article, something odd struck me from the bottom right corner of the page. An AP blurb out of Athens, Alabama reads "Somebody got away with the Piney Creek bridge, and folks are starting to get mad about it." Wait, what? Who steals a bridge?

Apparently, and by way of the January 28 edition of the Logansport-Pharos Tribune, Fred Vickers and Woodrow Moore of Limestone County, Alabama steal a bridge. As the story goes, Fred Vickers passes the bridge, most likely on an unpaved road that would later become present-day Huntsville Browns-Ferry in south Athens, and sees that the bolts can be taken out, so he calls his 350 pound friend Woodrow Moore to help him haul the 10 ton steel structure off. For their efforts dismantling the $28,000 bridge, they pocket a cool $149.

And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for a pesky local almost crashing into Piney Creek...then waiting two weeks...then remarking to the county commissioner that he sure hopes the new bridge comes in soon. After a series of confused exchanges, Sheriff John Sandlin jumped into action, stating "We just don't have any idea of what might have happened....we don't have any clues, and we're getting a pretty late start."

But serendipity blessed Sheriff Sandlin and the good people of south Athens, when deputies saw a fucking 10 ton bridge in a junk yard several miles outside of town. Deputies questioned Vickers who then turned over on his buddy Woodrow.

Best quote of the saga: "This time we're going to bolt the thing down good."


A Quick History of Stealing Bridges

The whole thing had me wondering, were there others like Fred and Woodrow? Was I naive to think that the stealing of a bridge would be such a tiresome and conspicuously grand caper that no one would try?

Yes; yes I was. A quick search reveals that in the last 200 years, there have been a whole bunch of stolen bridges.

Number of independent stories about someone stealing a bridge: >20

Oldest story of someone stealing a bridge: Actually, it was remnants of a bridge, but I'm still counting it. The April 18, 1832 edition of the UK's True Sun reports that James George was being held on charges related to his possession of steel and lead that had been stolen from the remains of the old London Bridge, which was a hodgepodge of structural duct-tapery that began around 1176. What can be gathered is that the old London Bridge was demolished in 1831 and somehow this guy came across some of the dismantled materials.

Best Payout to someone stealing a bridge: $5,200 to a couple of Pennsylvania brothers who made off with a bridge from North Beaver Township.

Most heartless instance of someone stealing a bridge: Someone stole a 10 foot bridge that was to be used on the grounds of a UK school for disabled children :,(

Moral (if there is one) to be learned about stealing a bridge: Never trust a scrap-metal buyer not to call the police on you, because they always do.

My personal favorite story of someone stealing a bridge: In 1931, Peter Orth of Wilmington, Delaware was looking for a way to feed his 12 (twelve) children. He landed on the rather reasonable plan of dismantling an abandoned rail bridge and using the planks for stove wood.  He later had a change of heart and decided to donate the wood to charity so that it might be distributed to the poor. Although he had already been caught, his donation was voluntary.

But What Happened to Fred and Woodrow?

They're fine. They're dead. Fred died in 1974 and Woodrow passed a few years later in 1980, both within just a few miles of the scene of the heist.  The theft has long been forgotten, and the bridge itself was most likely recycled after a 1956 repaving of County Road 24 that replaced all the bridges over Piney Creek.