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The Molasses Hill Incident

This article was written by J. Earl Clauson and published on Friday, November 15, 1935, in the Evening Bulletin newspaper of Providence, Rhode Island, under the heading “These Plantations.” The piece is untitled but tells the tale of a curious discovery at an old farmhouse in western Exeter.

Molasses Hill is on the Ten Rod Road in Exeter, just beyond the Four Corner Meeting House and the two bridges over Wood River. There the old highway made the slope of Mount Tom with a jump and a jerk and considerable strain on the traces and whiffletree.

If you don’t visualize it clearly from that description, let’s say it is a mile or better west of Millville, between that metropolis and Lewis City, south of Rice City, and a loud shout from Skunk Hollow. If you can’t get it now it must be you weren’t raised in Exeter and will have to wait until you drive over the newly surfaced, un-bridged Ten Rod Road.

Back from the old road near the top of Molasses Hill stands a little gray farmhouse where Edward Barber lived 75 years ago. He was the son of Samuel, whose neighbors called him Sidehill Sammy.

Sidehill Sammy, or his father, had bought the place from a party whose name is lost in the foggy past, and it’s just as well, because what happened in the little gray farmhouse wouldn’t bear pinning on anybody’s descendents. It was Samuel Barber who made the find in the muck pit.

This was down at the foot of Molasses Hill, near river level. Mr. Barber went down there with his cart when work slacked up on the farm and dug loads of muck. He would scatter the stuff in his cow yard and pig pen, and come spring it would have been worked by the livestock into excellent fertilizer.

One day – this might have been somewhat better than a century ago, for a guess – prodding into the muck, he turned up a human bone. It was just one section of an entire skeleton, which by intensive search Mr. Barber recovered entire and loaded into his muck wagon.

Out of the pit, too, came a sadly worn old saddle. With these discoveries Sidehill Sammy called it a day until chore time and returned to the house.

Molasses Hill, Mount Tom, Woody Hill and the section round-about was then, and for that matter still is a pretty remote section, peopled by old families – the Barbers, Gardners, Lillibridges, Vaughns, etc. – quite competent to manage their own affairs and coming in contact with officialdom only at tax time and financial town meetings. There is no testimony recoverable today that Sidehill Sammy went to any pains to report his find to the police.

He inclined instead to keep the discovery to himself for the moment until it became clear what he should do. He cleaned up the old bones of accumulated muck and laid them up attic to dry. The saddle went into a dark corner of the barn where it could crumble in peace.

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Then Mr. Barber began making discreet inquires, eliciting finally what he believed was the true explanation of the skeleton and saddle. That is the story he told his children and theirs, until it came to our ears from his great grandson.

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A peddler, oldish, sociable, well-liked, made periodical tours along the Ten Rod, carrying in his saddle bags an assortment of all the odds and ends farm women who almost never got to stores were likely to want. That was the golden age of peddlers. Shops were few and far away when most needed.

So there was an army of peddlers, each with his own route along which he was well known, stopping over night at whichever house darkness caught him, and paying generously for board and lodging by bringing in news from the outside world. He was the farm wife’s only contact, and she valued him accordingly.

This peddler who worked the Ten Rod Road route, Mr. Barber learned – his name has been lost in the years – had been seen selling his trade. Somebody happened to be watching even when he reached the little gray house at the top of Molasses Hill. But beyond there he never was seen again.

On the evening of the day the peddler called a neighbor happened in at the house, coming of course via the kitchen door. The housewife was sitting in her Boston rocker crying. The farmer himself was cleaning up the kitchen, on the floor of which a suspicious red spot still showed. There was an uncomfortable atmosphere around the place, to put it at its mildest, and the caller, by way of setting his host and hostess at ease, remarked: “What you been a-doin’ – a-murderin’?”

He really did think the old man had been killing a chicken in the kitchen, but no explanation came. Presently, finding a complete lack of sociability, he took himself off and gave the matter no more thought.

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Nor did anybody else. The old man and woman who lived there sold the place to Samuel Barber, moved away and presumably were dead when the skeleton was dug out of the muck pit.

It was in Squire Edward Barber’s time that four little girls were playing in the attic of the house on Molasses Hill. One was Joanie Barber, one was the little Bliven girl from Woody Hill (the house the Mount Tom Club has now) and a couple more. In a far corner of the attic they found a collection of thoroughly dried human bones.

“Oh, let’s have a funeral,” said one of the girls. The others agreed that would be plenty of fun. So they gathered the bones all together, dug a hole out by the orchard, and solemnly laid them at rest, with such bits of the committal service as they could remember. And that’s the last of the Molasses Hill peddler.

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At the Empire Theatre on Westminster street a good many years ago, when Spitz & Nathanson ran it, we saw a ham actor play “The Bells,” which was one of Sir Henry Irving’s repertoire. The plot parallels the Molasses Hill incident perfectly up to a point; the real stuffing of “The Bells” is that the murderer of the peddler was haunted by his victim, who in the stage version had a disconcerting trick of revealing his distorted features against a perfectly black background so you would have sworn this ghost was nothing but face. It got the murderer down finally.

There’s nothing to show that the Molasses Hill peddler ever did any haunting. Perhaps he was glad of the rest, because peddling was a hard life. It is likely a good many peddlers disappeared through murder, the case of Carter and Jackson, with a monument beside the Tower Hill Road marking the spot where Jackson was finished off, is the classic one in Rhode Island. It’s been told a good many times, however; that of the peddler along the Ten Rod had never seen print before.

Original story by J. Earl Clauson, originally published in the Providence Evening Bulletin under the heading "These Plantations". Later collected into a book of the same name that was printed in 1937 by The Roger Williams Press (E. A. Johnson Company).