Things my yard told me: Once there was a little brook flowing through this land. At the end of that brook was the point where it flowed into the Chenango River. Across the Chenango in 1870 there was the Halbert Brother's store. And one August nite we find two young clerks, Merrick, and Burrows, asleep together as usual in the same bed. They hear NOTHING as three burglars use hand drills to bore three holes in a back door so as to reach through and unlatch three latches. They clear out three parcels of valuable silks, and keep rummaging for more...when the clerks are awakened. They put up a hell of a fight. Burrows used a piece of iron to attack the burglars,,,Merrick resorts to fisticuffs. The eldest burglar clomps up the stairs and shoots young Merrick point blank in the back of the head to stop the commotion. Burrows keeps fighting. The burglars make their retreat and attempt to swim across the Chenango River. Only the eldest makes it. The younger accomplices are wounded. They drown. Their bodies are photographed on the banks of the river, and those photographs establish the legal precedent for the use of photographs in COURT. The elder burglar is Mr. Edward Rulloff. A brilliant rogue, he had earlier in life been sentenced to hang for killing his wife and daughter, but he got off on a technicality..after much other drama...including a jailbreak which cost him a big toe. Rulloff was caught in the general alarm given after the robbery, but he bullshitted the pickets on the bridge until a train came and he jumped to the other side at last minute and disappeared by the time they could cross. He later hid in an outhouse of the farmer Livingstone. Chauncey Livingstone heard a commotion but knew not what it was about, he sat on his back porch with a shot gun for HOURS thinking he was staving off people trying to steal his fruit. Finally, it dawned on him that it LOOKED LIKE there was someone in his out house which had the door wide open. He ruminated longer and adjusted his eyes. Finally, he walked over there, and he found RULOFF crouched in the outhouse. He cornered him and set of the alarm that sent Ruloff to both Fame and the Gallows. Skipping MUCH, let me just say..........RULOFF is buried on a hill above my house. The cemetery he rests in is one of four on the route of the Trout Brook/Creek which was buried in the mid 1920's and runs under my yard in a storm drain. His accomplices died near the outlet of Trout Creek, which was free flowing then, and he lived to climb up the bank near there, only to be buried near what is now the "infall". His head was cut off and his brain is on display to this very day at Cornell. His hanging in Binghamton brought in 6600 people on the trains, when this town had a population of 12,000. No lesser light that Mark Twain, argued for the commutation of his death sentence, and it helped with a STAY, but, in the end he was hanged in Binghamton in 1871. For over 30 years there has been a popular restaurant...more: bar...just off the Cornell campus in Ithaca named RULOFFS, and their website still claims that Ruloff was the last person hanged in New York. I will bring them the notices of a Mister Meineke who was hanged six years later in Binghamton when I get up that way next. This is all just rushed rambling ..a preview, if you will...as the work is painstaking. When they hung Ruloff they didn't give him a trap door....they pulled him UP. I am gonna do that too. And for the last time........when you see some JACKASS say that I am "obsessed with a storm drain"...please...know thee well, that THIS is one amongst many stories this drain under my yard has yielded..and I remind you...Ruloff is buried at the top of the system, headless, and he swam to a nite of safety right at the bottom of the system after his crime. Telling YOU this stuff, HERE right NOW, is not of much WORTH to me.........except in THAT,...there are so many other things along the way....I am just a guy who bought a house, had a manhole in the yard that flooded, and found this all out...it is not my FAULT if others want to compete about bigger better storm drains. I see the pics...i lust after them too,,,,but I am doing THIS. Make that OK.
[last edit 3/4/2009 2:18 AM by jtcolfax - edited 1 times]
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