|
According to Ella Mayhew Maxfield (b. 1866), on
December 30, 1903 she attended the
ill fated Mr. Bluebeard
matinee at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago with an unnamed friend.
She was badly injured during the fire and suffered from amnesia. During her
fourteen-month hospitalization, said Ella, her husband Herbert
Maxfield (b. 1868), thinking her an Iroquois Theater fatality,
mistakenly buried the body of another woman,
a stranger, as being Ella. Upon recovering her
memory, Ella saw that Herman had remarried and that
her grown daughter, Luella (b. 1880), was making a
new life. Ella decided it would be best if she
did the same. She moved away without
contacting them and adopted her
maiden name, Mayhew. The reborn Ella Mayhew
became a Red Cross nurse, branch organizer and traveling
lecturer in St. Paul, Minnesota, selling Christmas stamps
to raise funds to fight tuberculosis.
Nine years later, upon learning of an inheritance
from the estate of her parents, Thomas and Betsy
Mayhew of Empire, Wisconsin, Ella decided to reveal
her true identity so as to claim her one-third share of the
estate. She telephoned her daughter Luella to request her
help in proving her identity.
"Hi, there, this is Mom. You know, the one
that died?"
Daughter Luella had married a newspaper man, Sidney
Burrows (b. 1878). Sid printed the story in the
Wisconsin Valley Leader* and it went
viral, or as viral as news stories got in 1912.
Newspapers dramatized the story by saying Ella had
adopted an "assumed name" and portrayed Ella as a
tragic victim who had given up her happy life for
the sake of her husband and daughter.
|
 |
Ella and Luella were traumatized by all the attention and refused to give
interviews. An enterprising reporter tracked down husband Herman to learn
how he felt about his late wife coming back to life.
Not so good, it seemed.
Herman says reports of Ella's death were exaggerated.
According to Herman (who worked as an oiler,
presumably at the stock yards), Ella had abandoned
him in 1902, a year before the Iroquois fire,
after thirteen years of marriage. In 1904 he
obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion. He was
happy to show the divorce decree to anyone who
wanted to see it. The last time he saw Ella was the
day she left him. He denied having buried anyone from the
Iroquois fire.
Though Ella refused to be interviewed on the record,
she protested that a sister in Fond du Lac,
Mrs. A. F. Olmstead, could substantiate her story.
Reporters went looking for information (as did yours
truly) and the name Ella Maxfield was nowhere to be
found among the Iroquois dead or injured.
Ella doesn't look good in this Swiss cheese story.
I found reference online to an Ella Mayhew and Herman
Maxfield marrying in 1889 in Chicago, but a genealogy
report gives Luella's birth date as 1880 which would
have her being born nine years before Ella and Herman
married. Not impossible but not likely in
Edwardian times. More likely that Herman was
Ella's second husband.
|
