1) A brothel.
2) A bath or bathing house.
3) A prison or slave quarters in the Ottoman Empire.
Big Ed Sanford’s Bagnio was not a bathhouse. And it was far from the Ottoman Empire. Big Ed's Bagnio was on Evans Street in Oshkosh and embodied the first definition of the word.
Ed, Big Ed, Eddie… She wasn’t born that way. These were names she took up after she moved to Oshkosh. When she was making a new identity for herself. When she was burying her past. Eddie didn’t just bury the past. She danced all over its grave.
Big Ed began life as Sarah Dieter, born in 1861 on an isolated farm in Waupaca County. Sarah was 17-months old when her father left to fight in the Civil War. He was discharged four months later after he came down with pneumonia. The Army shipped Private Dieter back to Wisconsin. He got home just in time to die. He left his wife, Emeline, little Sarah, and 10-month-old twin daughters named Blanche and Geneva. Emeline sold the farm and moved them to nearby Auroraville where her husband was buried.
When Sarah was 14, she was made pregnant by her 19-year-old cousin named John Shannon. On Christmas Day 1875, Sarah gave birth to their child, a boy she named Dewey. Dewey was the maiden name of Sarah’s mother and John Shannon’s mother. Dewey may have never known the true circumstance of his birth. All his life he told people he was born in Oshkosh.
Sarah Dieter married John Shannon in the spring of 1878. The union was merely a formality. Nonetheless, Sarah had a new name. She was Mrs. Sarah Shannon now and about to leave dreary Auroraville behind her.
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| Old Auroraville, in southeast Waushara County. |
Sarah Shannon, her baby Dewey, her mother Emeline, and her twin sisters moved to Oshkosh in early 1879. Sarah lived apart from her family. She boarded with a family of strangers in a cramped home on Elmwood Avenue, behind Kaehler’s Brewery. Baby Dewey and the others lived about a mile away on Fulton Avenue. Sarah got a job making shingles at J.L Clark’s mill on the river. It was a miserable job paying starvation wages. She endured it for about a year. Then she disappeared.
From 1881 through 1883, Sarah went without leaving a trace. The only hint of her whereabouts were the uncollected letters addressed to her at the Oshkosh Post Office. This is when she remade herself. When she reappeared, she was Ed Sanford. Or Big Ed, or Eddie, depending on the day. She had shaved two years off her age and had established herself in the Oshkosh underworld as a prostitute. Big Ed was a big success. On March 1, 1884, she bought a home on credit near the corner of Evans and Parkway and made it her bagnio. Big Ed became infamous there.
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| The Evans Street neighborhood, 1877. The red square indicates the location of Big Ed’s Bagnio. |
This section of the old Fourth Ward was the outskirts of town in 1884. Evans Street was a dirt road that cut through a sparse neighborhood and dead-ended at Irving. Lots of open land. This was about to change, but it was a good place for a bagnio when Big Ed arrived there. Her site was secluded enough to afford privacy yet easy to reach from the business district and downtown saloons.
Big Ed’s Bagnio was one of at least eight houses of prostitution operating in Oshkosh in 1885. A healthy number for a city with a population of 20,000. Eddie’s was the second brothel on Evans Street. The first was launched by Annie Jones almost two years earlier. The Jones house trafficked in young runaways and was a constant source of scandal. Despite the odium, Jones endured. Her bagnio survived until about 1908.
Big Ed was less brazen, more cunning. She was arrested so often that she must have become numb to the routine. But she never played it that way. The other sporting women tended to treat their court dates like a farce. When asked to state their name, they'd respond with something suggestive like Kitty Reddy or Augusta Prong. Big Ed was different. An 1886 appearance before Judge Charles Oellerich was characteristic. “Eddie Sanford, you are charged with keeping a house of ill-fame,” the judge scolded her. Big Ed responded by bursting into tears.
“I don’t see why my house should always be picked out for an example,” Big Ed pouted and wiped away tears. “I am sure we are just as quiet and orderly as can be. There won’t be any sporting women in town tonight. They are all leaving now so they won’t have to pay any fines. I don’t care anyway, but I don’t think it's fair to always pick on me.” A trio of her fellow sporting women were also in court that morning. They looked on in amusement as Big Ed reached into her stocking, produced a roll of bills, and peeled off her fine: $28.25 (about $950 in today’s money).
The sensitivity wasn’t entirely an act. Big Ed was haunted by her infamy. In the summer of 1885, she attempted an escape with an overdose of morphine. The druggist assured her that the pills were “sufficient to send a person out of this world.” Not quite. But it took her more than a week to recover her faculties. While she languished, her notoriety grew. Stories circulated that she’d been jilted by a young man she’d lavished money upon. Eddie later denied the rumors. She said the rash deed was triggered by a cocktail of poor health, a fit of the blues, and her desire to quit the life she’d been living. Big Ed’s dark night of the soul passed. And she went right back to work.
Big Ed’s twin sisters, Blanche and Geneva, followed their sister into the sex trade. Whatever modesty Big Ed possessed was entirely lacking in Blanche and Geneva. They were known professionally as “The Twins.” They dressed exactly alike and operated in tandem as Birdie and Delia Fox. Their manager was a degenerate pimp named Richard Eighme. Birdie (Blanche) eventually married him.
In July 1886, The Twins bought a seven-room, two-story home at the southwest corner of Irving and Evans, just down the block from Big Ed. They were going to turn it into a brothel. The neighbors flew into a moral panic after getting wind of the plan. They formed a neighborhood committee and quickly succeeded at driving The Twins out. The property was sold back to the original owner, and The Twins split for the south side, where they established an odious fleshpot known as The Cottage.
Fresh off their success at expelling The Twins, the neighborhood committee went after Big Ed. The group circulated a petition and then brought it to the common council demanding the eradication of whoredom on Evans Street. Big Ed toyed with them. She circulated a counter-petition that collected more signatures than the petition attached to the complaint filed against her. The neighborhood committee got even less cooperation from the city attorney. He dismissed their complaint.
Eddie’s relationship with local officials tended to be cozy like that. The police were often tolerant, though they drew the line at her flat refusal to take out a license for the bottled beer she sold to her visitors. She knew how to curry favor with the cops when required. In late 1886, she put them on the path of a pair of safe crackers who’d been committing robberies across the state. While visiting Big Ed’s Bagnio, they talked up their exploits. After they left, Big Ed tipped off the local police. The duo was captured shortly thereafter. The cops repaid the favor. Big Ed went more than a year before her next arrest.
By 1887, Big Ed had arrived at a place rarely reached by women in her line of work. She ran a respectable house catering to the venereal appetites of temperate people. In three years, she had managed to pay off the property that was home to her bagnio. The neighborhood was filling in, but her new neighbors seemed to more or less accept her. And aside from the arrests for selling liquor without a license, the police were tending to look the other way. The Daily Northwestern crowned her “one of the queens of the demi-monde” and a “woman of considerable education.” That was easy to believe, but in fact, she had almost no education.
Beyond the house on Evans Street, though, her life was always up for grabs. Big Ed’s son, Dewey, was being raised by her mother, Emeline Dieter, in a home on Jefferson Street. Her sisters Blanche and Geneva often resided there as well. As the Fox Twins, they were a constant on the police blotter. Their pimp, Richard Eighme, was usually there with them. Emeline Dieter had tried to drive Eighme away from her daughters. She attacked him with a cane in 1888. Eighme retaliated by punching the 59-year-old woman in the face. He got 20 days in jail. It went on and on like this.
In 1889, Dewey was 14 and going to public school. He may have not yet known that Big Ed was his mother. Or maybe he didn’t want to acknowledge that. Dewey was using Dieter as his last name when his mother passed away.
Big Ed died unexpectedly from an undiagnosed heart ailment on Sunday, March 10, 1889. She was nine days shy of her 28th birthday. There was talk of sending her remains to Auroraville to be buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery next to the father she never knew. That did not come to pass. She was buried in Riverside Cemetery on March 12. A single rose is etched onto each side of her obelisk-shaped marker. Engraved on the face of the marker, under the name Sarah Shannon, is her Big Ed age: 26 Yrs.
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| Riverside Cemetery. |
Big Ed’s Bagnio wasn’t closed for long. It appears The Twins moved in almost immediately after her death. They still lacked the class of their older sister. Six months after the death of Big Ed, her former neighbors on Evans Street were back on the warpath. They went to the city council again for help, claiming the home had become the frequent scene of “midnight orgies.” This time, they got action. The Twins were again driven away from Evans Street.
Big Ed’s mother, Emeline, was appointed caretaker of her estate. The court also gave her guardianship of Dewey. Emeline and Dewey moved into the home on Evans and remained there until 1899. There was no more trouble. Dewey grew into adulthood in the house that had been his mother's brothel.
In 1896, a church was built next door to the home. The lurid history of that corner had already faded away.
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| The dedication of St. Paul's Evangelical Church, October 18, 1896. The church was remodeled in 1908. |
Blanche and Geneva put The Twins to rest. Geneva married a boxer named George Finney and moved away. Blanche never left the sporting life. In 1898, she was shot to death by a jealous lover, a florist named George Miles. The murder occurred at the home on Jefferson Street. Blanche was 37 and still known to all as Birdie Fox. Her killer went free.
After Blanche’s death, mother Emeline and Dewey moved to Kenosha, where they lived with Geneva and her husband, the boxer. Emeline died there in 1908. Dewey, whom she had raised, was out of the picture by then and using Shannon as his last name. Dewey was married in 1910. He and his wife never had children. Dewey Shannon died in Kenosha in 1961 at the age of 85.
At the northwest corner of Evans and Parkway, everything is, of course, very different. Solutions Recovery, an addiction rehab group, purchased the former St. Paul's Church and its parish buildings in 2007. The church was left to rot and, in 2015, was torn down. In 2023, Solutions Recovery built an addition to its main facility, which sits directly atop the spot where Big Ed’s Bagnio once stood. The past can be such a curious prelude.
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| Solutions Recovery |
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