Big Ed's House of Pleasure

Bagnio | bäˌnyō

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Solutions Recovery

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Mamie Seymour and the North-Side Wildlife

Saturday, March 31, 1894
Chief Rudolph Weisbrod left the station and drove his buggy up to the north side. He was almost to the city limit when he stopped, tethered his horse, and entered the house where Mamie Seymour lived. Weisbrod arrested her for selling beer without a license. Then he went to the house next door and arrested Frankie Harris on the same charge. Weisbrod could have gotten both women for crimes more severe than selling beer. But that was not the point.

Seymour and Harris went before Judge James Hamilton Merrill. The Judge was a Civil-War vet and had long been an influential figure in Oshkosh (Merrill Middle School still bears his name). Judge Merrill knew what was being asked of him. He gave both women a meager, $1.50 fine. Seymour and Harris paid up and went back to the north side. Nobody took this shit seriously.

James Hamilton Merrill

Mamie Seymour and Frankie Harris lived on the east side of Ashland Street just south of Murdock. It was the north end of the old Fourth Ward. If you crossed over Murdock you were into Nordheim. This was the outskirts of town where city laws were treated more like suggestions. What thrived there in the 1890s is all gone. It's now another of those quiet Oshkosh neighborhoods that betrays none of its secrets. This was a neighborhood that once spawned scores of secrets.

The southeast corner of Murdock and Ashland streets.

During the 1890s there was a redlight district along the east side of Ashland Street (named Fremont Street until 1896). There were at least five brothels doing business there. They were all conducted by women. There was the house of Anna Adams, there was Nellie Franklin’s, Frankie Howard’s, Frankie Patterson’s, and near the north end of the street was Mamie Seymour’s. Mamie’s place was the best known. Mamie was a local celebrity; the belle of the Oshkosh underworld.

She was born Mamie Smith in Michigan in the summer of 1864. Her parents were Irish immigrants. Her early life remains an enigma. By 1885 she was living in Oshkosh. About this same time she began selling sex and using Seymour as her last name. She had arrived in the right town at just the right time. Rudolph J. Weisbrod was about to be named Oshkosh’s chief of police. The new chief took a broad-minded approach in dealing with the city's professional merchants of vice.

Rudolph Joseph Weisbrod

Mamie Seymour had her place on Ashland Street up and running by 1890. The first brothels along that strip had opened about five years earlier. They were referred to as resorts. That was a more fitting label. After all, flesh wasn’t the only thing on the menu. Mamie’s resort was part saloon, part restaurant, part music lounge. Of course, none of it was licensed or legal. But it was more or less accepted.

Mamie usually had five or six other women working out of her place. She also employed a maid, a cook, and a hack driver to taxi her around town and cart customers up from the downtown saloons. Mamie kept a piano player in residence named Philip Oberdorfer. They called Oberdorfer the Professor; an honorific frequently conferred upon whorehouse pianists.

If you could afford it, you could drink there. Mamie sold beer for 50 cents a bottle (about $16 in today's money). The price of sex ranged from $5 to $15, depending on your pleasure. Nothing there was cheap. A good paying job in Oshkosh at this time might bring home $12 a week. That wouldn’t go far at Mamie’s place. She catered to free-spending sports and wealthy hedonists.

Chief Weisbrod handled Mamie with kid gloves. He’d tag her every now and then with some menial liquor offense. It was just to show he was keeping an eye on things. "The periodical arrest of the keepers of disreputable resorts in this city took place this morning," was how the Northwestern described it after Mamie had been arrested in 1899. Once again, it was for selling beer without a license.

1887

Mamie ran an orderly resort. An anonymous Oshkosh cop told the Northwestern, "There was never a woman of her class in Oshkosh who caused them less trouble." That didn't mean there wasn't trouble. There was plenty of it. And despite her standing, Mamie and Chief Weisbrod had a falling out in the summer of 1895. Neither would say why.

Mamie was forced to vacate the house on Ashland. It was rumored she would move to an old farm owned by the Gratten family that was just over the city line in Nordheim. It never came to that. Mamie remained in Oshkosh and built a new house on the east side of Ashland Street about a half-block south of Murdock. She would run her business there for the next decade.

The red dot indicates the approximate location of Mamie's Harrison Street resort.

At the turn of the century Mamie was 35, fairly wealthy, and so well known that when she appeared at the Turner Hall fashion ball – where she was awarded first prize for best costume – the Northwestern referred to her simply by her nickname: Reddie. No other name required.

The other women working at her resort tended to be in their early or mid-20s. In polite society, they were referred to as "Inmates" or "White Slaves" as if their residency were involuntary. That was not the case. The women at Mamie's resort tended to come and go. Although there were those, like Bessie Mengel, who by the time she was 26 had been working out of Mamie's house for five years. The papers wrote of their "life of shame." That sort of knee-jerk chatter didn't count for much among the working girls.

In 1895, members of Oshkosh's Ladies Benevolent Society went to Chief Weisbrod with an allegation that one of the resorts on Ashland was holding a woman named Minnie Boyd against her will. Weisbrod told them he didn't believe it, but he sent a detective to check it out. When Boyd was interviewed she said it was a lie; that she could leave any time she cared to. Laughing, she told the detective "I'm not through sporting yet."

It wasn't all joy riding. The charged atmosphere attracted more than its share of violence. Hardly a year passed without some grim eruption. In 1898, Mamie "pounded" another woman in an alley behind an Oshkosh saloon. She pled guilty to an assault and battery charge and was fined $23.80. "Good deal of money for licking her," Mamie muttered to the clerk as she paid the fine.

The following week, a rival prostitute named Birdie Fox was shot to death by the man she loved, Oshkosh florist George Miles. Their drunken fight began after Fox discovered that Miles had been having a relationship with Mamie. Miles was charged with murder. Mamie was supposed to be the prosecution's star witness. But when she took the stand, Mamie went mum. Miles went free.

Most of the trouble was started by the customers. They'd come in drunk and bust up furniture and abuse the women. For example...

Henry Freeman, a well-known sport about town, is in the city lockup for raising a row in a sporting house. Last night he went to the resort of Mamie Seymour. He threw a beer glass at a girl known as Clara Beth. She dodged the glass and he picked up a spittoon and threw that at her. It struck her head and cut an ugly gash over her right eye… On his way to the station, he told the officer that he meant to kill her and that if she did not die he would finish the job as soon as he was free.
   – Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; July 20, 1891

Clara Beth refused to press charges. But that was the end of Freeman in Oshkosh. The next morning, Chief Weisbrod fined Freeman and ordered him to leave the city and never return.

The worst of the trouble occurred in 1903. Mamie had a full house on the Saturday night of May 9th. At 9:30 pm four more men arrived. One of the newcomers immediately pulled the phone out by the wire and smashed it. Then their guns came out and the plunder began.

There were 11 people at Mamie's place that evening. They were each stripped of whatever valuables they had on their person. "They had taken everything in sight except the heavy silverware," The Northwestern reported. "The men then proceeded to hold high carnival."

The gangsters spent the next two hours at the resort. Between the four of them, they drained 19 bottles of beer and a quart of whiskey. The Professor worked the piano all the while. Every now and then one of them would take a potshot at one of the captives to keep them in line. At least a half-dozen shots were fired. Around midnight they finally left.

Mamie had two alarms in her private room. One went directly to the police station. The other to the Phoenix Fire House on North Main. In her haste, Mamie pulled the wrong alarm. The Phoenix brigade passed by the robbers on the way to Mamie's resort.

The ringleader of the gang was a roving, 5'4" career criminal named Archie McMillan (alias Edward Gray). Oshkosh police caught up with McMillan the following day. He was found in the bed of a prostitute at a resort near the corner of 8th and South Main. Emma Graves, who ran the house, had tipped off police that her new customer might be someone they were looking for. When the cops burst in, McMillan tried going for his gun. He was immediately subdued, cuffed, and taken naked to the police station. McMillan was swiftly convicted and sentenced to 12 years in the state penitentiary at Waupun.

Archie McMillan

Newspaper reports of the crime were extensive. But it was left out that Mamie had been assaulted that night. Her assailant, James McCary, evaded police for three years. He was caught in Menasha in 1906 and brought back to Oshkosh. Along with his other crimes, McCary was charged with felonious assault “upon the person and body of one Mamie Seymour.” Mamie was gone by the time that came to pass.

Around 4 a.m. on the Saturday morning of February 10, 1905, Mamie suffered a stroke at her Harrison Street home. She died within a half-hour. Mamie Seymour was 40 years old.

Her name had been danced across the pages of the Daily Northwestern for years. Always with something sensational or depraved attached to it. The report of her death began like most other stories about her: with an obligatory mention of her presumed moral corruption. But this time, even the Northwestern gave Mamie her due.

"She was generous to a fault and even those who condemned her life admitted that she has done much for charity. No hungry person was turned away from her place and many poor families have been assisted by her. Many times in charitable work her large contribution would be given under the anonymous name of ‘A Friend’ and it was known that if one only be secured to approach her and ask for money for a charitable purpose a refusal would not result. As a consequence, she aided many people who were never aware of it."
   – Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; February 11, 1905.

The funeral was held two days later at Mamie's home. The service was conducted by Rev. E.H. Smith of Oshkosh's First Congregational Church. Mamie had kept family in Michigan unaware of her life in Oshkosh. They were told of her death by Mamie's longtime confidant John Larie, who ran the White Seal Saloon on North Main.

Mamie's estate was valued at over $10,000 (or about $325,000 in today's money). She left her brother Frank Smith $1,500. All the rest went to Larie.

John Larie

The death of Mamie Seymour coincided with another round of calls to have Oshkosh cleaned up once and for all. The clamor, as usual, came mostly from elites embarrassed by the city's reputation as a place of mythic libertinism.

"It is high time that the independent voters assert themselves and demand reform in the moral atmosphere of this city," wrote an anonymous Oshkosh business owner to the Northwestern in 1905. "When we go away from home we soon learn of the reputation that Oshkosh has. It is a state of affairs tolerated only in some of the wide-open western towns, where vice rules for twenty-four hours a day."

Most Oshkoshers would never embrace the kind of reform the gentry hoped to foist upon them. But the old guard, which had fostered the city's "wide-open" atmosphere, was giving way. Judge Merrill, who had been elected mayor of Oshkosh, died in office in 1900. His successor was the Progressive John Mulva, who in 1902 led a movement to have Rudolph Weisbrod removed as Chief of Police. The esteemed Civil-War vet fought off the challenge only to die later that year.

Rudolph Weisbrod, (left) in a photo taken during the Civil War, and Mayor John Mulva.

A new generation was coming to power. Their vision for the city wasn't expansive enough to include the likes of another Mamie Seymour. For 20 years she had flourished here in her own extravagant way. Mamie was utterly of her time. But that time had come to an end in Oshkosh.

Notes

The quotes used in this story were sourced from either Oshkosh newspapers or court reports.

I've mentioned Nordheim a couple of times here. This is a neighborhood that is now part of the City of Oshkosh. It's bounded by Libby Street to the north, Harrison Street to the east, Murdock Street to the south, and Jackson Street to the west. Nordheim was annexed by the City in the 1950s.

I first came across the name of Mamie Seymour in 2012 in an Oshkosh police ledger from 1894. Prior to this I knew nothing of her, but her name became stuck in my head. Over the years I came across her name again and again while doing research on other topics. I recently realized just how much information I had inadvertently gathered on her. This story is a bit off topic for this blog, but I felt compelled to share it here.

The 1894 police ledger.

A Colorful Past #3

And here we have the old Gambrinus Brewery of Oshkosh brought to you in living color courtesy of Oshkosh artist Paul Nickolai.

Lorenz Kuenzl's Gambrinus Brewery was located at what is now 1235-1239 Harney Avenue. This shot was taken in 1893, just before Kuenzl merged his brewery with Glatz's Union and Brewery, and Horn & Schwalm's Brooklyn Brewery. The merger gave birth to the Oshkosh Brewing Company in 1894.

Here's how that picture looked before it was colorized.

To see more of Paul Nickolai's brewery work, go HERE and HERE.

A Colorful Past #1

Oshkosh artist Paul Nickolai uses vintage photographs as his canvas. Imbuing color and texture, Nickolai creates something new from source material that's quite old.

I first came across Nickolai's work on the Oshkosh Memories Facebook page. I thought it would be interesting to see what he might do with older photos related to beer and brewing in Oshkosh. The results are coming in.

Over the coming weeks, I'm going to post a series of old photos re-imagined by Nickolai. We'll start with Oshkosh's two most well-known breweries: the Oshkosh Brewing Company and People Brewing Company. I've been posting pictures of these breweries for years. But nothing like this...

More on the Oshkosh Brewing Company.
More on Peoples Brewing Company.