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martindlHeres some info on the gallows from an antique's publication. I can't post the link becuase its a subscription service, so apologies for the long post. Its a little less fluffy than the Mastro description.
UNION, Ill. – For sale to the highest bidder: A working gallows. Slightly used (only 86 times during the past 120 years). Good condition, accommodates five felons; fully functioning platform trap door. Great provenance; a star of the stage and screen.
"There’s lots of stories behind it," said Brian Marren, vice president of Mastro Auctions, who is handling the sales of the gallows. "We’ve had a lot of interest in it. We’ve had several historical societies express interest in bidding on this piece. It’s definitely one of a kind."
Bidding on the gallows will begin Nov. 20 on Mastro’s website, and close on Dec. 6. The opening bid will be $5,000.
Marren, and others at Mastro, are reluctant to place an estimate on the gallows. From experience, he knows that such one-of-a-kind items can be unpredictable. In the past, Mastro has sold the bus Rosa Parks rode on when she refused to stand for segregation for nearly $500,000, or the famous Steve Bartman foul ball that changed the course of the Chicago Cubs 2002 National League playoffs for $100,000.
The gallows, like the Rosa Parks bus and the Bartman ball, has a provenance, according to Marren, a Chicago native and something of a local historian.
The immense structure, with its sturdy crossbar and trapdoor platform, was originally built to accommodate four men convicted in the 1886 bombing of Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The Haymarket Riot began as a labor strike by employees at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. advocating an eight-hour workday. A few picketers were shot by the police after a fight had broken out, and a retaliatory bomb explosion succeeded in killing several police officers.
Although the bomb-thrower was never identified, eight labor activists were convicted of the crime, seven of whom were sentenced to execution. Four of those lost their lives in November 1887 to the Cook County gallows.
For the next 40 years the gallows would remain in use at the old Cook County Jail.
In 1927, the state legislature would elect to change the method of execution from hanging to the electric chair. The suddenly obsolete gallows might have been reduced to kindling if it wasn’t for a fugitive – "Terrible Tommy" O’Connor who had been sentenced to hang in 1921 for killing police officer, Chicago Detective Sergeant Patrick "Paddy" O’Neill.
Subsequently, O’Connor was sentenced to death by Judge Kickham Scanlan the same year. But word on the street was "Tommy O’Connor will never hang," and as the date of execution crept ever closer the deputies at the Cook County Jail grew edgy and tense, according to one contemporary account.
Four days before he was scheduled to hang on the Cook County gallows, O’Connor - a convicted robber, murderer, cop-killer and death row inmate – added a new title to his criminal resume – prison escapee.
The condemned man and four criminal associates overpowered a guard after an obliging prison cook received a pistol from an O’Connor accomplice outside the walls and smuggled it into Tommy’s death row cell. O’Connor quickly commandeered a get-away car and disappeared.
County officials, embarrassed and vengeful of allowing a cop killer to escape, neatly disassembled the wooden gallows and stored the structure in the Criminal Courts Building for more than 55 years, just in case Terrible Tommy should ever be apprehended.
It never happened. O’Connor was never seen again.
Speculation has it that O’Connor returned to his native Ireland and fought in the Black and Tan wars, Marren said, or that he became a Trappist monk. In any event, O’Connor’s infamous escape became the basis for a Broadway play The Front Page (1928) and three movie films, His Girl Friday (1940), The Front Page (1931 and 1974) and Switching Channels (1988).
By 1977, when all hopes of finding Terrible Tommy O’Connor (who would have been 87 years old) had been extinguished, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Richard Fitzgerald ordered that the gallows be officially retired and sold to the highest bidder. A Wild West museum in Union, Ill., purchased the gallows and integrated it into Donley’s Wild West Town, a tourist theme park and steakhouse.
But, as the Wild West town begins to cater more to children, owner Mike Donley, says its time for the gallows to go. Deciding that it no longer fits into the tourist park’s image, he commissioned Mastro to sell the grim ghostly gallows at auction.
Accompanying the lot across the auction block will be a spreadsheet listing those individuals who lost their lives on the gallows, numerous printouts describing the Haymarket riot, and the storied lives of Terrible Tommy O’Connor and his fellow death row notables.
11-15-2006, 11:22 AM
Careful friends, this Nodgrass is NO good!
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