1906 prison break stirred racist reaction

One late November afternoon a century ago, an inmate with the unlikely name of Minot St. Clair Francis bolted from a work detail, sprinted across the Thomaston State Prison yard, scaled the wall and disappeared into the darkness of nearby woods, bullets whistling about him. During the next two weeks, his case turned into the state’s most celebrated manhunt, both Bangor newspapers agreed.

Journalistic accounts of the ensuing events, however, degenerated into a frustrating stew of gossip, speculation, bravado and hysteria. There was little or no agreement on whether Francis was armed or unarmed, dangerous or merely desperate, tall or short, burly or fat, headed for Bath or Bangor and so on. Revelations that he was a poet and an artist contradicted the prevailing image of a hardened thug. Some people started to root for him and against his inept pursuers.

The newspapers seemed to agree on only two things. One was that Francis was a lot smarter than the hundreds of people who were trying to find him. The second was the color of his skin. Francis was an African-American. He was referred to repeatedly as a “Negro [or colored] desperado” in virtually every story that appeared. There were some doubts, however, about his exact DNA makeup, it being finally explained that he was a mulatto who could pass for a white man at a distance with his hat pulled low on his forehead.

While Francis was on the loose, a dark-skinned person was apt to be accosted on a downtown street or shot at in the woods by someone hoping to gain the $200 in reward money. The Commercial ran this headline on Nov. 20, 1906: “Colored Man Seen on Washington Street Tuesday … All Strangers of Dusky Hue Are Closely Scrutinized These Days – Officials Are Watchful.” Other blacks, Indians, at least one Italian – even the “dark-skinned” sheriff of Waldo County – had narrow escapes with overzealous pursuers. One pursuer filed a lawsuit against the prison warden after he was accidentally shot in Rockport during the chase.

When Francis escaped, fear gripped the countryside because of his imagined savagery. “Every Farmer from Penobscot to Plymouth on Guard,” announced a Commercial headline on Nov. 23, 1906. The story said, “Through the dark hours Thursday many a clump of bushes down in Newburgh concealed a youth wrapped in his greatcoat and armed with rifle or shotgun. … Every shadow was to them a Negro armed to the teeth, with bloodshot eyes and haggard face, desperate, determined, ready to kill any who should bar his path.”

Minot St. Clair Francis, 26, and another man had been sentenced to the Maine State Prison in February for shooting and wounding a night watchman while breaking into the post office at Red Beach, a village in Calais. Francis was already on the lam from a Massachusetts correctional facility when arrested for the Red Beach crime. He had previous convictions for larceny and assault.

In the first few days after his escape, newspaper accounts had him going in two directions at once – either toward Bath, where a militia company turned out to comb the banks of the Kennebec River, or toward Bangor. Newspapers in Waterville, Lewiston and St. John New Brunswick, Canada, also ran stories claiming people had spotted him near those locales as well. Cornered in Rockport and again a week later in Monroe, he eluded his pursuers, who often had no idea where he was. Many crimes were attributed to him from stealing horses to pilfering a pot of beans in Frankfort.

Jokes, some racist, began appearing in the newspapers. One Bangor wit, tobacconist A. Lewis, ran a large pipe advertisement in the Bangor Daily News, suggesting Francis might be hiding in his cellar at 26 State Street: “Mr. Minot St. Clair Francis, late of Thomaston, … is at this minute in Bath, Rockland, Damariscotta, Arrowsic, Bethel, Lincolnville, Veazie, Razorville and Oshkosh, Wis., and some other places.”

The big break in the case came after Francis stole a team in Prospect and drove up the road through downtown Bangor in the middle of the night. He spent the next day in a shed. Then he set out toward Glenburn on foot where he holed up in a hay barn belonging to A.L. Grover on Nov. 28. Several farm workers discovered him. Mrs. Grover prepared him breakfast, sending her son to a nearby telegraph office to notify authorities in Bangor. Admitting who he was, Francis appeared to have given up.

As he was being arrested in the hayloft without resistance, he “looked at his captives and cried, with a note of agony and despair in his voice: ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you shoot me before this,'” wrote a Bangor Daily News reporter. Francis had no gun. In fact, the convict was freezing and starving and his feet were badly injured. After witnessing the event, the disgusted reporter wrote contemptuously, “It was a victory of the powerful forces of the law – many well-armed, strong and well-fed men, over a hunted convict, half-starved, unarmed, penniless and scarcely able to stand…”

As interest in the case waned, some newsmen wanted to set the record straight. “… the most vivid impression remaining in the public mind is that never in the history of grand-stand playing and all around four-flushing was there a more ridiculous performance than the attempt of several of the pursuing army to get reputations … by representing Francis to be a second Jesse James,” wrote a reporter for the BDN on Dec. 1. An editorial writer on the same day went a step further: “Instead of being ‘a Negro fiend,’ such as certain newspapers have pictured him to be, Francis seems to have treated the country … with marked consideration. For these acts of restraint he should receive due credit.”

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net