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NYCHS
excerpts from Cindy Amrhein & Ellen Lea Bachorski's
Bread & Butter: The Murders of Polly Frisch.
and Ellen Lea Bachorski have put together a well- researched, richly- detailed, cogently- reasoned history of Polly Frisch, indicted in the 1856 and 1857 arsenic-involved deaths of her first husband Henry Hoag and two of the Hoag children. The inquests and Polly's initial incarceration took place in the autumn of 1857 after the suspicious death of her 2-year-old daughter Eliza Jane. Held in Genesee County Jail before, during and after her five trials, Polly was scheduled to be hanged there but her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She served 35 years -- first at Sing Sing and later at Kings County Penitentiary. While an inmate at the Brooklyn prison, she was pardoned in 1892 and released at age 68. The 222-page 8.25-x-5.25 book includes 16 photos and three maps to convey the murder and trial settings: the pre-Civil War rural Genesee County communities of Batavia and Alabama in northwestern New York not too far from Niagara Falls, Lake Ontario and Canada. NYCHS presents selected passages from most but not all the book's chapters as well as cropped and/or reduced size versions of its photos and maps. Cindy Amrhein is the Alabama Town Historian and web-master for the Association of Public Historians of New York State. Ellen Lea Bachorski is president of the Town of Alabama Historical Society and the Alabama Town Museum director. NYCHS is pleased and honored that they have permitted our site to present this sampling of their interesting and informative narrative. For more about their book, visit www. rootsweb. com/ ~nycalaba/ polly.html [all one word, no spaces] Return to navigation buttons above.
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