From twisted tale of greed and murder sprang a park
My friend Juan Palomo, a columnist in years past for the late Houston Post, lives across the street from a Midtown park that’s within a couple of blocks of the constant drone of U.S. 59. Juan is a calm, understated sort, and so is the park. A green square block in the midst of condos and townhouses that have sprouted like toadstools in recent years, it’s one of my favorites in the city.
I never thought about the name, Elizabeth Baldwin Park, until I started investigating Charlotte Allen, the “Mother of Houston” (see last week’s column), and found a 2008 article in the Houston Business Journal by local historian Betty T. Chapman.
In the article and in a conversation Chapman and I had earlier this week, she recalled not only the park’s connection to early Houston but also to a web of intrigue, including murder, that’s as tangled as the limbs of massive live oaks that grace the park.
It’s named for Charlotte Allen’s niece. Shortly after Charlotte Allen arrived in Houston with her husband Augustus Chapman Allen and her brother-inlaw John Kirby Allen, her brother Horace followed her to the raucous hamlet on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. Horace Baldwin, like his sister, became an integral part of the community and was elected mayor in 1844.
Baldwin had two daughters: Charlotte, who married Frederick A. Rice, and Elizabeth, who married James Brown, “who seems to have been unremarkable in every way,” a biographer of William Marsh Rice noted. (Rice would become Elizabeth Baldwin Brown’s second husband.)
‘A brilliant woman’
Elizabeth — she liked to be called Libbie — apparently was more colorful than husband Brown. Capt. James A. Baker Jr. described her as “a brilliant woman, unusually handsome, tall and straight as an Indian. Nature favored her with wondrous eyes and a handsome suit of hair. … She loved people and was always happiest when doing for others.” That was Baker’s public description. In private he said “she was fond of society and fond of being in the public eye.” Others described her as “imperious.”
Libbie’s husband died in 1866, and the next year she married Rice, the brother of her brother-inlaw and one of the richest men in Texas. He was 51, she 39. A ship owner, cotton planter, sugar dealer, rancher, hotel owner and banker, Rice had a knack for seeing opportunity and making the most of it. (So did Libbie, apparently.)
For the next 25 years or so, William and Libbie divided their time between Houston and New York City, and at a country estate they owned in New Jersey. They usually wintered in Houston, in a suite at the Capitol Hotel (forerunner to the Rice Hotel). In April 1896, Libbie suffered a severe stroke that left her right side paralyzed and affected her speech. William brought her to Houston for treatment.
She may have been sick but not too sick to craft a lengthy new will in June at the urging of a friend whose husband was a lawyer.
Under the new will, she directed that $250,000 be set aside to endow a home for “indigent gentlewomen” in Baldwinsville, N.Y. (her birthplace), to be known as the “Elizabeth Baldwin Home”; another $100,000 for the Elizabeth Baldwin Park in Houston; $15,000 for the Wm. M. Rice Library Building, designated specifically for the purchase of portraits of “my beloved husband William M. Rice and my aunt, Charlotte Allen.”
Rice left out of will
Left out of the 1896 will was any mention of a free co-educational institution that her “beloved husband” had long envisioned for Houston. He had formalized his plan for the Wm. M. Rice Institute of Literature, Science and Art five years earlier.
Elizabeth Baldwin Brown Rice died in July 1896. You can imagine the aging millionaire’s dismay when he discovered that her executor had filed a secret will for probate. Baker, his attorney, went to work to get it overturned on grounds that Libbie was not mentally capable of knowing what she was doing at the time of its writing.
As the case made its way through the courts, the executor of Libbie’s will hired a New York attorney named Albert Patrick to assist in validating that the Rices were Texas residents, not New York, which would empower her, under community property laws, to dispose of one-half of the vast wealth her husband had acquired during their marriage.
Patrick, a Grimes County native in his mid-30s, had practiced law in Houston but had fled to New York to avoid disbarment after being accused of taking fees from both sides in a divorce case. In New York, according to Rice biographer Andrew Forest Muir, he craved money and social position.
Greedy conspirators
Rice at the time was living in the swank Berkshire Apartments on Madison Avenue in New York, where he was assisted by a young man named Charles Jones. A son of Harris County tenant farmers, Jones was the old gent’s chamber maid, cook, secretary and valet. Although growing a bit eccentric with age, Rice at 84 was in relatively good health, his mind still sharp.
Jones, 21 when he moved to New York to work for Rice, needed money. “Not surprisingly, in view of his youth and good looks, he had considerable success with the ladies, and this became expensive,” Muir writes.
Patrick concocted a scheme to divert Rice’s fortune to himself, a scheme that required Jones’ help. In early August 1898, the lawyer had a question for the young valet: “Don’t you think Rice is living too long for our interests?”
Jones agreed, and on the night of Sept. 23, 1900, he took a small sponge Rice used to clean his clothes, placed it inside a towel and pinned it into the shape of a cone, as Patrick had shown him how to do. He poured about two ounces of chloroform into the sponge before clamping it down on the old man’s face while he slept. Rice never awoke.
‘It’s a nice park’
The tangled webs of intrigue got sorted out eventually. On the 12th anniversary of Rice’s death, Sept. 23, 1912, Rice Institute opened its doors. That same year, Albert Patrick, sentenced to death for murder, was granted a pardon by the governor of New York. The alleged mastermind of Rice’s demise headed west to Oklahoma, where he practiced law without a license and sold cars and air conditioners. He died in 1940.
Charlie Jones was allowed to return to Texas with a brother, where he disappeared from sight until 1954, when he shot himself in his brother’s Baytown home.
Ellizabeth Baldwin Rice got her park. In 1905, the sum of $9,250 in her estate was used to purchase the 4.88 acres in what’s now Midtown, as directed in her will. The city of Houston bought the acreage from her estate for $10.
“Kids from the high school around the corner play over here, people walk their dogs, lovers have their lunchtime trysts — it’s a nice park,” my friend Juan told me the other day. It is, indeed.