Minnesota & Vermont: Strangers in a Strange Land

From Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast · 32:32

Show by Shane L. Waters, Wendy Cee, Gemma Hoskins

Season 40: America's 250th — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years of American history. Thisdouble-feature takes us to two immigrant communities separated by two decades and a thousand miles. InMinnesota, 1884, a boarding house keeper is murdered by the stranger he nursed back to health. In Vermont,1903, a nation's greatest granite carver is shot dead during a political brawl in the hall his own community built.Two states. Two crimes. One question: what did it cost to belong?The VictimsJoseph Farley ran a saloon and boarding house in Tower, Minnesota, on the Vermilion Iron Range. In 1884, Towerwas one of the newest places in America — the Soudan Mine had shipped its first iron ore only months earlier.Men flooded in from Duluth, Michigan, Finland, Sweden, Cornwall, and Germany. Farley fed them, housed them,nursed them when they fell sick. He took in a Finnish immigrant named John Waisenen, who arrived broke andill. Farley cared for him, then gave him a job. Nothing else survives about Joseph Farley — no age, no birthplace,no family. He is remembered only through his generosity and the murder it invited.Elia Corti was born in Viggiu, Italy, on December 21, 1869, and by his early thirties he was doing things with BarreGrey granite that no one in America could match. The New York Times called him the nation's greatest granitecarver. His masterwork: a set of bas-relief panels on the Robert Burns Memorial in Barre, Vermont — an Italianimmigrant carving Scottish poetry into Vermont stone. The monument stands twenty-two feet four inches aboveits foundation, dedicated July 21, 1899. By 1901, Corti had his own firm. He was thirty-three years old, a father ofthree daughters, and at the height of his craft.The CrimesOn November 19, 1884, Farley rode out to Camp Sixty-Two with Waisenen and another Finnish immigrant, JohnNorland, to collect boards from his cabins. At the camp, the two men turned on him. Farley's skull was crushed.They set fire to the cabin with his body inside. William Varrill and his sons arrived to find the cabin burning andboth men standing nearby with Farley's horses. The motive was robbery. Waisenen received thirty dollars forhelping kill the man who had saved his life.On the evening of October 3, 1903, Corti stopped at the Socialist Labor Party Hall on Granite Street in Barre onhis way home from a funeral dinner. A socialist speaker was scheduled, but he was late. As the crowd waited,anarchists and socialists began fighting — taunts, shoving, then a knife and a chair. At approximately 7:15 PM,Alessandro Garetto, a socialist tool-sharpener, drew a pistol and fired three times. Two shots hit furniture andclothing. The third struck Elia Corti in the stomach. He was carried to Heaton Hospital in Montpelier, where helingered for thirty hours. Shortly after midnight on October 5, 1903, Corti died. He was thirty-three.### The Investigations and AftermathSheriff McQuade of St. Louis County led the Minnesota case. The evidence was straightforward: Varrill placedboth men at the scene, and Waisenen confessed. Norland hanged himself in his jail cell on April 9, 1885, with ablanket. Waisenen went to trial, was convicted, and sentenced to death — the first execution in Minnesota inseventeen years. On August 28, 1885, at 3:02 PM, Sheriff McQuade pulled the lever. Waisenen's hanging brokethe state's informal moratorium on executions. Several more followed, culminating in the botched hanging ofWilliam Williams on February 13, 1906, where the rope was too long and it took fourteen and a half minutes for himto die. Public horror over the Williams case led to Governor Adolph Olson Eberhart signing the law that abolishedcapital punishment in Minnesota in 1911.In Vermont, Garetto was convicted of manslaughter — not murder — and sentenced to ten to twelve years atWindsor Prison. The jury accepted that the shooting occurred in a chaotic brawl and that Corti may not havebeen the intended target. Garetto served his time, returned briefly to Barre, and is believed to have gone back toItaly. On October 6, 1903, fifty-two wagons followed Corti's hearse to Hope Cemetery. Anarchists and socialistswalked together. No priest officiated, honoring Corti's dying wish. In the months that followed, his brother Williamcarved a life-size memorial from a single block of Barre Grey granite — Elia seated, tools at his feet, one handon a broken column, with an expression described as pensive, confused, as if trying to understand what hadhappened.### Historical ContextThe Socialist Labor Party Hall, built in 1900 by Italian community volunteers, was designated a National HistoricLandmark in 2000 — the only building in the country known to have been constructed by volunteer membersof the Socialist Labor Party. Luigi Galleani continued publishing Cronaca Sovversiva, first from Barre, then fromLynn, Massachusetts after 1912, until the paper was suppressed in 1920. His followers carried out bombing attacksacross the United…

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