STUNTS, GAGS & SHENANIGANS
The Man From Missouri
This weird story was told in the Hunterdon Independent by “Franklin,” its anonymous history columnist in 1877:
William Bradley, a young Missourian, traveled through California, Texas and the South, and arrived in Frenchtown circa 1868. He hired on at the Kugler & Reading wagon-spoke factory on Upper Third Street. “He was one of those adventurous spirits that we often meet, who, by an easy flow of language, pleasant and cultivated manners, and experience and observation acquired in extensive travel, fit themselves for almost any society, and whose genius and tact adapt them to any situation. He was a skillful hand in the use of a saw and knew just how to keep it in order.”
He often talked about buying the spoke factory. After his father died, Bradley went home to Missouri, claimed his inheritance, and came back to New Jersey. On the train to Frenchtown, he encountered factory co-owner Peter Kugler, and “he intimated that he had plenty in his satchel to make them (Kugler and Philip Reading) comfortable for life, and now if Mr. Reading was ready to sell out, he was ready to pay down the money.”
Bradley boarded with Mrs. Margaret Rittenhouse for the weekend, and “on Monday morning, while preparing to take the money to the bank, in a sudden fit of delirium he tossed his Government bonds into the stove.” Oops.
“Mrs. Rittenhouse looked in and saw a charred mass of burnt paper, two empty envelopes lay on the table, marked different sums as their contents, which made the sum of $28,000, and she said there were coupons for several years interest attached to them.
“Some believe it was all so, while others think it was a sham,” wrote Franklin. In any case, Bradley soon returned to the West, and the factory in question burned down the following March – in 1869.
From “Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia”