The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees

by Mary Caroline Crawford

In spite, therefore, of the stern decree that young Fairbanks should not visit Miss Fales at her home, there was considerable well-improved opportunity for intercourse, and, as was afterward shown, the two often had long walks together, apart from the others of their acquaintance. One of their appointments was made for the day of the murder, May 18, 1801. Fairbanks was to meet his sweetheart, he told a friend, in the pasture near her home, and it was his intention at that time to persuade her to run away with him and be married. Unfortunately for Fairbanks's case at the trial, it was shown that he told this same friend that if Elizabeth Fales would not run away with him he would do her harm. And one other thing which militated against the acquittal of the accused youth was the fact that, as an inducement to the girl to elope with him, Fairbanks showed her a forged paper, upon which she appeared to have declared legally her intention to marry him.

One tragic element of the whole affair was the fact that Fairbanks had no definite work and no assured means of support. Young people of good family did not marry a hundred years ago without thinking, and thinking to some purpose, of what cares and expense the future might bring them. The man, if he was an honourable man, expected always to have a home for his wife, and since Fairbanks was an invalid, "debilitated in his right arm," as the phrasing of the time put it, and had never been able to do his part of the farm work, he had lived what his stern forebears would have called an idle life, and consequently utterly lacked the means to marry. That he was something of a spoiled child also developed at the trial, which from the first went against the young man because of the testimony of the chums to whom he had confided his intention to do Elizabeth Fales an injury if she would not go to Wrentham and marry him.

The prisoner's counsel were two very clever young lawyers who afterward came to be men of great distinction in Massachusetts—no others, in fact, than Harrison Gray Otis and John Lowell. These men advanced very clever arguments to show that Elizabeth Fales, maddened by a love which seemed unlikely ever to end in marriage, had seized from Jason the large knife which he was using to mend a quill pen as he walked to meet her, and with this knife had inflicted upon herself the terrible wounds, from the effect of which she died almost instantaneously. The fact that Jason was himself wounded in the struggle was ingeniously utilised by the defence to show that he had received murderous blows from her hand, for the very reason that he had attempted (unsuccessfully, inasmuch as his right arm was impaired) to wrest the mad girl's murderous weapon from her.

The counsel also made much of the fact that, though it was at midday and many people were not far off, no screams were heard. A vigorous girl like Elizabeth Fales would not have submitted easily, they held, to any such assault as was charged. In the course of the trial a very moving description of the sufferings such a high-strung, ardent nature as this girl's must have undergone, because of her hopeless love, was used to show the reasons for suicide. And following the habit of the times, the lawyers turned their work to moral ends by beseeching the parents in the crowded court-room to exercise a greater vigilance over the social life of their young people, and so prevent the possibility of their forming any such attachment as had moved Elizabeth Fales to take her own life.

Yet all this eloquent pleading was in vain, for the court found Jason Fairbanks guilty of murder and sentenced him to be hanged. From the court-room he was taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night of the seventeenth of August he was enabled to make his escape through the offices of a number of men who believed him innocent, and for some days he was at liberty. At length, however, upon a reward of one thousand dollars being offered for his apprehension, he was captured near Northampton, Massachusetts, which town he had reached on his journey to Canada.

The gallows upon which "justice" ultimately asserted itself is said to have been constructed of a tree cut from the old Fairbanks place.

The Fairbanks house is still standing, having been occupied for almost two hundred and seventy-five years by the same family, which is now in the eighth generation of the name. The house is surrounded by magnificent old elms, and was built by Jonathan Fairbanks, who came from Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in 1633. The cupboards are filled with choice china, and even the Fairbanks cats, it is said, drink their milk out of ancient blue saucers that would drive a collector wild with envy.

The house is now (1902) the home of Miss Rebecca Fairbanks, an old lady of seventy-five years, who will occupy it throughout her lifetime, although the place is controlled by the Fairbanks Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution, who hold their monthly meetings there.

FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM, MASS.