The Louis Lingg-Henry Denhart Connection (?)

Henry Denhart was born in 1842 in Germany.  He came to America in 1853 with his parents and settled in Washington.  In 1866, he formed a partnership with Charles Anthony that eventually morphed into the Denhart Bank.

I give you these dates because they are important to the "illegitimacy" of our story.

Louis Lingg became famous (infamous) in the 1880s in Chicago as being convicted as one of the perpetrators of the Haymarket Affair, a May 1886 bombing incident which killed seven police officers.  There is a Haymarket sculpture in downtown Chicago as a tribute to those who fell that day.  Seven people were convicted in the execution of the act, but it was an apparent rush to judgment, as several were later pardoned and all have more recently been considered innocent, albeit after they were hanged in 1887.

One of the convicted was not hanged, but committed suicide in prison.  That was a man named Louis Lingg, who detonated a small explosive in his mouth on November 10, 1887, the day before the scheduled hanging of him and four others for the crime.  It is a historical fact that Lingg came to America in July 1885, less than a year before the bombing.  Louis Lingg became known as "Suicide Lingg."

Here is where our story connects to Washington and becomes a bit clouded.  In the weeks following the suicide, the Bloomington Pantagraph ran a blurb about a Lingg/Denhart connection.  Here is the blurb, verbatim:

Louis Lingg, the anarchist who suicided in the Chicago jail, came to this country on the same ship with a bright and exemplary young man now working for Henry Denhart, a banker at Washington, Tazewell County, Illinois.  The Washington youth went to work in earnest and is now worth $15,000. (Weekly Pantagraph 11/25/1887)

A couple of months later, a different blurb resurfaced, telling a different tale.  Here it that verbatim text:

Two young men came to this country from Germany on the same ship.  Both were lithe of limb and strong of intellect - typical Germans, apollos in figure, striving for the betterment of their condition.  One went to Chicago, and the other settled in Washington, Tazewell County, Illinois. The former became sad, drank every cup of misanthropy and hate, nurtured in his breast the hatred of morality, all Christianity, hated his God, hated successful business men, hated the law, hated its agents, hated every enobling virtue.  The latter pursued a life of recitude and sobriety, was simple in his habits, economical in his ways, and today is worth fifteen thousand dollars.  the former was suicide Lingg; the latter Henry Denhart, a banker, of Tazewell County, Illinois.  Here is a grand opportunity for moralizing, but let all remember the lesson to be drawn from the two young men who came to America on the ship.

Aside from the histrionic text, the second story just isn't true.  Denhart and Lingg came to America several decades apart.  The problem was that story, in all its melodramatic and inaccurate glory, was reprinted in several newspapers across the nation, although not in Illinois.  Those papers list the source as coming from the Lewistown News in Lewistown, Illinois, although that specific source cannot be found to verify.

What could explain this?  It is possible all of these articles are simply reprinted from Washington newspapers of the time, and they are to blame. Copy editors of the time often played with the truth.  Another possible explanation is that the Lewistown editor got a copy of the original story from the Pantagraph and misread it, thinking that Denhart was on the boat with Lingg, rather than his younger worker.

We may never know.