Nina Bagley
Mrs. Ellen S. Tupper was a complex and cunning woman beekeeper in the 1800’s that all beekeepers should know. She was born into an affluent family in 1822 in Providence, Rhode Island and was later known as the “Queen of Iowa.” She was arrested for forgery and diagnosed as being insane in 1876. Lots of information can be found about Ellen Smith Tupper; in fact she is the most talked about of the women beekeepers in the 1800’s. Her achievement in helping to educate women in beekeeping gave her the title “Queen of Iowa” which she earned honestly! She was an intelligent woman and had a drive to educate young women in the sciences, especially beekeeping.
After collecting all the information I had about her from my books, bee magazines and online, I started digging to find out more about her life so I could tell her story in a different light. (Unfortunately, you could do a million good things, but it’s the one bad thing you do that people remember.)
Ms. Ellen S. Smith married Allen Tupper, a lumberman and aspiring Baptist Minister in 1843. Due to her poor health and advice from her doctors, she and her husband moved the family to Brighten, Iowa in 1850 where they purchased a farmhouse through a land grant. They had eleven children; her early years in Iowa were not easy ones. She encountered hardships: flooding and the loss of two children to cholera. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1850’s her husband’s business and health failed. She wrote, “Allen’s… wealth melted away like dew before the sun,” and to make matters worse, like many men at that time, Mr. Tupper went off to fight in the Civil War. He was 57 years old when he returned home.
Teaching and beekeeping allowed women the freedom to be independent and be respected by their peers. Ellen Smith Tupper saw an opportunity to teach women the subject of bees while writing in her entomological journal about her beekeeping knowledge. She spoke German and French and was well on her way to rising to the standards of a well-known apiarist at the time such as Huber, Berlepsch, Dadant, Wagner and Dzierzon. She studied The Dzierzon’s Theory (parthenogenesis) and claimed to have been successful at fertilization in a confined environment and wrote, she “cannot consider an Italian queen pure whose royal daughters are not duplicates of her.” In the 1860’s beekeepers realized that fertilization experiments under controlled conditions were needed to find the answers to the mechanism of bee heredity. But unfortunately, the reports on Tupper’s pure queens were received with large skepticism by other beekeepers. Her caged-in confinement approach seem to have failed; this was a time of classical genetics and an apiarist remarked that it was a valid question of “whether she was deceiving herself or trying to deceive others.” Adam Grimm, a queen breeder at the time, visited Mrs. Tupper’s apiary while she was away and “found no difference in the queens he had and the ones she raised.”
But despite this, over the years she became America’s distinguished lady writer in Bee Culture during and shortly after the Civil War. She was the first female lecturer at the State Agricultural College of Iowa. Tupper played a major role in recruiting women from the Temperance Movement, to become part of the world of bees. She was the associated editor of the National Bee Journal which was a monthly periodical published from 1870-1874 before she purchased it in 1873. She also wrote for the Prairie Farmer, American Bee Journal and Youths’ Companion.
Mrs. Tupper’s next and last business venture was with Mrs. Annie Savory, a philanthropist and wealthy businesswomen from Des Moines, Iowa. In 1871, the two women started the Iowa Italian Bee Company to support and sell honey bees in the American Midwest. Annie Savory provided “Abundant Capital” in the company in the amount of ten thousand dollars, which was a lot of money for someone “who didn’t know a bee from a yellow jacket,” as Mrs. Tupper wrote, while she had the knowledge and the expertise in keeping bees. They even financed Dadant to travel to Lake Como, Italy in July 1872 to import bees, but unfortunately it was a huge failure. The two women made mistakes planning the shipping and handling, resulting in the loss of many bees during transportation. Both women blamed the Italians for the careless packaging of the bees. Business didn’t go smoothly, and lack of experience caused the company to fold. Ellen S. Tupper and Annie Savory parted ways in 1873 supposedly with no hard feelings between them.
The Savorys’ lost most of their belongings in a house fire shortly afterward and eventually moved out of Des Moines to another territory. Tupper lost 300 hives in a fire and collected the insurance – there was talk and skepticism about the fire. During this period, it is believed that she was passing bad bank notes. Ellen S. Tupper was well-received by her peers and friends; she was an entomologist of “continental reputation,” however “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” was finally catching up with her. The scheme of her activity was to substitute old notes when they came due with new ones. I’m not sure when she started getting into financial trouble, but it was probably during or after the Civil War. In 1876, she was arrested with the charge of forgery. Accusations wrote, “It appears that she freely used the names of relatives’ friends, and in addition, forged the names of leading citizens of various cities of Iowa,” including a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln!
Beekeepers Column
The article below in reference to the arrest of Mrs. Ellen S. Tupper from the Currol County Mirror of Illinois, which will be read with interest by all beekeepers:
Monticello, Iowa, 1876
“Mrs. Ellen S. Tupper, a long time resident of Des Moines, Iowa, has recently been arrested for the alleged crime of forgery. Heretofore she has born an unblemished character. She with her husband came to this State about twenty years ago with $2,000, with which they went into business, and finally failed, when from that time to the present they have been carrying on an extensive bee trade, her husband being during most of the time, unable to secure any labor; threw upon her the burden of providing for the family, which she did with wonderful success. She is a woman of high culture and refinement and is known all over the States as the “head center of this business.”
Immediately after her arrest Ellen S. Tupper went into violent spasms, becoming bewildered. Her physician was immediately telegraphed, but being unable to leave, sent his partner. Sherriff Babcock made the arrest, assigning Mrs. Tupper to “comfortable quarters” in the county jail. She was released some time in February 1876, the reason unclear. She tried leaving Iowa, slightly angry with the reporters who were interfering with her journey. Ellen Tupper rebuked them and referred them to the newspapers that “knew more about her movements and conditions then she did.’’
She failed to show up to her arraignment in June and was under two bonds by mid-1876, to answer to indictments in Davenport on the grounds of “forgery” and one for “uttering false notes as true ones.” It took the authorities some time to find her whereabouts, but they finally found her in August living on a farm that her husband had lived in for some years. The officers were surprised by the comfortable home they found: a large homestead of 160 acres with another 160 acres as a “timber claim” (Anonymous 1876). Ellen Tupper was released from custody; once again her lawyer presented two bonds, and the prominent signatures on the bonds indicated the strong support she still had from relatives and friends. Her trial was in February 1877, but being unable to obtain a lawyer, Ellen Tupper’s daughter formed a team of local “advantageous” lawyers. The defense prepared that Mrs. Tupper was “insane and thus not responsible for her doings.” In the Midwest newspapers, they described Tupper as an insane person. The Chicago Tribune reported that her family physician had declared that “she was decidedly a monomaniac on money affairs’’ and “not of sound mind.” Her lawyer argued that the insanity she inherited from her relatives has shown itself in her grandfather, aunt and nephew. He emphasized that while the victims “should have their money,” Ellen S. Tupper was “penniless” and “without a descent place to lay her head.” The judge instructed the jury on reasonable doubt in regard to sanity. “That the law of the state shields or excuses every person from punishment for wrongful and criminal acts when done in a state of insanity.” The trial took a whole week and the courtroom was standing room only with Tupper’s family and many supportive women from the suffragettes present. Her brother, the Rev. James Wheaton Smith, who testified “the constant strain of mind in the work to support her family, has been enough to set a dozen women crazy.”
She was released for the third time to her daughter Kate, who was influential during her mother’s trial. I guess you can say the third time is a charm, she was found not guilty due to insanity.
It’s difficult to conceive what her motives were in committing such a crime as “forgery.” It made me wonder, she had to be self-possessed for the banks to trust her motives and I’m sure her family’s background made her scheme easier. Ellen Smith’s family was very influential, which most likely was how she was able to get away with forging the signatures of her father’s friends, and her relatives, including writing James Harlan’s signature, the close friend of Abraham Lincoln!
Her father, Noah Smith Jr. was one of the better-known political leaders in Maine. As a lawyer, Smith moved his family to Calais, Maine, in 1830. He soon became very involved in the state’s politics. For a number of years he was an active member of the Maine Legislature, which opened the door for him to become speaker of the Maine House of Representatives in 1854. In 1858, Smith became the Secretary of State. When a dear friend, the Honorable Hannibal Hamlin was elected as vice president, he secured Smith in the seat of secretary of the United States Senate. Later, Smith would become the legislative clerk of the Senate. He was also acquainted with President Lincoln. Ellen’s mother was Hanna Draper Wheaton. Mrs. Wheaton’s family was influential as well. Her maternal uncle, Henry Wheaton, became a professor at the medical school at Brown University in 1812. He was the United States Supreme Court reporter from 1816 to 1827. Henry Wheaton’s diplomatic career spanned the administrations of six presidents from John Quincy Adams who appointed him, to James K. Polk who dismissed him. He was offered a lectureship in civil and international law at Harvard, but was prevented from preparing his lectures by ill health. He died on March 11, 1848.
Ellen Smith’s first cousin Charles Jackson was Governor of Rhode Island, 1845-1846. It became clear to me how she might have been protected to avoid tarnishing her family’s name. I can also understand why she was able to move around and use the names of these prominent people because her family was prominent as well. I believe they never suspected her motives so it’s unfortunate that Ellen Tupper was arrested for forgery, but until one walks in her shoes, we can’t judge her. Struggling to keep it together in the 1800’s was no picnic to say the least! I suspect that she was keeping up appearances and doing the best she could to keep her family in the lifestyle she was accustomed to. Crazy or not, she committed a criminal act but she probably didn’t see it that way. I would like to believe she intended to pay her victims back before she was discovered. She spent the remainder of her life writing and traveling. Her last visit was with her daughter Margaret in El Paso, Texas in 1888, where she passed away of heart failure leaving behind a legacy of “Bee Culture.” Two of her daughters became Unitarian ministers, another daughter became a teacher and her grandson Allen True Tupper, became a famous artist who specialized in depicting the American West. Two hundred years later, we are still talking about Ellen Smith Tupper, “Queen of Iowa.”
Nina M. Bagley
Columbus, Ohio.