This is Part 1 of a two-part series about human trafficking in the 19th century.
“Wanted: Girls to Wait on Tables in Lumbermen’s Hotels in Michigan and Wisconsin. Wages up to $6 a Week and Board. Transportation Free.”
It wasn’t called human trafficking in 1890 but the crime certainly existed at that time. More commonly known as abduction in the late nineteenth century, the ploys and tricks of the perpetrators remain much the same today.
The folks of Barrie may have known a little about the brothels that operated in the lumber camps and mining camps of the Canadian and American north. Possibly, they read newspaper stories about young women being forced to work in such places.
If the good people of this town thought that these outrages were being committed anywhere but here, they were mistaken. A well-respected Barrie physician was arrested in January 1890 and charged with administering poison for the purpose of a criminal operation, which laid bare some sordid truths.
At that time, Mrs. Caroline McDonald, an Agnes Street woman, was lying gravely ill in a Barrie hospital bed. As Barrie’s first true hospital did not yet exist, she was likely being treated in the hospital section of the Barrie Jail.
Mrs. McDonald claimed that her life-threatening condition was the fault of Dr. Henry Wallwin who had performed an abortion upon her.
This was a truly shocking scandal. Abortion was illegal but rarely prosecuted. In fact, from 1840 to 1900, there were only 16 cases brought to court in Ontario and the Wallwin case was one of them.
Within a month, Dr. Wallwin was cleared of any wrongdoing and all eyes then turned instead to Mrs. McDonald. A second doctor examined her and discovered that she had been suffering from some type of dangerous inflammation but no evidence of a recent abortion was found.
As it turned out, Mrs. McDonald had been hoping for a cash settlement from Dr. Wallwin but that didn’t happen. She was not arrested nor charged for her deception, but her way of living was widely reported in the local newspapers.
After her recovery, Mrs. McDonald was brought to Police Court where she faced a barrage of intense questions from Dr. Wallwin’s defense counsel. She was forced to acknowledge that she been at the centre of an equally shocking case 3 years earlier.
“Mr. Murdoch also succeeded in having Mrs. McDonald admit that, together with a man named Stewart, she had procured young girls for immoral purposes, and sent them to Wisconsin lumber camps, there to lead a life of degradation and shame.”
The pair had also been convicted in another similar case. They had been found guilty of enticing a young woman to a brothel in St. Mary’s, Ontario under the pretense that she could find domestic service work there.
It was learned that Mrs. McDonald had been convicted for her work in a house of ill fame and had served 10 months at the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women, more commonly known as the Mercer, on King Street in Toronto.
When Mrs. McDonald did her time at the Mercer, the facility was relatively new. This first women’s prison in Canada opened with the intention of providing females with so-called Victorian morality and sought to teach them useful skills such as sewing and baking.
Nearly 80% of the Mercer inmates were there because they had breached public morals. Many were sex workers but any young woman could be incarcerated for up to 5 years for drinking, begging, causing difficulties for her parents or spouse, or being pregnant with an illegitimate child.
The ideals of the Mercer slipped away and the institution eventually became a house of horrors which led to several violent uprisings before its eventual 1969 closure.
In the late 1880s, when people like Caroline McDonald and Daniel Stewart were being paid to dupe young women into a trade that they had no intention of taking up, the ruse was fairly simple. The advertisement quoted at the start of this story, found in an unnamed Michigan newspaper in 1887, would certainly have received numerous replies.
Each week, the Barrie Historical Archive provides BarrieToday readers with a glimpse of the city’s past. This unique column features photos and stories from years gone by and is sure to appeal to the historian in each of us.
