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The Murdered Maiden Student : A Tribute to the Memory of Miss Josie A. Langmaid.
Suncook, Pembroke, N.H., 1878. 12mo, original burgundy cloth, gilt title and decorative black stamping on front cover, lower cover with blind-stamped title and ornament. Frontis. portrait engraving, 63 pp., illus. A poetic eulogy for the murdered student Josie Langmaid, also relating the circumstances of her horrific death as well as a description of the public memorial created for her. On the morning of October 4, 1875, the beautiful 17-year-old Josie Langmaid did not show up for school. When Pembroke Academy in Pembroke, New Hampshire notified her family, a search party was assembled. That night the party found her decapitated and mutilated body in the woods near the school and discovered her head the next morning. The horrific discovery tore the community of Pembroke apart. The book begins by briefly detailing the infamous Pembroke murder; the trial and hanging of her murderer, Joseph Lapage, a French-Canadian woodcutter; and the memorial that was erected in her memory. The town of Pembroke placed the monument to the victim near the murder site, including directions to the areas where her body and head were discovered. Keeler offers a description of the monument, reproducing its inscriptions, and gives an account of the grief stricken Langmaid family. What follows is a 40-page poem of rhyming couplets: "So sad a story did that day unfold, / Not half its burden ever can be told." The poem finds only relative solace in the "swift justice" that "closely followed" the "soulless wretch" of the murderer. A stirring eulogy for the murdered Pembroke maiden. REFERENCES: Not in McDade, which records three other titles on the Langmaid murder. CONDITION: Very good; cdv very good.
Item #3756
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