GERMANTOWN AVENUE IS STILL A THOROUGHFARE FOR COMmuters traveling between Center City Philadelphia, and its northwestern suburbs. Drivers slowly pass along it as they approach the center of Germantown. True to its history, the two-lane road is especially rough in the vicinity of Market Square, and tires skid over trolley lines in the broken pavement, bumping against potholes, cement, cobblestones— layers of failed street construction.
As the industrial age entered the twentieth century, more African-American and immigrant laborers found employment in Germantown’s factories and moved into its neighborhoods. The community enjoyed economic prosperity into the 1940s, escaping the initial economic devastation of the Great Depression, but over the next two decades, two factors transformed the neighborhood: Germantown’s wealthier families moved back into Center City, and factory closures took jobs away from thousands of blue-collar workers. House values dropped, lower-income families moved in, and the economic decline intensified racial hostility. Many white homeowners joined the “white flight” from the city into the suburbs, but over the years, Germantown has remained a somewhat racially heterogeneous section of Philadelphia. Although several of its blocks are undergoing gentrification, the neighborhood’s low-income population lives mainly in row homes, and most of the mansions that once housed Philadelphia’s elite have been either torn down, abandoned, or converted into apartments. The lawns of those that still stand, however, are lush and green.
About a mile down East Washington Lane, the Zion Hill Church of Christ sits on the former Ross property. The stone wall that Walter and Charley played behind is still intact, but only a few bushes remain in the yard. Next to the church, blocks of row homes stretch up the hill toward Germantown Avenue, and across the street, part of a disintegrating mansion has been converted into a daycare center. Beech trees line this specific block, but they bend under telephone wires, and their branches have been cut. With the exception of cars passing on the road, it is quiet today, a Sunday afternoon. And even though a small street two blocks northeast of here is called Ross, generally the people here have never heard about Charley, or this piece of Philadelphia’s history.
William Westervelt was released from prison on January 18, 1881. He gave at least one interview to the New York Tribune soon after his return to the Lower East Side, and in the article he maintained that he had had nothing to do with the Charley Ross kidnapping. Westervelt stayed out of the newspapers until his obituary appeared in 1890. His sister Martha Mosher and at least two of her nephews gave sporadic interviews through the end of the nineteenth century; in her statements, Martha voiced her innocence and her belief that Charley was alive. In 1897, Gil Mosher’s son Ellsworth came forward with the news that his father, on his deathbed, said the bones of Charley Ross were buried inside of a saloon on Grand Street once leased to Bill Mosher. Although the bones of a child had been found in the wall when the building was torn down, they were those of William, Bill Mosher’s oldest son, who had died years before Charley’s kidnapping.
Not much is known about the life of Captain William Heins after 1875. Over the next two years, his name disappeared from records of captains who served under Mayor Stokley. Mayor William S. Stokley held office until 1886, when voters denied him a fourth term. While some historical records of Philadelphia honor Stokley for noble service, newspapers of the day accused him of “scandal breeding” as a member of the Philadelphia Buildings Commission, the group responsible for the construction of City Hall. Refusing audits, the Commission made personal demands on the city budget and awarded contracts without advertising for bids; under their watch, City Hall cost 12 million dollars more than expected and was finished twelve years later than estimated. Newspapers referred to the building as “the temple of Philadelphia’s folly.”
Three months before the Centennial opened, the government released 1.5 million dollars to satisfy its financial commitment to the exhibition. Although investors did lose money, the celebration was considered successful. More than one in five Americans visited the Centennial grounds in Fairmount Park, participating in the effort to heal civic pride and American business. Foreign visitors admired America’s industrial and agricultural displays, paying particular attention to Samuel Colt revolvers, Cyrus McCormick reapers, and the Corliss engine. Philadelphia’s execution encouraged foreign trade and inspired creative minds, visionaries who organized six major fairs around the nation within forty years of the Centennial.
In spite of his frustration with the superintendent, Christian Ross met with George Walling in New York as late as 1887, the same year that Walling penned a memoir chronicling his thirty-seven-year career as a New York police officer (he retired in 1885). In his book, Walling said the case of Charley Ross affected him more deeply than any other.
Christian Ross never stopped searching for Charley. Within two years of the kidnapping, his dry-goods business failed and he went bankrupt. Through continued personal hardship, he sifted through the statements of those saying they were his son—at first the stories of adolescent boys, and then teenagers, young adults, and finally, grown men.
In 1876, following the advice of friends who recommended he clarify erroneous information and defend his own integrity, Christian penned a memoir entitled The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, the Kidnapped Child. Although there was commercial interest in the book, Christian did not make much money from it.
In June 1878, Governor Hartranft of Pennsylvania gave him a title and the position of “Harbor Master.” The job, a token position, paid a small salary. That same year, P. T. Barnum contacted Christian, offering to give him $10,000 if he would agree to display Charley on the Barnum tour once the child was found. Christian agreed, provided that he could return the money and cancel the deal if he ever found his son. He died at home, following an illness, in 1897.
Sarah Ross lived in the family home in Germantown until 1912, when she dropped dead of heart failure after entering her pastor’s home one day. At the time of her death, five children survived her: her sons Henry and Walter, and her daughters, Sophia, Marion, and Anne. In 1926, her children sold the property on East Washington Lane, and the home was razed. Since then, three different churches have held services in a building on the lot.
As an adult, Walter Ross lived a few miles north of Germantown, in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Both he and his older brother Henry became very successful businessmen. Throughout his career, Walter worked in Philadelphia, moving from the position of clerk to investment banker before establishing his own firm, one that gave him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1931, his son Walter Jr. was killed in an auto crash on his way from Newtown, Pennsylvania, to Walter Sr.’s home in Chestnut Hill.
Over time, the Ross story has been forgotten, but the case received small bursts of media attention in the twentieth century. In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, schoolboy kidnappers and killers, said in court documents that they were influenced by Mosher and Douglas’s behavior. And in 1932, news of another stolen child shocked America. About thirty miles northeast of Germantown, in the town of Ewing, New Jersey, Charles Lindbergh’s baby was taken from his crib.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, men claiming to be Charley Ross continued to come forward. Perhaps the most famous was Gustave Blair, a man in his sixties who first publicized his story in 1931. Blair said he had been taken from the Ross home and raised in Illinois as “Nelson Rinear” until his adopted father, attempting to conceal “Nelson’s” true identity, tried to kill him. Blair said he then fled to Canada, changed his name, and returned to Illinois years later, when an older adopted brother confirmed his identity.
Walter and his siblings immediately dismissed the man’s story, saying it was the kind of tale that had bankrupted their father. In 1934, Gustave Blair took his case to a civil court in Arizona, and a jury believed him, enabling him to legally change his name to Charley Ross. He then contacted the media and asked people to donate enough money to send him to Philadelphia, where he would reunite himself with his long-lost family. When they raised enough, Blair and his fiancée traveled to Germantown, aiming to marry in Walter’s church— Cliveden Presbyterian. The pastor refused to marry them, and the family refused to meet them. In 1939, Blair filed a civil lawsuit against Walter Ross, demanding to be recognized as an heir. Rejecting the court papers, Walter moved to his New York home. He spent most of his time there until he died four years later, in 1943.
Charley Ross was never returned home to East Washington Lane, and a body was never identified. Regardless of whether he was killed, Charley Ross died the day that Mosher and Douglas parked their wagon on Washington Lane and offered him candy on a summer evening. Social historians have attempted to trace Charley Ross into the twentieth century, studying stories selected from the hundreds of those who wished to end the mystery with their tales of woe—and perhaps, somewhere in that pile of discarded leads, the real Charley was dismissed, denied his own identity.
When Mayor Stokley watched the Masons drop the day’s newspapers into a vault on July 4, 1874, he was ensuring that his world, if perhaps lost in history, would never disappear. Two centuries later, all that is really known about Charley is cemented in that cornerstone of City Hall, underneath the statue of William Penn that still defines Philadelphia’s skyline:
300$ REWARD WILL BE PAID TO THE person returned to No 5 North Sixth Street, a small Boy, having long, curly, flaxen hair, hazel eyes, clear, light-skinned round face, dressed in a brown linen suit with a short skirt, broad buttoned straw hat and laced shoes. This child was lost from Germantown on Wednesday afternoon. 1st lost, between 4 and 5 o’clock.
The End