Hardboiled

     For many new Richmonders and visitors to our city, the idea that there was once an enormous walled prison in the middle of downtown is unbelievable. The fact that the sprawling assembly of buildings was utterly erased and replaced by nothing more threatening than a grass meadow makes it especially hard to visualize that vast warehouse of criminals and misery. From 1804 to 1990, the Virginia State Penitentiary saw thousands of inmates come and go, and many never left the grim old facility alive, dying of old age, murder, or execution by the Commonwealth. The vast majority served their time and were released. There was a third, even more desperate option other than legal release or death, and that was escape. 

The Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond as it appeared in 1982. Belvedere St. is at the top of the photograph and the Downtown Expressway ran parallel to the northern wall of the facility.

             Ralph Scott “Stony” Stonebreaker (whose very name conjures up visions of chain gangs) was born in a tiny crossroads town in north-east West Virginia in 1910, one of twelve siblings. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, and the 1930 Census found him serving at Fort Eustis in Newport News. Army life apparently held no more attraction for Stonebreaker than farming in rural West Virginia, and he and another soldier, Charles Panella, embarked on a crime spree in late 1931. Stonebreaker and Panella committed a series of four robberies on the Peninsula and two gas station holdups in Richmond. The authorities in Warwick County commented at the time that they would be glad when the pair were taken to the State Penitentiary because they were among a group of twelve inmates who almost escaped from the County jail.

 

Ralph Scott “Stony” Stonebreaker. Stony finally managed to escape prison, but not in the way he expected.

       Stonebreaker’s accomplice, Charles Panella, age 23, was an Italian immigrant with a definite distaste for detention but faced a combined fifty-eight-year term for his role in the heists with Stonebreaker. Just two months into his sentence on January 25, 1932, Panella was out on the prison yard and spotted a half-inch electrical conduit running up one of the Penitentiary’s tall brick walls. A former boxer, the agile Panella deftly climbed up and over the wall using the conduit while a hundred cheering inmates watched him, then scrambled down a barred window on the other side, scaled the outer wall, and fled under a fusillade of shots from the guard towers. He was last seen running down an alley near Fourth and Canal Streets but disappeared from Richmond entirely despite a massive search across the city. It would be three months before Panella was caught by a cop in Hampton, having robbed a business and then hijacked a getaway car at gunpoint. He was returned to the Penitentiary.

 

Charles Panella, Stonebreaker’s partner in a crime spree.

Two months later and perhaps impressed by Panella’s ability to literally run away from the Penitentiary and get away with it, Panella’s pal “Stony” Stonebreaker decided it was his turn to take a chance at freedom. Robert McDonald was convicted of murder and arson after killing a man in Louisa County then burning his house down around the body. On June 22, 1932, he and Stonebreaker were returning from the mess hall when they spotted a prison truck parked inside the walls, partially loaded with sheet steel to be made into license plates. Jumping in the truck, they started it and barreled across the prison grounds toward the massive wooden gate. When they hit it burst open with the weight of the heavy truck and the two convicts plowed through the gate and down Spring Street, onto Belvedere, and turned south. Abandoning the truck, the pair ran through the Oregon Hill neighborhood until they got to the Hollywood Cemetery fence along South Cherry Street.

Robert McDonald, who with Stonebreaker rammed their way out of the Pen.

There was a Confederate reunion going on in Richmond that week, and the two escapees were spotted in the distance trotting through the tombstones and trees by visitors touring the Hollywood Cemetery Confederate section. Dozens of armed Penitentiary guards and personnel flooded the cemetery looking for the pair. By 2:00 PM they still had not been located, and Prison Superintendent Major Rice Youell sent word to the prison in Goochland County to send bloodhounds to Richmond to find Stonebreaker and McDonald. The dogs arrived at 3:50 and were immediately released and led authorities out of Hollywood and into adjacent Mount Cavalry Cemetery. Stonebreaker and McDonald lay under a cover of vines and bushes in the northeast corner of the cemetery listening to the commotion and baying of the bloodhounds until flushed out by police with drawn guns and returned to prison after several hours of freedom.

 

“Big Dutch” Arthur Misunas of the infamous “Tri-State Gang,” outside a Richmond courtroom in 1934. Misunas had no illusions about his status as a rat and was prepared for the “Tri-State Avengers.”

Two of Stonebreaker’s prison pals became even more notorious three years later when McDonald, Panella, and another man, Bill Lynn (termed “two tough holdup men and a moron murderer” in the Times-Dispatch), attacked Arthur Misunas in the mess hall. Misunas was one of the few survivors of the infamous Tri-State Gang which engineered a series of truck hijackings, robberies, kidnappings, and murders up and down the East Coast in the early 1930s. The other two principals of the gang, Walter Legenza and Robert Mais, had been put to death in Virginia’s electric chair on February 2, 1935, largely because of Misunas’ testimony. In the Virginia Pen, “Big Dutch” Misunas was considered the biggest and most despised rat of them all. Four days after the executions, the trio attempted to kill Misunas, who, defending himself with a homemade knife made from half a pair of scissors, instead stabbed Panella in the stomach and then calmly “retired to his cell.” Following closely on accounts of the electrocution of Mais and Legenza, the story of the failed “Tri-State Avengers” made national news on the wire services.

For Richmonders living in Oregon Hill, just to the west of the Penitentiary, the howl of the prison siren must have been a rare and exciting sound. Rarely did the hulking collection of buildings on the other side of Belvedere emit anything other than routine vehicle traffic in and out of the gate, with supplies arriving by truck and the prison bus transporting inmates to court or a local hospital. Imagine the excitement on June 16, 1936, when the siren began, followed by the heavy thud of a shotgun echoing around the walls of the prison, and then immediately after that, the unmistakable rattle of a machine gun. Stony Stonebreaker was making his play for freedom again, only this time he had a lot more help.

Excited Oregon Hill residents gather in the 500 block of Spring Street at the sound of machine gun fire coming from the nearby State Pen. On the other side of the wall, Stony and his pals were making their play.

 

Robert Reams, prison guard, had no hint that things were about to go so very badly that afternoon. It was a clear and warm, a pleasant day for baseball, and about 150 inmates were out on the yard either playing or watching the game. Abruptly, Reams had a knife put to his throat and heard somebody behind him say, “git in the truck.” His hands bound, Reams was unceremoniously thrown in the back of a prison van and found another guard, Powhatan Bass, and a prison trusty named Oscar Fields already tied up on the floor. Eight inmates piled in the truck with them, someone started it, and the tall, black truck roared out of the automotive shop and toward the prison gate – the same gate that Stony and his pal McDonald had driven through four years before, only now reinforced with a heavy steel beam.

 

Prison guard O.C. Smith, didn’t hesitate in unleashing a torrent of gunfire into the escapee’s truck, killing and wounding prisoners and hostages alike.

Patrolling on top of the wall was guard O.C. Smith, a no-nonsense veteran officer hardened by years of working at the Penitentiary. Looking down from his vantage point, it was obvious that the person behind the wheel was not supposed to be there and this was an escape attempt. Smith knew what to do. Drawing his service revolver, he quickly emptied it into the truck below him, and then grabbed a shotgun from the guard post. Pumping it rapidly, he shot the truck six times with buckshot (each round carrying nine pellets the size of a pistol bullet). The truck was still moving, so Smith dropped the shotgun and picked up a Thompson sub-machine gun, hauled back on the cocking handle, and fired a long burst of .45 caliber bullets into the now slowing truck as it finally bumped harmlessly into the gate and stopped.

 

Prison guards examine the truck that was riddled with bullets by O.C. Smith.

As Smith’s Thompson roared, inside the truck dots of daylight appeared all over the walls as bullets zipped through it and bloody pandemonium broke out. An inmate named Debie Coleman slumped unconscious, a bullet through his head. Coleman would die of his wounds two weeks later. Bill Lynn, a Texas bank robber and one of Misunas’ assailants, was shot in the back and leg and George Ferguson, a convicted murderer, was badly wounded in both legs. The hapless trustee Fields who had no part in the attempted escape was shot in the stomach. Bank robber Talmadge Feazell had flesh wounds, but the guard, Robert Reams, was hit in the mouth by a slug and had a bullet wound in his hip. His fellow guard, Powhatan Bass, lay dead beside him on the floor of the truck, shot several times in the head and body. The truck sat in front of the gate and was instantly surrounded by guards with shotguns and the doors flung open. A murderer named Burley Wright, bank robbers Ed Veal and John Price, and Ralph “Stony” Stonebreaker emerged from the carnage in the blood-spattered, bullet-riddled truck, unscathed and with hands held high.

The gravestone of prison guard and hostage Powhatan Bass in Maury Cemetery, killed in the volley of machine gun fire that ended the escape attempt. (Photo from Find a Grave)

The City of Richmond tried to convict the attempted escapees with murder in the death of Powhatan Bass, with District Attorney Gray Haddon announcing he would seek the death penalty for Stonebreaker and the other three who were not wounded in the attempt. The question of where Bass was in the truck and when exactly he was killed in the fusillade of bullets clouded the prosecution, and murder charges were eventually dropped against the convicts. Guard O.C. Smith was roundly praised for following regulations and his part in thwarting the escape, even if it cost Powhatan Bass his life.

Stonebreaker attempted, again and again, to get out of prison throughout the 1940s by using legal means, claiming that he was denied due process when first convicted of his crime spree back in 1932. He staged a five-year court battle (financed by an inheritance he received while he was in prison) that became known in the press as “the famous Ralph Stonebreaker case.” Eventually the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the charges be dismissed. This left the uncomfortable fact that, by 1947 Stonebreaker served nine years too many. In June, 1948, at age 37, Ralph Stonebreaker was released from prison.

Stony Stonebreaker was just as hard-looking as an older man as he was in his prison mug shot. (Photo from Find a Grave)

 

According to his entry on the “Find a Grave” website, Ralph remarried (his first wife had divorced him in 1934) and had two children. In 1950, he was living in Cumberland, Maryland, and worked at Memorial Hospital. Ralph “Stony” Stonebreaker died in 1992 at the age of 81. The hardboiled old ex-con is buried in the cemetery of a small rural church in western Maryland in an unmarked grave.

 

 - Selden

 

See also the Shockoe Examiner’s tour of the inside of the Penitentiary before it was demolished in 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

Richmond’s Own: Oscar “Reddy” Foster

  The evening of March 14, 1908 was not a quiet one, and under overcast skies many families who lived in the now vanished Richmond neighborhood of Fulton were spending an uneasy night on their porches and patrolling their alleys. On Louisiana Street, between Sixth and Seventh, residents were particularly tense with the sound of voices and people walking up and down the cobblestones. The Richmond Police had been put on alert, extra patrolmen were assigned to Fulton, and everyone was wide awake late into the night and talking about the man who threatened to burn down the whole of Louisiana Street, starting with his wife’s home. In the close-set frame houses of Fulton, the danger of fire was not something to be taken lightly and they all knew the source of the threat, too, making the image of blazes sweeping across Fulton valley even more believable. “The neighbors stood guard for some time, ready to move their chattels at a moment’s notice and to vent their anger,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch in an article headlined, “Neighborhood in Uproar..”

 

A view of the town of Fulton asReddy Foster knew it, ca. 1910.

 

  The residents, the police, and his family were all looking for Oscar “Reddy” Foster: baseball player, Richmond native, would-be arsonist, wife beater, and notorious mean drunk. Foster didn’t add to his fame and carry out his threat against Fulton, although he was spotted sulking through the streets of the neighborhood. “Foster was seen to pass the place several times,” reported the Times Dispatch, “but no match was struck, and he was allowed to depart in peace.” Hardly an admirable figure, Foster was nevertheless one of the few Richmonders who made it, albeit for only one shining afternoon, to play in the big leagues in the rough and rawboned world of late-nineteenth century American baseball.

  That March night Foster was enraged that his former wife had claimed all the pay from their son’s job at the nearby Richmond Cedar Works, leaving the aging ballplayer nothing for the week. Foster’s oath to exact revenge on her and the entire neighborhood resulted in that nocturnal panic in Fulton. It was one more example of the drunken Foster being famous in Richmond, but not for his skill or achievements but rather his drinking and his temper. Even a history of baseball’s early players is quick to note Foster “was known as a hard-drinking, rough and ready ballplayer whose temper usually got the best of him.” In 1908 Foster appeared in Richmond Police Court to answer for beating up both his sister and her husband after they made disparaging remarks about Foster’s mother, and he was released after paying a $35 fine. The news was reported under the heading, “Old Player Fined,” further adding to the image of Reddy Foster as being a has-been and washed up at age 44 and no doubt adding to his rage and frustration.

  Foster also had a reputation of taking out his shortcomings on Mary, his long-suffering wife. “Reddy’s continued abuse after team losses became so commonplace that his wife came up with an ‘early warning system,’” wrote one historian of the era. When Foster’s team won, she would be home when he got there as he was then a “happy drunk.” When the team lost, she would arrange for someone to get word to her so she could flee before the drunk and belligerent Foster got home, and she would wait safely at a neighbor’s house for him to sober up.

Oscar “Reddy” Foster, pictured in the Richmond Dispatch in 1895.

 

  The baseball statistics website, “Baseball Reference” names a team in Lebanon, Pennsylvania as the first team Reddy played for in 1890. It goes on to list eighteen different teams he was on, teams with names that reflect the colorful and often hard-scrapple places they called home. The Richmond Bluebirds, the Allentown Peanuts, the Bristol Bell Makers, and the Waterbury Rough Riders were among the stops on a long journey of boarding houses, hotel rooms, train rides, beer joints and rural baseball diamonds attended by crowds just as drunk and rough-and-ready as the players. It was an alcohol-fueled sport filled with personal rivalries, where fistfights were common and sliding to a base often meant coming in with spikes up to do as much damage to the other player as possible. “Reddy Foster should be heavily fined when he gives such exhibitions of temper,” wrote one chronicler of a game played on the evening of September 15, 1894, where his petulant behavior helped cost the Richmond team the game. “A few fines and he might be able to control himself.”

  The same baseball history that termed Foster abusive noted that once upon a time, “Foster was a star catcher in the Virginia State League when he was discovered by a scout for the New York Giants.” Despite his famously bad temper, Foster was signed by New York and prepared for the move north, but before leaving Richmond, Fulton’s own Reddy Foster was honored by a baseball game in his honor on November 23, 1895. The Richmond team played a volunteer group, and the game itself was termed “passing dull.” Nevertheless, many turned out to watch Fulton’s most famous son’s last game before he headed off to the majors and what everyone hoped would be a long and promising profession. In a foreshadowing of Foster’s meteoric rise and fall, a New York coach O. P. Claytor commented that Reddy was not much to look at but “he has the appearance of a fighter, and, as a whole, Claytor thinks he will do.”

  Later in life, he must have looked back at that time with the Giants and that one summer afternoon on June 3, 1896, that Reddy Foster played in the major leagues as a lofty pinnacle that he’d never see again. Not that the game itself was a sterling example from which warm memories were made. The New York World said the Giants played poorly all around and their pitcher “fretted, fumed and fussed” because things were not going his way. The whole game was “one of the sort which leaves a bad taste.” New York lost 14-8. Foster’s presence was not mentioned in the newspapers, and he never played in the majors after that one game.

  Dismissed from the New York Giants, Foster eventually returned home once again to Fulton and apparently kept the peace. He was welcomed back to a local team, the Richmond Lawmakers, after turning down a coaching job in Connecticut. The local newspaper reported the offer and even they seemed surprised he would not take it: “Foster declined to accept the position, although it has a good salary attached to it.” In 1902, “Oscar (Reddy) Foster, a star of the old Virginia League. was spotted in Fulton, resting before headed to his new post as coaching in Wheeling, W. Va.” Reddy eventually signed with a Portsmouth team and later returned as a player to Richmond, but even his hometown had grown tired of his ill-mannered behavior. His cursing on the field and other vulgar behavior was soundly criticized in the press. “Reddy wants to wake up to the fact that Richmond people don’t tolerate such conduct,” sniffed the Times Dispatch..

  By the spring of 1906, Reddy Foster was on a downhill trajectory. When he came back to Richmond, unlike in the past when he might have first gone carousing, instead he went directly from the train station to his mother’s house in Fulton. “’It’s been five years since I saw her sweet face, and I wasn’t coming uptown to get mixed with a crowd before I had a good long talk with her,’ said the auburn-haired backstop, who is known to all of Richmond.” Reddy was in pretty good shape, commented one reporter. “He played excellent ball last year with the Greenville (Miss.) team, and was offered a larger salary there this year, but wanted to get back to Richmond.” Among the few constants in Reddy Foster’s life, aside from his famously bad attitude, was his mother and the Fulton neighborhood where he was born, and it was always a powerful draw.

   Two weeks after he returned home, the end came for Reddy Foster’s baseball career during a game between the Lawmakers and the opposing Lynchburg Hill Climbers. The Cooperstown Chronicles generously claims Foster “always demanded the best from his players and teammates on the field: incompetence was something that was totally unacceptable to him,” and that it was his sheer exasperation with the quality of play is what made him throw down his catcher’s gear and stalk off. Rather than a noble quest for excellence, it was more likely hard liquor and a famously bad attitude that caused Foster to curse, leave the field and the park entirely, never to return. “There are those who think that he will be given another show, but this is a mistaken conclusion, for the player who quits, sulks, or gets bad in any way, hasn’t got any sleeping apartment with the Lawmakers, it is said.”

 

The grave of Oscar “Reddy” Foster in Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery.

 

  The next year found Foster still playing ball, but now back with the same amateur team he started with as a young man. The sporting public was informed that, “The old Fulton baseball club has reorganized with a strong list of players, and Mr. C. Linwood Wade has been elected captain, to whom challenges should be sent at No. 20 Orleans Street.” Far from the beautifully manicured field at the Polo Grounds in New York, Foster now loped around the bases in the valley he called home, his ill-fitting unform once again stained with the red clay of Fulton.

  Things began badly in 1908 after the arrest in February when Foster beat his sister and brother-in-law, followed by the incident where he threatened to burn down Fulton. It was said that Reddy returned to his neighborhood and continued to “dissipate.” On a Sunday late in December, when most Richmonders were thinking about the upcoming Christmas holiday, the ballplayer was on a bender. He was drinking with Lee Poklington, who lived in Fulton on Louisiana Street and was probably among those on alert at a window the year before, watching for his old buddy Reddy coming up Louisiana Street with a can of gas. In late afternoon on December 19 the two walked to the Fulton waterfront, both no doubt knowing every path and alley in the valley from a lifetime of making their way through Fulton to the river. They carried with them a bottle of whisky and, for some reason, a double-barreled shotgun.

  Foster and Poklington stood a while on the shore of what was known as the Fulton Flats and watched the James River roll by as they passed the bottle back and forth. It was growing dark, reported an account of Reddy’s afternoon, “at that hour between day and night when a man’s thoughts turn toward retrospect and when nature wears a melancholy attitude.” The lengthening shadows and growing gloom could have only added to the baseball player’s troubled mind, and he had a long pull off the whisky.  Handing the bottle back, he took the gun and said, “watch me.” Poklington turned away from the view of the river and toward his friend standing beside him just as there was a flash and a roar. Reddy had put the gun under his chin and both barrels of the shotgun fired, blowing most of his head off and all over the rocks on the Fulton shore.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 20, 1908.

 

  The sudden death of Fulton’s troubled favorite son was front-page news in Richmond. “Once Famous Ball Player Blows Top Of Head Off With Shot Gun” trumpeted one newspaper - a headline leaving little room for sentiment in its description of the grisly method of suicide. The accompanying article explained that long ago, the crowds roared in approval for Reddy who had “an arm of iron.” “His red head shone like a blaze behind the bat, and the people fondly gave him the name which afterward distinguished him more than his own.” His rise to the major leagues was recounted as the top of an arc that began and ended beside the river, in Fulton. “He was a great man with the bat, especially towards the umpire, and people resented his unruly wildness… At last, when he was down and out, when he had grown physically weak and his career was a wrecked, he saw one more finish, one more run – that one more home run he could make – and he committed suicide.”

  It seemed that over the years Foster had finally worn out his welcome in his native city, and his passing was not noted other than with the account of his sensational death.  There was no obituary for Oscar “Reddy” Foster, no call for grieving family and friends to meet at Oakwood Cemetery for his burial. Maybe Lee Poklington, termed Foster’s “last friend” in the newspaper, really was the only person he had left, and perhaps that was the reason Foster had Poklington accompany him that afternoon on his last stroll through his old neighborhood. The still-shaken Poklington may have been among the few mourners that went to Oakwood to see Reddy buried in what is today an isolated area of the cemetery, long forgotten and carpeted with crabgrass. Weeds grow up through the cracked vault lid covering the grave of one of Richmond’s most famous early ballplayers.

- Selden. 

Rare view of Seventh Street Christian Church, Seventh and Grace Streets, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1870s

 

I found this rare stereoview image of the Seventh Street Christian Church building on eBay a few weeks ago. I had no idea what church it was so I asked the members of the "Old Images of Richmond" Facebook group. Donald R. Traser, a local historian and author, answered my question. Donald, who has published The Organ in Richmond. A History of the Organs, Organists, and Organ Music in Richmond, Virginia, from 1816 to 2001 and Virginia Railway Depots, knows the history of Richmond churches quite well. Here is his response to my question:  

"The church in the picture is the Seventh Street Christian Church, which faced Grace Street at the corner of 7th. Constructed in the 1870s and demolished in the late 1940s. The architect was Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia. For the organ enthusiasts, it had a Hook & Hastings organ originally, replaced by an Austin organ in the 1920s. The Austin moved to the new building on Grove Avenue and was replaced by the current Schantz organ." - Donald R. Traser, October, 2022.  Thanks again Donald. 

The church is still active and I found more of the church's history on its website. They write: "Seventh Street Christian Church has a long rich history in Richmond. It began as Sycamore Christian Church in the 1930’s, [I think they mean the 1830s] as a direct result of Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) founders, Thomas and Alexander Campbell’s. Eventually, the congregation raised money to purchase land and build a church at Seventh and Grace streets. Officially in the new church on July 14, 1872, the congregation changed its name to Seventh Street Christian Church and worshiped there until September 29, 1946. Church growth forced them to build and relocate to the current location at Malvern & Grove where we’ve been since September 1950.

In 2002, Hanover Avenue Christian Church, which was located at Hanover and Allen Ave., closed its doors and merged with Seventh Street Christian Church. Established in 1913, Hanover Avenue Christian Church was a merger of Marshall Street Christian Church and Allen Avenue Christian Church, both outgrowths of Seventh Street Christian Church." - from their church history available HERE.

I found this very detailed article - see below - using Chronicling America. This article is from The Daily State Journal, published on September 2, 1871. Note that the name of the church was originally "Sycamore Church." 

Samuel Sloan, the building's designer, was a major American 19th-century architect - read his detailed Wikipedia entry HERE. According to The Virginia Architects, 1835-1955 by Wells and Dalton (1997) his other Virginia commissions were the Leigh Street Baptist Church built in Richmond, 1853-1857, and a Baptist Church built in 1857 in Warrenton, Virginia. The Seventh Street Christian Church building is not listed in Wells and Dalton. So this is a major find - thanks again Donald Traser.

More details on the history of the church are in the newspaper article below published in the Daily State Journal, May 2, 1873:

Lastly, here is the reverse side of the stereo of the image of the church. It does not list the church building among the views its sells. I think this is a very rare stereoview - I certainly have never seen it before. eBay is full of gems like this. 

- Ray