Bob Kriebel

For the Journal & Courier

On Saturday, June 10, 1876, a 37-year-old farmer, blacksmith, self-proclaimed inventor and Civil War veteran drove a horse and wagon nine miles into Lafayette from rural Union Township. It was mellow and warm, strawberry time, and people were already munching lettuce and early peas from farm and home gardens.

Out in the township James A. Moon lived with his wife, Mary, and two children, in a two-story but small frame house. The house stood over a cellar on mortared fieldstones, with a cistern in the back, and faced the Locust Grove & High Gap Pike (Sleeper Road on today’s Tippecanoe County map).

Moon’s horse strained to pull the wagon baring both the bearded, hatted farmer and his heavy trunk filled, as it turned out, with the many trappings of an inventor:

Five 30-inch lengths of 1-by-6 lumber, a wooden soapbox, assorted screws, leather straps, a dowel, a brace and three bits, a wrench, a screwdriver, a candle, a few yards of lightweight cord, matches and a pencil.

Moon joined scores of other Saturday farmers on a glorious day around the Tippecanoe Courthouse Square in Lafayette.

Moon tied his horse somewhere out of the way, then walked by the busy marketplace on Fifth and entered the Lahr House, the venerable hostelry on Main Street by the railroad tracks. There proprietor Otho Weakley and a workforce rented rooms for overnight guests, or sites for permanent lodgers such as merchant businessman John Purdue himself.

Moon insisted on a quiet room, maybe something in the rear, abutting the alley if possible. He said he wished to be away from any noise; he could sleep only in a quiet room. When the clerk showed Room 41, on the third floor near the south end of the Lahr House, overlooking the marketplace, Moon at last nodded: “It suits me first-rate.” It was 12 by 14 feet with a window opening west looking over Fifth Street, a door in the south wall opening into adjoining Room 40, another in the east wall opening into the hall. A bed, washstand and table furnished the room.

Moon soon locked the room, and walked a block to Isaac L. Beach’s hardware store near Fourth and Main. There Moon paid cash for a razor-sharp broadax head (minus handle) with a 12-inch blade, had it wrapped, then lugged it four blocks down to Second and South. He presented the axe to a clerk at Thomas Harding & Son’s foundry, selected two heavy pieces of two-inch iron plate from foundry stock, and asked that the foundry bore holes through the iron and broadax, then bolt them together. When a foundrymen asked what for, Moon explained that “I’m inventing an instrument for making fruit baskets.”

He commandeered a Lahr House porter named John Cain and another helper, led them to the wagon, and requested that they get the heavy trunk up to Room 41. He cautioned them not to jostle the trunk because of the contents, for he was finishing “work on an important invention to be patented.” He followed the hard-breathing porters up to the room, and there showed them precisely where and how to place the trunk. The porters left. Soon Moon locked the door and left again.

Moon prowled the evening streets, seeing a few Civil War comrades and cheerfully enjoying the reminiscences of old friends. He returned to his room at 8 or 9 (Saturday) evening and was never again seen alive.

On Sunday afternoon, June 11, a Lahr House maid named Bridget Clogan tried several times to rouse the occupant of Room 41 so that she could clean and straighten. By 5 p.m. Sunday, finding the room still locked, she entered the adjoining Room 40 with a passkey, let herself into Room 41, then screamed at the horror she beheld.

A few doors down the hall a startled traveling salesman from Cincinnati and a visiting Lafayette businessman, Henry C. Tinney, heard the screams and rushed to the maid’s assistance. In Room 41 the men saw Moon’s body strapped to the wooden floor, his head cleanly severed by the blood-splattered broadax bolted to a six-foot-long wooden arm so as to constitute a crude guillotine.

Lahr House clerks sent for the authorities. Shortly the Tippecanoe County Coroner, Dr. William W. Vinnedge, arrived. For two days Dr. Vinnedge studied Moon’s suicide from every angle.

The evidence suggested that Moon had not invented a mechanism to make fruit baskets at all. He had built this portable but very functional guillotine, hiding its disassembled components in the trunk.

One end of the jointed wooden arm — fashioned out of the 1-by-6 lumber — swung on a hinge screwed into the floor. The two-inch thick iron bars bolted to the broadax weighted the far end. Moon had measured things precisely then strapped himself so that the ax would fall upon his throat.

Moon even put a 50-inch wood block under his neck. It made a solid place for the blade to hit. Investigators marveled at his ingenuity calculating the drop. He had fastened a metal ring to the wooden arm. (Most people used such rings for hanging pictures.) To the ring he fastened a length of the cord. He set a small Lahr House candleholder over on the window sill. He put his own candle in it. Then he ran the cord past the candle and tied it to the window frame.

Moon raised the hinged ax-arm to 45 degrees. He tightened the cord enough to hold the arm in place. He lit the candle, set it just above the taut cord so that it had to burn down for several minutes to singe it. With this much time, he strapped himself to the floor, head in the soap box. He soaked the batting in chloroform, set the batting over his nose, and waited. In time, the candle burned the cord. The ax fell with a splattering thud.

The verdict of the jury was swift and simple: Death by suicide, owing no doubt to mental instability. Rumors swiftly spread about Moon being brilliant but odd, a mechanical genius, a crazyman. Moon’s surviving family and friends related how he had vowed someday to “do something that will cause people to talk about me.”

That he did! But dozens of questions about the how and why, the when and the where, remain unanswered to this day.

Survivors buried Moon in a grave dug along the west side of the Farmers Institute Cemetery. About a mile east of Moon’s home, the cemetery is northwest of the present junction of Tippecanoe County roads 375-W and 660-S.

About this series

Each week, in celebration of Indiana's 200th anniversary, the Journal & Courier is reprinting some of the best of Bob Kriebel's Old Lafayette columns. Today is a look at one of the most unusual deaths in Lafayette history. This is taken from columns published Oct. 22, Oct. 29 and Nov. 5, 1989.