| BREAKFAST | DINNER | SUPPER | |
| Tuesday Aug 2 | ? | Swordfish (fried) | Swordfish (warmed) baker’s bread, tea, milk cookies, cake |
| Wednesday Aug 3 | Pork steak Johnny cakes (1) Pears, coffee Milk | Mutton stew (2) | Mutton stew (warmed) bread, milk, cookies, cake |
| Thursday Aug 4 | Mutton (cold) Mutton stew (warmed) Johnny cakes Bananas, coffee, milk | Mutton, warmed (3) Mutton stew |
(1) A small, inedible pancake made by frying corn meal
(2) John Morse thought it tasted like veal
(3) Warmed mutton was what Bridget Sullivan would have cooked for dinner if . . .
The final breakfast is a famous one. It has been said, not entirely in jest, that it must have been the catalyst if not the cause of the murders. Keep in mind, though, that hearty breakfasts such as this one were much more common in the "good old days" than they are today. Growing up in rural New Hampshire in the 1930s, I can remember eating warmed over steak for breakfast (it tasted a lot better than mutton).
House of Horror
The photograph below shows the Borden property at 92 Second Street as it looked a few months after the murders. The narrow 22 story house faces Second Street; the back of the property abuts houses on Third Street. The ornate picket fence at the front had two gates. The one shown at the right led directly to the front door; the other gate led to a side entrance located towards the back of the house. There was also an entrance in the rear (not shown) which opened into the cellar. It's not obvious from the photograph, but the entire property was enclosed by wooden fences which separated the Bordens from their neighbors.
FIGURE 2.7 Front view of Borden house, circa 1892
Behind the house you can see the two story barn, where Liz-zie said she was when Andrew was murdered. Until a year or two before the murders,Andrew Borden kept a horse; in August of 1892 the barn served no useful purpose except as a storage area for articles no longer used but too valuable to throw away. To the right of the barn were several pear trees, which have been mentioned a couple of times already. Apparently everyone in the household except Bridget liked, or at least ate, pears.
The Borden house was built in 1845 as a two-family tenement. The first and second floors were virtually identical at that time; each contained a kitchen, two medium sized rooms and two small rooms. When Andrew Borden bought the house in 1872, he converted the upstairs kitchen to a master bedroom. Downstairs, a partition between the two small rooms was removed to make a dining room. The resulting layouts of the two floors are shown in the diagram below.
The downstairs parlor was almost never used. Had President Harrison come to visit, he would probably have been entertained there, but ordinary guests like John Morse made themselves comfortable in the sitting room. That was where Andrew and John talked in the darkness on the night of Wednesday, August 3. It was also where Andrew Borden was murdered on Thursday and where the funeral was held on Saturday.
The kitchen was where the "survivors" (Lizzie, Bridget, Adelaide Churchill, Alice Russell and Dr. Bowen) gathered after Andrew's body was discovered. Notice that in order to get from the kitchen to the front stairs, you had to pass through the sitting room. Perhaps that was why Bridget refused to go alone to look for Abby in the upstairs guest room; she had to pass by Andrew's body on the sitting room sofa.
FIGURE 2.8 Layout of the Borden house
From Goodye, Lizzie Borden, pp. 14, 15
The second floor was effectively divided into two compartments. The two rooms toward the back (master bedroom, dressing room) were accessible only from the back staircase; the door to Lizzie's room was blocked by a heavy bureau. The three rooms at the front, facing Second Street (Lizzie's room, Emma's room, and the guest room) could be reached only from the front staircase. Notice that Emma's room was considerably smaller than Lizzie's. When the Bordens moved into the house, Emma, as the older sister, got the larger room. When Lizzie came back from Europe they switched. According to Emma, that was her own idea; maybe so, maybe not.
The back staircase went all the way from the cellar to the attic, where Bridget's room was located. Notice that she was far removed from the sitting room; given that and the street noise, it's hardly surprising that Bridget was unaware of Andrew's murder when it occurred.
The Borden house in 1892 had only one modern convenience, central heating furnished by a coal furnace. When city water became available in 1874, Andrew installed two cold water taps, one in the first floor sink room, the other in the laundry room in the cellar. Later he added a third faucet in the barn so he could water his horse. For all this, Andrew paid the city of Fall River $10 a year.
There was no convenient source of hot water in the Borden house. If you wanted to take a bath, you could start a fire under a large cast iron cauldron in the cellar; a couple of hours later you'd have ten gallons or more of hot water. Alternatively, you could heat smaller quantities of water to boiling on the kitchen stove, which burned wood or coal. (No wonder most people only bathed once a week a hundred years ago.)
There was only one toilet in the house, euphemistically called a "water closet"; it was located in the cellar. There was no water above the ground floor. Each bedroom was equipped with a receptacle called a chamber pot for nocturnal liquid waste. Andrew called his a "slop pail" and emptied it each morning in the back yard. The ladies of the household were more circumspect; they emptied their chamber pots in the water closet.
At the time of the murders, illuminating gas had been available in Fall River for several years; electric lights were just coming in. The Bordens had neither; Andrew was satisfied with kerosene lamps, which he used sparingly. Certainly, for a person of his means, the house was fitted out in a primitive way. Lizzie complained about this to her father, loudly and frequently, but to no avail.
Surprisingly, the Borden house has survived, almost unchanged structurally. The present owner, Martha McGinn, has restored the Victorian motif of a century ago and opened a bed and breakfast (telephone: 508 675 7333); tours are also available. Before staying there overnight, I checked on the number of toilets and the supply of hot water; both are more than adequate. The breakfast does not feature mutton of any kind. Otherwise it's pretty much as John Morse described it on that fateful morning in 1892; "plenty of it."
The Neighborhood
The surroundings of the Borden house are shown in the sketch below. Adelaide Churchill, the forty two year old widow who came over to console Lizzie on the morning of the murders, was her next door neighbor to the north. The two houses were only twenty feet apart but, because of the gate and fence arrangement, Mrs. Churchill had to walk considerably further to get from her front door to the side entrance of the Borden house. Dr. Kelly and his wife lived directly south of the Bordens; their house was somewhat more distant than Mrs. Churchill's.
