Content Warning: This post regards manslaughter; historical sources are shared that get somewhat grisly in places. It’s Halloween, what can I say? Read at your own discretion.

Our scene opens on the dusty urban corner of Market and Front Streets, in the 1870s.

In a squat brick building, a small hotel and saloon is being run by proprietor Henry Hoock.

This hotel was the Market Cottage.

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The Market Cottage

By all accounts, it was a very old and widely-known little hotel. When the farm market used to dwell on the east side of Front Street, beside the river, the Market Cottage Hotel stood across Front Street from it. The inn provided a comfortable place for travelling farmers to put up their horses, cool their heels, have a drink, or board overnight.

Though a brief tenure, a record is left in the Rochester Daily Union of one early proprietor, Charles Trotter, who took on the Market Cottage in 1853 then sold on its interests just a year later, 1854.

At this time, the Market Cottage Inn had an advertisement in the city directory featuring a hilarious wood font, which reminds me of Printshop Pro more than anything.

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The 1870s

But again, our story takes place later, in the 1870s.

The Market Cottage was never quite a pristine hotel of good repute, but even that modicum of repute had worn off by the 1870s. It was the sort of place where someone might find a dead body.

Or, on not-so-dramatic days, it might be the sort of place where guests roam the halls covered in bedbugs and blood.

Henry Hoock and his son, Henry Hoock Jr., had operated the hotel and saloon since 1871. Two years later, and little seemed likely to change.

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William Henry

Enter William Henry.

William Henry was 22 years old, and he worked as a clerk in the butcher shop of Adam Brown, No. 42 Front Street. It was a typical skeevy Front Street butcher; Brown boasted boldly about his beef in his newspaper advertisements, but was operating sans butchery license while fending off the Clerk of Markets with promises to pay for one. Later on, he’d be arrested for this and forced to pay ten dollars–but that’s all secondary to the fact that William Henry worked there.

While Henry worked, he put his horse up at the stables of the Market Cottage.

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November 5th, 1873

It was a cloudy November day and the thermometer hadn’t topped thirty degrees. William Henry was spending his late afternoon getting powerfully drunk. He had something on his mind: his horse.

He’d felt for some time that his horse was being poorly cared for at the Market Cottage stables; maybe they neglected to brush her regularly, or feed her enough, or put a blanket on her in the nippy cold. The record doesn’t say, and it doesn’t matter. William Henry’s brain was braising in a boiling bath of alcohol and anger. His only concern now was working up a head of steam to go in and give Hoock a piece of his mind.

Six o’clock struck and William Henry burst through the door of the Market Cottage. A cold November chill followed as he stalked across the saloon floor, whereupon he reached the bar and hammered his angry fists against the planks.

Behind the bar stood Henry Hoock, Junior, the 13-year-old son of the proprietor, unimpressed by the inebriate’s fury. Nettled by William Henry’s accusations, Hoock spat nails back at Henry. The two had squabbled for some time when William Henry, incensed, said something the elder Hoock could not abide. [According to Hoock’s deposition, this statement was “You son of a bitch!”] Henry Hoock, Senior came to the aid of his son, ordering the vulgar William Henry out of the establishment. When he refused, Hoock prodded him with two smart blows from a police truncheon he kept under the bar.

At this, William Henry’s rage grew incandescent. The men came to grapples and blows, with Henry being beaten back away from the bar into the bar-room by Hoock and his cudgel.

The struggle continued for but a moment, when suddenly Hoock exclaimed in pain, “I’ve been cut!” Bolting through the door, William Henry made good his escape. From his hand tumbled the weapon, a simple two-bladed pocket clasp knife such as any man might carry.

Hoock staggered and collapsed into the arms of a bystander; he was grievously wounded, a seam having been sliced into his abdomen from which intestines were protruding.

Emergency surgery had to be performed; Hoock was in critical condition. The small wound had to be opened larger in order for the great mass of intestines to be fit back inside Hoock’s gut.

With the wound treated as well as the medicine men could manage, it was a waiting game to see if Hoock had been fatally struck by William Henry’s hand. In agony and jacked up with the finest medical stimulants 1873 had to offer, Hoock swore a deposition against Henry and signed it with an X.

The officers Ferry Marzluff and Peter Lauer tracked down the fugitive knifeman to the house at which his widowed mother, Christiana Henry, was boarding, No. 10 Jackson Street.

Christiana Wieldsen Henry, a German immigrant, had lost her husband William Henry in 1866 when his lifeless body was fished from Child’s Basin. The coroners reported it as death by accidental drowning, due to inebriation. Christiana was thereafter forced to raise their nine children on her own.

Doubtless it was an unhappy experience for Christiana to have her eldest child–and her husband’s namesake–come to her frantically, begging for sanctuary, after he’d just slashed a saloon-keeper. But he was, after all, her son, so she took him in.

When officers Lauer and Marzluff apprehended William Henry, he was still extremely drunk. Though reticent to answer the officers’ questions, he corroborated Henry Hoock’s story save one element: William denied the use of a knife.

Obviously this line of reasoning wouldn’t bear out; Hoock’s abdomen did not spontaneously split open from the stress of argument, nor did his entrails make a bid for escape because of a fist’s errant blow. Hoock had been badly slashed, and there was none other to answer for that crime but William Henry.

I attempted to visit the grave of Henry Hoock; however, the plot in Mt. Hope Cemetery where he is registered as being interred does not contain any markers for him.

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William Henry Sentenced

The trial of William Henry began a few months later, March 19, 1874, in the court of Judge Charles C. Dwight.

William Henry was represented by attorney Christopher C. Davison.

The people versus William Henry were represented by District Attorney George Raines.

The jury reached a consensus that William Henry did not demonstrate an intent to kill. Hoock’s consequent death from the wound constituted manslaughter, in the third degree, for which William Henry was sentenced to three years and two months of hard labor at Auburn Prison; however, the Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York lists his term as 5 years.

Either way, William Henry would have been released from prison not too long before his mother died in December of 1882, of malarial fever.

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Aftermath

Life carried on for the widowed Florentine Hoock and the junior Henry Hoock, with all of its brutal banality. The following year, Florentine had a grocery at the corner of Frances and Hunter Streets–what would today be the southeast corner of Jefferson Avenue and Dr. Samuel McCree Way.

Florentine would be listed as a grocer for the next three years’ directories; in 1878 she no longer has an occupational title in the directory.

Henry H. Hoock, Jr. would go on to become a shoemaker; he would marry Sophia Stetzenmeyer and settle into No. 190 Cottage Street, where they would live out the rest of their days. Sophia would pass away in 1940 at age 85, leaving Henry, who died 1956 at age 95.

It appears their house was still extant as of 2007.

However, in 2012 the property sustained heavy fire damage, most likely from arson.

By 2014 the house had been razed to the ground, and the lot has remained a simple grass lot ever since.

Sophia and Henry Hoock were buried together in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

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The Market after the Murder

After the dust from the murders settled, the Market Cottage saloon was purchased by Wendell Charles Bayer, former fire department chief.

Wendell Bayer may have had a bit too much of a taste for alcohol; one firefighter, albeit it one Wendell had recently suspended, claimed Bayer had shown up noticeably intoxicated for at least three or four major fire events. Doubtless if this were so, proprietorship of a saloon was likely not good in combination.

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Francis Doud

In 1892, Bayer sold the Market Cottage to Francis Doud.

Doud was a member of a family of hoteliers; most notable was his brother Dennis Doud, who ran the Oyster Bay hotel, the National hotel, and the Bristol Hotel.

Note the belt-driven ceiling fan in the above image, simply because it’s cool as heck.

Under Francis Doud’s administration, the Market Cottage continued its tradition of fights and random deaths.

Doud was known to turn a blind eye to excise laws of the time and pull a few drinks for customers on a Sunday, without so much as a scrap of food as a fig leaf “dinner”. Eventually, he’d be caught in the act and arrested.

Francis Doud died in 1941, a year after the American Legion post, William W. Doud Post No. 98 was opened at No. 898 Buffalo Road. The post was named in honor of Francis’ son, William Wiley Doud, who was killed by an explosive shell during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France during the final days of World War I.

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Final Years of Market Cottage

Francis Doud would retire his share in the Market Cottage in 1914, and Nicholas R. Marion would become proprietor for one year, 1915, after which Charles E. Keenan took proprietorship.

Despite his short tenure, Nicholas R. Marion’s name would be on the placard when these quality photographs were taken in 1915:

In 1921, the next door neighbor, pawnbroker Isaac Bernstein, expanded into the Market Cottage space and repurposed it as their loan office, for which the entrance was on Market Street.

It would remain Bernstein’s Loan Office for only two years; in 1923 the property was sold off to Fred H. Becker, a meat seller, who would remodel it into a meat market.

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A Memory of Mortality

The above article brings us to November of 1923, exactly fifty years after the tragic slaying of Henry Hoock. Many of the involved parties had passed on. Henry Hoock’s widow, Florentine, died in 1891. Henry H. Hoock, Jr. was now 66 years old, with two grown sons, Albert and Jacob, who had married and had children of their own. William Henry, the man who slayed Hoock Sr., had perished seventeen years before, in 1906 in Pueblo, Colorado.

A man’s death had become another memory of our city’s streets, as so many deaths before and as so many would come to be.

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