The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Addison Howell and the Clockroach Documented by Cherie Priest

Museum Name and Location: The Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry; Port Angeles, Washington

Name of Exhibit: Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana

Category information

Creator: Addison Sobiesky Howell (alleged); American, born 1828 in Chicago, Illnois. Died 1899 in Humptulips, Washington

Title: “Clockroach,” built 1878(?)

Medium: Mixed, primarily steel, cast iron, rubber tubing, and glass

Source: Donated in 1953 by the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, Washington, at cost of transportation—and a gentleman’s agreement with regards to subsequent restoration and display

Accession number: 1953.99

Exhibit Introduction Panel: Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana

The Olympic Peninsula has long been home to a number of Native American tribes, including the Hoh, Makah, and the Quileute; but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that it became settled by white homesteaders. Primarily, these homesteaders were farmers and loggers, lured by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the promise of a temperate climate.

Though much can be said about the Native traditions and myths, this exhibit focuses on the rural homesteaders and their inevitable bedtime or campfire stories—some of which were regarded with a seriousness that borders on the charmingly naïve or dangerously optimistic, as evidenced by the items on display.

Highlights of the collection include:

(1908.32, items a-g) Filbert Seyfarth’s assortment of “vampire-killing” poisons. These anti-undead concoctions were understandably unpopular—considering that, given a vampire’s traditional diet, the poisons must first be consumed by a potential victim (presumably, of the suicidally game-for-anything variety).

(1912.11) Earl Lenning’s Skoocooms Mesmerizing Ray (patent no. D224,997), a trigger-operated light-projecting contraption intended to befuddle a creature now better known as “Sasquatch.” The existence of this device leads some researchers to suspect that a Native American practical joker enjoyed a hearty laugh at Mr. Lenning’s expense.

(1953.99) Addison Howell’s “Clockroach,” a one-man, quasi-lobster-shaped vehicle allegedly designed and driven by an aloof, peculiar craftsman who was rumored to be the devil himself.

We at the Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry would like to welcome you to this exhibit and invite you to ask questions. However, we ask that you not touch the Clockroach—nor allow children to climb upon it and make the choo-choo noise, as this is both contextually inappropriate and bound to result in tetanus shots for all concerned.

Clockroach: The Legend

(Oral tradition transcribed by UW graduate student Gregory Blum from an interview with Petra Oberg [1902–1996], daughter of Isac and Emma Johnson—two of Humptulips’ original settlers.)

Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the logging company, and mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, as my daddy put it.¹

Mr. Howell built himself a house, way outside of town, a big three-story place set back in the hills—and you couldn’t see it until you were right on top of it, what with all the trees.

He had a wife with him at one point, but she died up there. Folks said he’d murdered her with an ax, but there was never any proof of that and we didn’t have any law at the time nohow, not a sheriff or anything, much less a jail. We had a mayor, though—a fellow named Herp Jones—and I think if Herp could’ve rounded up enough warm bodies, he would’ve seen to a lynch mob.² But everyone he might’ve asked was either working or drinking, so I guess that didn’t happen.

The town gave Mrs. Howell a Christian burial in a little plot back behind the only church we had, and her guilty-as-sin husband paid a pretty penny to have a crypt built up around her. It was a real big deal, because nobody else in town had ever gotten a crypt, and only about half the folks who ever died even got a tomb stone.³ Then Mr. Howell went back to his house in the trees, and, for the most part, nobody hardly ever saw him again.

Addison Howell on his Clockroach

A few years later, as I heard it, Addison Howell was out and about doing whatever it is a wicked man does on a Sunday, and he came across a homesteader’s camp just off the old logging road. There was a wagon with a broken axle, and two dead men lying beside a campfire. It looked like they’d been tore up by wolves, or maybe mountain lions, or somesuch creature. But inside the wagon he heard a little girl crying. He looked inside and she screamed, and she bit him—because like attracts like, I suppose, and the girl had a bad streak in her, too. That’s why he took her home with him.

She was maybe eight or nine when he brought her inside, and legend has it she was mute. Or maybe she didn’t feel like talking, I couldn’t say. . . . ⁴ . . . Anyway, he raised her as his own, and they lived together in the house in the hills, and nobody ever visited them because everybody knew they were doing evil things up there.⁵

But people started telling stories about hearing strange noises out there at night, like someone was whacking on metal with a hammer, or sawing through steel. Word got around that he was building a machine that looked like a big bug, or a lobster, or something. It had a big stack on top and it was steam-powered, or coal-powered, or anyway it was supposed to move around when he was sitting inside it.

I don’t know who was fool-headed enough to get close enough to listen, but somebody did, and somebody talked.

And later on, the mayor and some friends of his, all of them with guns and itchy trigger fingers, went up to that house and demanded to know what was going on up there. For all they knew, he was summoning Satan,⁶ or beating up that girl,⁷ or raising whatever kind of hell I just don’t know.

Addison Howell told them they were welcome to look around, so they did. They didn’t find anything, and they were mad about it. They asked the girl what was going on, but she wouldn’t say nothing and they thought maybe she was scared of Howell, and that’s why she wasn’t being helpful. But she was a teenager by then, or old enough that she could live there with a dirty old man if she felt like it, and people’d look askance, but no one would take her away.

Not long after that, Addison Howell went into town to do some business—he was over at the logging foreman’s place, and nobody has any idea why, or what they were talking about. They got into some kind of fight—the foreman’s wife overheard it and she came out and saw them struggling, so she took her husband’s shotgun and she blew the back of Addison Howell’s head clean off, and he died right then and there.

The foreman went and got Herp Jones, and between ’em, they figured it was good riddance. They decided they should just leave him in the crypt with his wife, since there was a slot for him and everything, and that’s what they did. They wrapped up his body and carried it off.

When they got to the crypt, they found that one of the doors was hanging open—and that was odd, but they didn’t make nothing of it. They thought maybe there’d been an earthquake, a little one that wasn’t much noticed, and the place had gone a little crooked. It happens all the time. But inside the thing, they found the floor all tore up. There used to be marble tiles down there, and now they were gone. Nothing but dirt was left.

I expect they wondered if someone hadn’t gotten inside and stolen them. Marble might’ve been worth something.

They didn’t worry about it much, though. They just dumped old Addison Howell into his slot, scooted the lid over him, and shut the place up behind them. Then they remembered the girl who lived at Howell’s place—nobody knew her name, on account of she’d never said it—and they headed up there to let her know what had happened.

I think privately they thought maybe now she’d come into town and pick a husband, somebody normal and good for her. There weren’t enough women to go around as it was, and she was pretty enough to get a lot of interest.

When they told her the news she started screaming. They dragged her into town to try and calm her down, but she wasn’t having any of it. Around that time there was a doctor passing through, or maybe Humptulips had gotten one of its own. Regardless, this doctor gave her something to make her sleep, trying to settle her. They left her in the back room of the general store, passed out on a cot.

And that night, the town woke up to a terrible commotion coming from the cemetery behind Saint Hubert’s. Everybody jumped out of bed, and people grabbed their guns and their logging axes, and they went running down to the church to see what was happening—and the whole place was just in ruins. The church was on fire, and the cemetery looked like someone had set off a bunch of dynamite all over it. The Howell crypt was just a bunch of rubble, and there was a big old crater where it used to be.

And by the light of the burning church, the mayor and the logging foreman and about a dozen other people all swear by the saints and Jesus, too . . . they saw a big machine with a tall black stack crawling away—and sitting inside it was the demon Addison Howell, driving the thing straight back to hell. Some said he was laughing, some said he was crying. Most everyone said they were glad he was gone.

ENDNOTES

1. Colloquialism for severe poverty. I offered to amend the “i” in “piss” to an asterisk for the sake of decency, but head of antiquities Dr. Meagher said to leave it alone, surprising no one even a little bit.

2. Census records for this region are all but nonexistent until well into the twentieth century, so little is officially known about the town’s population; but anecdotal evidence and extensive, thankless, unpaid legwork by a graduate student (who is poor enough to warrant an analogy in need of an asterisk) suggests that fewer than three hundred people were in residence at the time.

3. Records kept at Saint Hubert’s Church imply an average of half a dozen deaths per year—startling only if one fails to consider that Humptulips was a logging town. As a side note, it turns out that St. Hubert is the patron saint of woodsmen.

4. Mrs. Oberg took this opportunity to speculate with regards to what wild animals might have eaten the girl’s family, and then suggested that maybe she was too traumatized to speak thereafter. She also brought up the possibility that Mr. Howell was a pedophile, though that isn’t the term she used. As Mrs. Oberg went on at great length upon the subject, her digression has been edited out. After all, an endnote is in better taste, unless Dr. Meagher wants a protracted diatribe about body parts and their respective fluids described with a good number of Anglo-Saxon, consonant-heavy words engraved on a plaque right there on the exhibit, surely prompting a number of embarrassed parents^4a to answer many awkward questions on the way back to the car.

4a. Do they still let children scale the Clockroach and pretend it’s a train? That was always my favorite part of school field trips to the SMPI, until one day I fell off and impaled my foot on a rusty spring. They made me get a tetanus shot.

5. When asked precisely how everybody knew this if no one ever visited them, Mrs. Oberg’s ironclad logic went as follows: “If they weren’t up to any mischief, they would’ve just moved to town like civilized people.”

6. This seems rather unlikely.

7. The interviewer considered the wisdom of interrupting to ask if the girl was made of metal, given Mrs. Oberg’s previous statement, but resolved instead to save his breath. After all, he wasn’t getting paid by the word. Or at all.

Clockroach: The Facts

(Fact-checking provided courtesy of Julia Frimpendump, professor emeritus of regional history, University of Washington. Sponsored in part by the West Coast Pioneer Bibliography Project, but not sponsored so extensively that the graduate student who was stuck typing out Dr. Frimpendump’s notes was compensated one red cent for his efforts.)

Though Saint Hubert’s church was, in fact, subjected to a fire in 1889, it did not burn in its entirety, and most of its records were preserved. There is a record of burial for a woman named “Rose M. Howell” on October 2, 1878, lending credence that the story of Addison Howell may hold a grain of truth; but there is no record for Mr. Howell’s death, nor any subsequent burial.

After consulting with an archeo-industrialist in Cincinnati, I have concluded that the peculiar device known locally as “the clockroach” is very likely intended for use in the logging industry. Its forward claws suggest a machine capable of carrying tremendous weight, and the multiple legs imply that it could have traversed difficult terrain while successfully bearing a load.

Based on this information, one could speculate a kinder story for the tragic Addison Howell. It’s reasonable to guess that he might have been a lonely man who adopted an orphaned girl, and in his spare time he devoted himself to tinkering . . . eventually coming up with this peculiar engine that might have revolutionized the industry, had it been adopted and mass-produced. His conversation-turned-argument with the logging foreman may have been some patent dispute, or an altercation over the invention’s worth—there’s no way to know.

The casual record-keeping and insular nature of a tiny homesteader’s town has left us little with which to speculate.

However, the remains of a marble crypt can be found in Saint Hubert’s churchyard. The church’s present minister, Father Frowd, says that it collapsed during an earthquake well before his time—and to the best of his knowledge, it was salvaged for materials.

As for the wagon with the murdered occupants and the sole surviving child, evidence suggests that a family by the name of Sanders left Olympia, Washington, intending to homestead near Humptulips in 1881. This family consisted of a widower Jacob and his brother Daniel, and his brother’s daughter Emily. The small family never reached Humptulips, and no record of their demise or reappearance has ever been found.

In one tantalizing clue located (once again) via Saint Hubert’s, a spinster named “Emily Howell” reportedly passed away in 1931, at the estimated age of sixty. Her age was merely estimated because she never gave it, and she passed away without family members or identification. She was found dead alone in the large home she kept outside the city limits—her cause of death unknown.

But she is buried behind the church, and her tombstone reads simply, EMILY HOWELL, D. 1931. SHE NEVER FORGOT HIM, AND NEVER FORGAVE US.