Minnesota & Vermont: Strangers in a Strange Land

Season 40: America's 250th — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years of American history. This

double-feature takes us to two immigrant communities separated by two decades and a thousand miles. In

Minnesota, 1884, a boarding house keeper is murdered by the stranger he nursed back to health. In Vermont,

1903, a nation's greatest granite carver is shot dead during a political brawl in the hall his own community built.

Two states. Two crimes. One question: what did it cost to belong?

The Victims

Joseph Farley ran a saloon and boarding house in Tower, Minnesota, on the Vermilion Iron Range. In 1884, Tower

was one of the newest places in America — the Soudan Mine had shipped its first iron ore only months earlier.

Men flooded in from Duluth, Michigan, Finland, Sweden, Cornwall, and Germany. Farley fed them, housed them,

nursed them when they fell sick. He took in a Finnish immigrant named John Waisenen, who arrived broke and

ill. Farley cared for him, then gave him a job. Nothing else survives about Joseph Farley — no age, no birthplace,

no family. He is remembered only through his generosity and the murder it invited.

Elia Corti was born in Viggiu, Italy, on December 21, 1869, and by his early thirties he was doing things with Barre

Grey granite that no one in America could match. The New York Times called him the nation's greatest granite

carver. His masterwork: a set of bas-relief panels on the Robert Burns Memorial in Barre, Vermont — an Italian

immigrant carving Scottish poetry into Vermont stone. The monument stands twenty-two feet four inches above

its foundation, dedicated July 21, 1899. By 1901, Corti had his own firm. He was thirty-three years old, a father of

three daughters, and at the height of his craft.

The Crimes

On November 19, 1884, Farley rode out to Camp Sixty-Two with Waisenen and another Finnish immigrant, John

Norland, to collect boards from his cabins. At the camp, the two men turned on him. Farley's skull was crushed.

They set fire to the cabin with his body inside. William Varrill and his sons arrived to find the cabin burning and

both men standing nearby with Farley's horses. The motive was robbery. Waisenen received thirty dollars for

helping kill the man who had saved his life.

On the evening of October 3, 1903, Corti stopped at the Socialist Labor Party Hall on Granite Street in Barre on

his way home from a funeral dinner. A socialist speaker was scheduled, but he was late. As the crowd waited,

anarchists and socialists began fighting — taunts, shoving, then a knife and a chair. At approximately 7:15 PM,

Alessandro Garetto, a socialist tool-sharpener, drew a pistol and fired three times. Two shots hit furniture and

clothing. The third struck Elia Corti in the stomach. He was carried to Heaton Hospital in Montpelier, where he

lingered for thirty hours. Shortly after midnight on October 5, 1903, Corti died. He was thirty-three.

### The Investigations and Aftermath

Sheriff McQuade of St. Louis County led the Minnesota case. The evidence was straightforward: Varrill placed

both men at the scene, and Waisenen confessed. Norland hanged himself in his jail cell on April 9, 1885, with a

blanket. Waisenen went to trial, was convicted, and sentenced to death — the first execution in Minnesota in

seventeen years. On August 28, 1885, at 3:02 PM, Sheriff McQuade pulled the lever. Waisenen's hanging broke

the state's informal moratorium on executions. Several more followed, culminating in the botched hanging of

William Williams on February 13, 1906, where the rope was too long and it took fourteen and a half minutes for him

to die. Public horror over the Williams case led to Governor Adolph Olson Eberhart signing the law that abolished

capital punishment in Minnesota in 1911.

In Vermont, Garetto was convicted of manslaughter — not murder — and sentenced to ten to twelve years at

Windsor Prison. The jury accepted that the shooting occurred in a chaotic brawl and that Corti may not have

been the intended target. Garetto served his time, returned briefly to Barre, and is believed to have gone back to

Italy. On October 6, 1903, fifty-two wagons followed Corti's hearse to Hope Cemetery. Anarchists and socialists

walked together. No priest officiated, honoring Corti's dying wish. In the months that followed, his brother William

carved a life-size memorial from a single block of Barre Grey granite — Elia seated, tools at his feet, one hand

on a broken column, with an expression described as pensive, confused, as if trying to understand what had

happened.

### Historical Context

The Socialist Labor Party Hall, built in 1900 by Italian community volunteers, was designated a National Historic

Landmark in 2000 — the only building in the country known to have been constructed by volunteer members

of the Socialist Labor Party. Luigi Galleani continued publishing Cronaca Sovversiva, first from Barre, then from

Lynn, Massachusetts after 1912, until the paper was suppressed in 1920. His followers carried out bombing attacks

across the United States in subsequent years.

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