Sarah Carter's world starts on the River Exe, not the Ohio Canal.
She was born 1 June 1850 at Dotton Mill, near Harpford, in southeastern Devonshire, the sixth child of the miller, Joel Roger Carter, and his wife Mary, formerly Dyer.1 2 Sarah may have grown up in a pleasant seacoast county in southwest England, but her childhood was far from idyllic. The family lived in the old mill where her father and his ancestors had made their living before him. Dotton Mill was so ancient, it had been enumerated in William the Conqueror's Domesday Book.2
Dotton Mill, a working mill near Harpford, Devon, was demolished in 1968 after standing more than a thousand years. Several generations of the Carter family lived here.
The impacts of this upbringing may have begun seeping from her character after "crossing the pond" as a young wife set on building a life in Akron. With her husband of two years, James Murch3, Sarah had sailed for America on 21 April 1873.4
James and "Mrs. Murch" crossed to New York aboard the White Star liner Baltic, sailing steerage from Liverpool.4 The Baltic was new and fast, having taken the transatlantic speed record on the Queenstown run just three months earlier.5
They took their chance, perhaps influenced by elder brother Joel Roger Carter, nine years Sarah's senior. He had immigrated several years earlier to the growing Midwest city where he made his home. Like his father, the younger J.R. Carter earned his living as a miller. Unlike his father, who had been hauled before debtor's court in 1851,6 J.R. was quite the businessman. He had become an early investor and factory owner in the canal town's burgeoning oatmeal industry.7 Many years later and long after Joel's death, this industry consolidated into Quaker Oats.
Six years after the James and Sarah Murch settled in Akron came the shocking news published in the Summit County Beacon on 19 March 1879.8
The headline left nothing to the imagination: "A Wife's Two Attempts to Poison her Husband" and "She Flees at Length with her Paramour."8
The article read, "James Murch, an employe in one of the mills of the city, returned home on Park Street near the railroad, and found his supper on the table… everything about the house in the usual order… but no wife was there."8
Sixty dollars were missing.8
After speaking with his wife's acquaintances, Murch learned that Sarah had told them "she expected soon to join her fortunes to those of a man with money."8
Joe Lehmann, about 30, living with his mother in South Akron, had for months been "intimately acquainted" with Murch's wife, visiting her at her home "and under the very eyes of the bereft husband."8 Murch knew about his wife's affair, but decided to await developments.
Eight months before she ran off, the Summit County Beacon had reported that Murch had a bout of sunstroke. "When attempting to leave his house, had become prostrated and in the afternoon, had convulsions," the newspaper reported.9
Murch had developed another theory: he told the newspaper he had come to suspect this was the first attempt on his life by his wife, "once by poisoning his coffee (the sunstroke episode), and again, two nights before this report, by applying a chloroform-soaked handkerchief to his face while he slept."8
Lehmann had left Akron about two weeks before this report, telling his mother and the Akron Junior Band (of which he was a member) that he had gone to Texas to buy land, and taking with him "a considerable sum of money."8
A Summit County land transaction reveals Joseph selling his Akron property to his mother Theresa, executed 27 Feb. 1879 for $250 — an amount that would have gone far toward getting out of town and starting anew.10
Murch believed his wife was on her way to join Lehmann. Speculation in several local newspapers surmised this destination may have been Texas or Kansas.8 11
The couple eventually surfaced in Buffalo, New York, under an assumed surname. (More about that later.)
How Sarah's marriage ended up so broken may have more to do with how broken was Sarah.