A Murder in Excelsior

Coal company housing in Excelsior, date unknown

Murder visited the tiny mining village of Excelsior on a quiet Sunday afternoon in April of 1874.  This village of a few dozen homes, located about two miles east of Ranshaw, earned its name from the nearby Excelsior Colliery, which was built in 1865 on a parcel of land belonging to the Fulton Company.

Thomas Gribin and his wife lived in the village and attended church in Shamokin every Sunday with John Keating, a boarder in the Gribin home who was also Gribin's brother-in-law. After the church service was over on Sunday, April 5, the Gribins and John Keating began to walk back to Exelsior but somewhere along the way one of the men decided to stop at a saloon for a drink.

By the time the two Irishmen returned to the village they were in a rather jovial and boisterous mood and around five o'clock, while Mrs. Gribin was preparing Sunday dinner, the two men compared stories about prominent fighters of the day and a friendly whiskey-fueled debate over which of the neighborhood men was the toughest ensued.

While Mrs. Gribin busied herself with setting the table, her husband proclaimed that he was tougher than Keating.  Keating, naturally, took exception to this remark and slammed his fist down in anger, knocking several dishes from the table. Thomas Gribin stood up from the table, shouted a few choice words at his brother-in-law, and then disappeared upstairs. He returned a moment later with a revolver, firing a shot through the front door of the home.

Mrs. Gribin and Keating urged the enraged man to calm down and eventually convinced Thomas to put the gun in the cupboard and rejoin the family for dinner. After a few moments of awkward silence, the old topic of who was the better man once again came up. Gribin once again jumped up from the table, but this time he didn't bother raising his voice.  Without uttering a word, he retrieved his revolver from the cupboard, pointed it at Keating and shot his brother-in-law at close range through the forehead, killing him instantly.

Aroused by sound of the gunshot, neighbors raced to the home. Upon seeing the lifeless body of John Keating and pool of blood on the floor, they subdued Gribin and turned him over to Coroner Hesser (who, incidentally, would be murdered himself in December). Coroner Hesser immediately held an inquest and Gribin was taken to the jail in Sunbury to await trial.

Gribin claimed that the killing was an accident, but that defense didn't garner much sympathy.  The man he killed was an Irish immigrant who had only been in America for about nine months.  Keating had a wife and five children in Ireland, and had come to Northumberland County with dreams of starting a new life for his family. Gribin, on the other hand, had a reputation for being violent and quarrelsome after drinking. Even though Gribin was a member of the Coal Township school board and had a number of influential friends, it was Keating with whom the locals sympathized.

Another reason why the public sympathized with Keating may have been because his murder was eerily similar to one which occurred in the area just a few weeks earlier. The Shamokin Herald stated:

Our town was again startled by the report that another man had been shot, and that the cause of the crime and the relationship of the parties concerned were similar to those of the Levins shooting case which occurred only a few weeks ago... The cause that led to the committal of this dreadful crime was doubtless strong drink... It is the old story repeated over and over again- whiskey! quarreling! fighting! and murder!  We refrain from further comment at the present.