The Fantastic Disappearance of Captain Rehrer

The grave of Capt. Rehrer in Lake County, Florida.

 

The historic village of Rehrersburg in Berks County is named for Revolutionary War lieutenant Jacob Rehrer, a son of Johan Gottfried Rehrer (Rohrer) and Maria Magdalena Rehrer, who, in the 18th century, settled in a region known as Altohoe, which had originally been part of the manor of Richard Penn. Many generations of this notable family continued to live in and around Rehrersburg, and today there are dozens of Rehrers, Rohrers and Rohrs scattered throughout Berks and surrounding counties who can trace their lineage directly back to Johan Gottfried and Maria Magdalena.

Among Johan and Maria's other children were a daughter, Hanna Catharina (b. 1764) and Gottfried Rohrer (b. 1769). This Gottfried Rohrer was the father of Maj. Thomas Jefferson Rehrer (b. 1790), who rose to prominence in 1827 when he was elected to the state legislature for the first of two terms. Major Rehrer moved to Harrisburg in 1832 with his wife, Salome Weiser (who was a direct descendant of Conrad Weiser), and later became the chief clerk in the Land Office of the Commonwealth, a position he held until 1866. They had three daughters, all of whom married into respectable families, and one son named Erasmus, who was the youngest of the Rehrer family.

Like his father, Erasmus Godfrey Rehrer seemed destined for greatness. He served in Company E of the 129th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Infantry. He entered the service while a resident of Tamaqua and served honorably as an officer in the Union Army's engineering corps, rising to the rank of captain. After the war he relocated to Tremont and entered the coal mining business. As superintendent of the Tremont Coal Company, Captain Rehrer, along with two partners, John Albrighton and Thomas Smith, saw an opportunity to strike it rich. After discovering a previously unknown vein of coal near Donaldson, they formed their own company, obtained a lease on the land and sunk all their savings into drilling a tunnel. According to reports, Captain Rehrer put nearly $4,000 of his own cash into the venture. 

And that's when things went horribly wrong.

It was well-known around Donaldson that the captain's partners, Albrighton and Smith, objected to the tunnel-- it was a true money pit in every sense of the word. In October of 1867 construction of the tunnel was stopped when the newly-formed partnership ran low on funds, After obtaining loans, the work resumed and things were going smoothly until November 14th. On that evening, Albrighton, Smith and Rehrer met in the company office to discuss paying their workers. Before leaving the office for the night, Captain Rehrer informed his partners that he would go to the Donaldson shaft to inspect the progress of the tunnel, and from there he would continue on to Pottsville by stagecoach.

On Friday morning, November 15, Captain Rehrer arose before dawn. After eating a hearty breakfast he set out on foot to Donaldson. About a half mile down the road he was met by John Kopp, a miner who worked in the Eckert mines just above Donaldson. The two men were acquainted, and Kopp bid the captain "good morning" as he passed by. This was around 6 o'clock in the morning. Kopp proceeded down the road toward the railroad, as was his usual custom, and that was the last anyone saw of Captain Rehrer.

Although Rehrer failed to arrive at Donaldson that fateful day, his absence didn't cause much excitement. The captain was known to take frequent business trips. But, after several days had elapsed without word of his whereabouts, concerned friends and family members wrote to Erasmus' father, Thomas Jefferson Rehrer, in Harrisburg, but Major Rehrer could offer no explanation for his son's disappearance. Rowland Jones, the captain's father-in-law, also hadn't heard a thing; as far as he knew, there had been no domestic troubles in the Rehrer household.

Based on the available evidence-- or lack thereof-- it didn't take long for locals to reach the conclusion that Erasmus Godfrey Rehrer had been murdered.

On Sunday, November 24, a party of two hundred citizens from western Schuylkill County began a thorough search of Tremont, Donaldson and surrounding areas, exploring the bowels of active and abandoned mineshafts alike, but no trace of the young man could be found. The following afternoon Chief Marshal Joseph Heisler of Governor Geary's newly-formed "Special Coal Police" (which had been the result of a petition calling for "the better protection of persons, property and life in the mining regions of the Commonwealth") arrived in Tremont with his ten men, cracked open the safe in Rehrer's office, and examined the documents inside. They found nothing in the captain's papers that offered a clue to his disappearance.

 

Piecing Together a Puzzle... With Help From a Fortune-Teller

Newspapers ran rampant with speculation surrounding the strange affair, and new theories as to Rehrer's fate emerged as soon as new details about his life were put into print. Captain Rehrer was a Freemason, and some suspected that some sort of shadowy secret society had been behind his murder. A reward of $500 was immediately offered by authorities; $250 for the recovery of the body, and an equal amount for the apprehension of the murderer. An additional $100 was offered by the Tamaqua Masonic Lodge. As the search dragged on into its second week, the reward was increased; $1,000 by the Schuylkill County Commissioners, and $1,000 by Rowland Jones and Major Thomas J. Rehrer.

Naturally, suspicion soon fell upon Rehrer's partners. After all, they had not been happy about the captain's plan to proceed with the drilling of the expensive Donaldson tunnel. Without any evidence, John Albrighton, Sr., John Albrighton, Jr., Thomas Smith and William Cooper were arrested on Wednesday, December 4, and brought before Judge Frailey. The arrests were made on oath of a man named Cleaver Jones, who essentially had nothing more than a "hunch" that Rehrer's partners had been behind the murder after he had found some of Rehrer's soiled clothing inside his office.

But perhaps these arrests would not have been made if not for a fortune-teller. A psychic medium of English origin who lived in the vicinity had come forward stating that three men had been involved in the murder of Captain Rehrer. She also told Marshal Heisler that, if he were to search in a certain area, he would find two keys belonging to the victim. Marshal Heisler and his deputy traveled to Tremont and, surprisingly, found the keys in the very spot the fortune-teller had described. 

The initial hearing was held before Judge Frailey in the Library Room of the county courthouse in Pottsville. Cleaver Jones was the first witness called, and he told the court that he had found an outfit of the captain's clothing inside his office in Tremont. According to Jones, the right pantleg had a small hole in it, while the seat of the pants and the coat had dark stains that resembled blood. 

The next witness called was the wife of Erasmus Godfrey Rehrer, who testified that the clothes entered into evidence were indeed the same clothes her husband had worn on the day of his disappearance. She also identified her husband's keys and memorandum book, which had also been left inside the office. Mrs. Rehrer testified that her husband never went anywhere without them. Several other witnesses were called that day, including John Kopp and Major Rehrer. After the hearing, the Albrightons and William Cooper were released from custody. Thomas Smith, however, was bound over for court, though a writ of habeus corpus allowed him to be free on $5,000 bail.

 

Tremont, much as it appeared in Capt. Rehrer's time

A Deceptive Detective

On January 24, 1868, two months after the disappearance, Thomas Jefferson Rehrer received a troubling visit at his home in Harrisburg. According to the visitor, a man named Carpenter who had represented himself as a detective, the body of his son had been thrown down an abandoned coal shaft. According to Major Rehrer's visitor, his son's killers had been apprehended in Buffalo, New York. Evidently, Erasmus Rehrer's disgruntled partners had arranged for these men to carry out the execution in order to get their hands on the coal lease.

But could this incredible story be true?

The Pottsville Standard wrote that it had been one of the captain's partners, Thomas Smith, who had written to two men in Rochester that he had "a big job" for them to do. The thugs, who had been identified as James Brady and Patrick O'Hara, were so eager to comply they departed for Pennsylvania without replying to the letter, and Smith, worried about the lack of response, fired off another letter to Rochester, which aroused the suspicion of the Postmaster General. Upon reading the murderous missive, the Postmaster General turned the letter over to a detective. The Standard story claims that the detective tailed the two thugs-for-hire to Buffalo, where they were captured.

The same detective, C.C. Carpenter, had also visited John Albrighton, one of the captain's business partners. Carpenter had approached Albrighton and informed him that he was in possession of some explosive information that would lead to the arrest of Rehrer's killers. Carpenter then immediately traveled to Harrisburg to relay this information to Major Rehrer.

C.C. Carpenter had obtained large sums of money from Major Rehrer and John Albrighton, Sr., by alleging that he had obtained the letter written by Thomas Smith urging the two men to come to Tremont to kill Erasmus Rehrer. All the detective needed was money to cover his expenses so that he could go to New York and capture them. Carpenter then went to Captain Rehrer's father-in-law, Rowland Jones, with the same story. Jones also forked over a tidy sum to the detective for his "services", convinced that Carpenter was hot on the trail of the culprits. 

Carpenter then caught the midnight train to Tamaqua and paid a visit to Samuel Albrighton with fifteen men, all of whom were wearing masks and dressed in black gowns. Claiming to be members of a secret society, the men entered the home and cornered Albrighton, who was in bed, and threatened to lynch him for the murder of Captain Rehrer. "But I'm innocent!" proclaimed the young man. Carpenter, who told Albrighton that he was the head of the secret society to which Rehrer belonged, promised the young man that he would spare his life if he confessed to the murder. 

When Carpenter reported back to Rowland Jones and Major Rehrer, he told them that Samuel Albrighton had made a full confession, and provided particulars of the dastardly deed. Captain Rehrer, while walking to Donaldson, had been waylaid by two thugs hired by Thomas Smith, John Albrighton, Jr. (Samuel's brother) and David Lomison, who was the president of the Miners' Bank in Pottsville (it was Lomison who had given Captain Rehrer the loan to carry on with the project at Donaldson). Carpenter reported that Rehrer had been shot in the thigh, bludgeoned over the head with an iron bar, and his body dumped into the "old Heilner shaft" near Tremont with a heavy cog wheel tied to the ankle. Although Samuel Albrighton fingered his brother, he refused to implicate his father.

The "old Heilner shaft" (which was most likely the abandoned Heil & Dutter workings at the Marshfield Colliery between Tremont and Middle Creek) had been abandoned for years and was filled with several hundred feet of water, which the Masonic Lodge of Tamaqua began pumping out at once without any thought of the expense. Meanwhile, acting on the report which C.C. Carpenter had given to Rowland Jones, an arrest warrant was made out for John Albrighton, Jr., Thomas Smith and David Lomison. Friends of the accused protested the arrests, claiming that Samuel Albrighton's confession had been made under duress.

A court date was set, but missing from the hearing was one important witness-- C.C. Carpenter. A subpoena was issued, but when the detective failed to show up to testify, it became abundantly evident that he had been nothing more than a con artist who had used the Rehrer case to fatten his own wallet. Further proof of this was obtained by the District Attorney, after he telegraphed the authorities in Buffalo and Rochester and discovered that no persons named James Brady and Patrick O'Hara had been arrested, or that the Postmaster General had intercepted a letter written by Thomas Smith. Judge Ryon ordered the immediate release of Lomison and Albrighton, though Smith remained in custody until the pumping of the Heil & Dutter shaft was complete. As one might expect, there was no corpse chained to a cog wheel at the bottom. Smith was then released.

Even though the local authorities had been fooled by a swindler and had egg on their faces from illegally arresting three innocent men for murder, they continued to search for the body of Captain Erasmus Godfrey Rehrer and his supposed killers... until a strange twist of events at a presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. put the  perplexing mystery to rest once and for all.

 

The Truth Comes Out

On March 4, 1869, outgoing president Andrew Johnson ruffled feathers by boycotting the inauguration of the 18th President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant (an occurrence that would not occur again until 2021, when Trump boycotted the inauguration of Joe Biden). Light rain had fallen all morning, but by noon the sun had come out, and eight full divisions of soldiers-- the largest inaugural parade in American history up to that time-- marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the East Portico of the Capitol Building, where the great hero of the Civil War would be sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.

Standing amid the large throng of onlookers along the parade route was a Tamaqua resident, George W. Cole. As a detachment of Marines assembled for the procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, Cole's attention was fixed on a soldier wearing the chevron insignia of a sergeant. The face looked quite familiar to Cole, and in a few moments he was able to place it. Impulsively, Mr. Cole elbowed through the crowd and approached the soldier, much to the astonishment of the commanding officer of the Marine detachment. Gasps and shouts erupted from the sidewalk as the angry man stormed past the helpless Marine commander and grabbed the sergeant roughly by the collar; was it a disgruntled supporter of Andrew Johnson looking to make trouble?

 "Erasmus Godfrey Rehrer!" declared the parade crasher. The Marine sergeant told Cole that he must be mistaken, as Cole dragged him by the scruff of his neck into the lobby of a nearby hotel. The commanding officer followed on their heels, demanding to know what was going on. Inside the hotel, George Cole told the commander about the disappearance of Captain Rehrer, and all the trouble it had caused throughout Schuylkill County. The commander suggested they should go into a private room to discuss the matter. Once inside, the Marine sergeant broke down and confessed that he was indeed the missing mine operator.

Rehrer confessed that he had decided to skip town on that fateful day in 1867. He was heavily in debt to his father, father-in-law, business partners and David Lomison from the bank. When he saw that there was no possible way to extricate himself from his precarious pecuniary situation, he went to Trevorton and worked odd jobs until he had saved up enough money to go to Baltimore and, later, Philadelphia. It was there, in the City of Brotherly Love, where he had enlisted in the Marine Corps, believing that he would soon be stationed in some foreign land. But fate had other ideas-- instead, he was ordered to go to Washington and take part in the grand military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Sadly, the fortune of his father, Major Thomas Jefferson Rehrer, was wasted in the search for his son's body and the search for the killers which never existed. Hard times also fell upon his in-laws and former business associates, who were driven out of the county. Thomas Smith and the Albrightons eventually prospered in coal mining in Luzerne County, though it took them quite some time to recover their losses. As for Lomison, the man who had loaned Rehrer the funds to carry on with the Donaldson venture, he lost the shirt off his back and left the banking industry, his reputation tarnished and his name disgraced. 

As for Captain Rehrer, he patched things up with his wife (the woman surely must've been a saint) and the two of them moved to Eustis, Florida, where he remained until his death in 1921 at the age of 90.

Sources:

Sunbury American, June 1, 1867.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Dec. 9, 1867.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Dec. 16, 1867.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Dec. 30, 1867.
Scranton Tribune, Jan. 27, 1868.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Jan. 30, 1867.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Feb. 1, 1868.
Sunbury Gazette, Feb. 15, 1868.
Lancaster Daily Evening Express, March 16, 1869.
Pottsville Republican, Feb. 25, 1922.