We will recall from a prior post that CIA paymaster Paul Helliwell in his youth was listed as the manager of a liquor distribution company in 1934, the same year Prohibition ended. The treasurer of this enterprise was a Tampa attorney, Cody Fowler, who had arrived from Oklahoma some 12 years earlier.
Cuban Rum, Inc.'s Cody Fowler
Pettingill fired by Pres. T. Roosevelt |
One of that firm's senior partners, Noah Brooks Kent Pettingill, came from a family which first moved to Tampa in 1884. He had been appointed Law Judge of the United States Provisional Court for the military district in Puerto Rico during the end of the Spanish-American War. Following that, he became U.S. Attorney in Porto Rico, as it was then called.
He was, however, summarily fired by President Theodore Roosevelt in late 1906 after it was learned he had privately taken a case against other "colleagues" within the insular court system, whose names were not revealed.
Macfarlane family |
Click to enlarge. Maude the only woman. |
Arlington, a few miles northeast of Memphis, was home base for the first few years of their marriage, while O.S. (as he was commonly known) worked as a traveling salesman. In 1897, we learn from the Salem, Missouri, newspaper that O. S. had been aboard a street railway car in that city with Maud's father, Joseph L. Cody, when it was struck by a loose coal car that had come unhitched from the Illinois Central's main train. Neither man was permanently injured but undoubtedly quite shaken up.
O.S., the son of Napoleon Bonaparte Fowler, grew
up in St. Louis, Missouri, and in El Dorado, Kansas, where his parents moved in 1883. Napoleon died there in 1901, while O.S. was living with his wife, Maud and young son Cody Fowler in the Panhandle Plains of Texas. The grocery store they operated was in a small community 30 miles northwest of Charles Goodnight's home. The only means of transport at that time were horses and trains. One train actually, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad.
If You Build It, They Will Come...
It's not known who or what enticed Joseph Cody and O.S. Fowler to this barren land, which only a few years earlier had been the domain of the J.A. Ranch, a partnership between John George Adair (and his wife Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie Adair) and Charles Goodnight. Adair had been an Irish securities broker who moved to Denver by way of New York, who began purchasing what would eventually become, we've been told, "1,325,000 acres in parts of Randall, Armstrong, Donley, Hall, Briscoe, and Swisher counties," by the time of Adair's death in 1885.It was all left to his wife, who continued the partnership with Goodnight for a few more years. It is not clear whether she still owned the ranch when she died in 1921. However, it most likely became part of the New York and Texas Land Company consisting of millions of acres all over Texas, or the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company (White Deer Lands Trust Company) in the Panhandle.
"From 1882 to1886, N Bar N leased range in Carson and neighboring counties from the Francklyn Land & Cattle Company, a British syndicate backed by Cunard Steamship Line. Afterward this range belonged to White Deer Land Company. The N Bar N outfit left here because White Deer Land Company wanted the range cleared of large herds.
Joseph Cody's family members were settled into Carson County--including two daughters, Ola and Elsie, who were working as school teachers--where he ranched. Not far away, Maud and O.S. operated a grocery store. From advertisements that later appeared in Oklahoma newspapers, we get the sense that it was actually Maud who was mostly in charge of the grocery store operations.
Newspapers reported in 1903 that O. S. Fowler had a ranch in Stratford, Texas, and that he ran for election for County Judge of Sherman County (not Carson, where they lived).
By 1903, however, they had relocated to Oklahoma, just a few miles west of Oklahoma City. Maud was clearly in charge, and she didn't hesitate to let everyone know it.
Her sister, Ola Edna Cody, married in 1906. Son Cody Fowler was sent off to military school. The N. B. Fowlers moved east of Oklahoma City to make a homestead claim, which they accomplished in 1909, the same year N.B. Fowler died. Things began to change after that. The O. S. Fowlers sold their grocery store in El Reno and relocated to Kansas City. Before July 1910 Maud and O.S. had seen advertisements for land for sale in Florida, and, just as so many others had done, they bought a few tracts.
Florida Drained Land Company
Unlike most, however, they actually visited Florida that year to talk to people onsite about buying more land in the Everglades. The people they saw apparently signed them up as agents to help sell the land. Maud (always called Mrs. M.C.) Fowler was being written up by commercial newsman Gilbert D. Leach in October 1910 as having been engaged in sales of Florida lands only a few months, revealing she had a unique ability to resell the land almost instantly at a much higher price.
Maud was soon on the payroll of the Florida Drained Land Co. with the job of entertaining passengers being taken by train to visit Florida to hear a sales pitch from the company. Articles were placed in Missouri and Kansas papers that mentioned a certain Mrs. M. C. Fowler, also known as "Mother" Fowler, who made the trip so enjoyable for prospective buyers.
In the meantime, O.S. had found his niche as a hotel manager for the Elsmere Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. The 1911 Kansas City directory listed Maud's name (M. C. Fowler) as vice-president of the Security Underwriters Corporation that year.Florida history sites have stated Maud had lived in "Kansas City where she became one of the most successful women of the business world in that city and, as Vice President of the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City, she was one of few strong businesswomen of that day and also headed the Kansas City Women’s Athletic Club." In fact, Maud's name did appear in Kansas City newspapers as "Mrs. M. C. Fowler," president of the Women's Athletic Club, in 1913.
She somehow avoided being tainted by the white-collar scandal that began to hit the news in 1912. Some of the land buyers panicked when they noticed the monthly checks they were sending to Plantation Lands or Florida Farm Land Co.--there were other similarly named companies as well--were being deposited into accounts held in New York by an octopus-like entity known as Security Underwriters Corporation.
It was reported that this company's stock was controlled by a syndicate of engineering companies which had allegedly contracted with the original owners of the land engaged in selling it off by agent companies to dredge laterals and canals in connection with the work previously done by the State of Florida, as promised by the Governor.
Without using that language, the reports alleged the sales companies were engaged in a ponzi scheme. The buyers' payments were being spent as rapidly as they were received, and none of those funds were being used to drain the land. It was fraud, pure and simple, attorneys for the buyers claimed.
When their lawsuits rendered them no recovery in the form of damages, by the end of 1912 they filed applications for receivership under state laws akin to federal involuntary bankruptcy. That seemed to have put a halt on Maud Fowler's cash cow for the time being.
Oklahoma City addresses 1918 |
Cody Fowler married in 1915, two years after graduating from Cumberland University in Tennessee with a law degree. He and his wife, the former Maude Stewart, lived with her parents--Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Stewart, Sr., a wealthy lumber man in Arkansas before relocating to Oklahoma City, where his office was in the Insurance Building, 114 No. Broadway.
Artesian Farms had been incorporated in 1910 by a partnership of the Bolles Trust Co. and the son of former Florida governor, William Sherman Jennings. Governor W. S. Jennings moved from Chicago to Florida in 1885, settling in Jacksonville after serving as Florida's governor 1901-05. William Jennings Bryan's mother, Mariah Jennings, was a sister of William Sherman Jennings. She married her brother's law partner, Virginia-born Silas Bryan, in 1852. Silas had moved west to Illinois after his parents died. His own death occurred in Marion, Illinois in 1880. At that time the Bryans' eldest son, named for the future Florida governor, was a young student of 20 with four younger siblings.
In 1881 William Jennings Bryan began law school in Chicago, spending much of his time at the home of former Senator Lyman Trumbull. In 1883 he began practicing law in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he married in 1884, but by 1887 the newlyweds had moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. He was first elected to Congress as a Democrat and from Nebraska and began serving in Washington in January 1891.
The Artesian Farm Land Co. was at that time housed in the Dyal-Upchurch Building, at 4 East Bay in room 310, next door to the Atlantic and East Coast Terminal company--near the corner of Main and East Bay years before the Main Street bridge was constructed.
Church near old Hadden Hall in 1917 |
A duplicative listing in the 1920 Census, however, showed Cody and his wife living with her parents in Oklahoma City.
The Fowlers listed their occupations that year as a druggist and truck garden farmer.
Perhaps the lies had something to do with the massive fraudulent schemes which had already been occurring in Florida as early as 1912. One newspaper, the Miami Metropolis, had traced the fraud to Wall Street and to some land investors operating all over the country at the time, in particular the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City mentioned above.
Next, see:
When White Russians Invaded Florida