The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota*

Edwin Sylvester worked in fields, delivered vegetables, earned $1 a day

February 3, 1926

PAGE 186

Earned a Dollar a Day
Sylvester was earning a dollar a day when he was arrested while working as a fireman in the Avon Hotel at Biloxi after he had left the Hoffstetter farm. While he was holding his job, Sylvester ate his meals in the hotel kitchen with the colored help.
According to County Attorney Foley, in a message to the Post-Bulletin, Sylvester told him that after he left Ohio he went directly to Chattanooga, Tenn., where he spent one night. Then he went to Birmingham, Ala., and left there immediately for Biloxi, Miss. arriving there on March 4.
Delivered Vegetables
On March 27, Sylvester went to work for Hoffstetter on his truck farm two miles from Biloxi. He tended the gardens and peddled vegetables. Perhaps the extensive knowledge of truck farming and vegetable farm lands gained in Plainview as a help to him in Mississippi. Anyway, he worked daily in the gardens under the hot southern sun and delivered vegetables to stores in Biloxi and Gulfport and to the back doors of private residences just as farmers had, not so many months before, delivered vegetables to the back door of his palatial home in Plainview.
For three months Sylvester stayed with Hoffstetter. Then he left him and went to work in a sawmill near Waynesboro, Mississippi, where he stayed three weeks. When he quit the sawmill he went to Lucedale, Miss. where he worked as a farm laborer for nearly five months.
Worked in Cotton Fields
Tiring of the farm labor, Sylvester got a job in the cotton fields, and he picked cotton for two months, getting an average of a dollar a day for that work. His age militated against him, and he couldn’t work as fast as the sweating Negroes beside whom he labored.
He gave up cotton picking and went to work in a cement block factory for a short time. Then he went back to the Hoffstetter farm and returned to common labor-grubbing in the fields.
It was during this last experience on the truck farm that Hoffstetter turned against him. Seeing his danger, Sylvester left the farm and went to work in the hotel boiler room at Biloxi. It was here that he made his mistake. Had he vanished entirely from that section of the country, he might still be at large today.
Silent about Bank Affairs
According to County Attorney Foley, Sylvester was very reluctant to discus the affairs of the Plainview Bank. In fact, it was with the greatest difficulty that the county attorney drew the elderly banker the story of his travels during the time he was a fugitive.
Sylvester’s clothes are shabby and torn, and his baggage consists of a brown bag and bundle of work clothes tied in a khaki cloth. There is little about him that resembles the important citizen and banker of Plainview who less than a year ago, was guiding the affairs of the town serving on important committees acting as guardian of the estates of children and an administrator of the estates of widows.
Interested in Southern Land
During the months that he wandered the Gulf, Sylvester became closely acquainted with conditions in the south. He told county attorney Foley of fishing on the Gulf, and spoke familiarly of the land situation of Gulfport and Biloxi. His interest in land deals, it was such deals that got him into trouble at Plainview, was revealed when he told the county attorney that he could have made considerable money in Mississippi land.
The county attorney, the deputy sheriff and their prisoner left New Orleans at 12:30 this noon and will arrive in Chicago tomorrow. They expect to take a train from Chicago Friday morning, arriving in Wabasha Friday night.

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* SOURCE: Manzow, Ron (compiler), "The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota - a collection of information taken from the Plainview News, other newspapers, letters, and diaries beginning in 1884": Plainview Area History Center, 40 4th St. S.W., Plainview, MN 55964. Compiled in 2001.

NOTE: from Ron Manzow, December 2001: "Feel free to reproduce the pages for anyone who wants a copy. It was compiled to be shared... All I ask is that they consider sending a check to the [Plainview Area] History Center to help us out. That should be enough."