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According to the county attorney, Sylvester has not stated to him what his plea will be. He has inquired several times, however, about prison conditions. The bank president in overalls would neither admit nor deny, in his cell in the Parish prison in New Orleans, that he had absconded with $100,000 of the Plainview Bank funds. The indictment carried by County Attorney Foley and Deputy Sheriff Fitzgerald to gain the necessary extradition papers charges Sylvester on one specific count of taking a $500 deposit from Elizabeth Allen of Plainview and failing to enter it in the records of the Plainview Bank.
February 3, 1926- Winona Republican Herald Glittering "Romance" of Luxury With Stolen Funds Spent Entire Time in South New Orleans, LA. Feb. 3 – The glittering romance that the people back home in Minnesota had built around Edwin L. Sylvester, alleged wrecker of the Plainview Sate Bank, was shattered here today. Instead of living a life of luxury in hotels for the past ten months, and spending the money he had taken from his friends and depositors of the bank, Sylvester had sunk to the depths of a common laborer in the south, who lived and ate with Negroes and picked cotton in the fields at a dollar a day. The story of his life from the time he left Chicago nearly a year ago is just a tale of a penniless man, thrown out on the world without friends, to battle his way unaided and hunted halfway round the world. It is told late yesterday in little bits, between tears and smiles, as the white-haired man of 65 sat in a day coach of a train between County Attorney John R. Foley and Deputy Sheriff Ed Fitzgerald of Wabasha, on the way from Gulfport, Miss., where he had been arrested to New Orleans. Under the name of Samuel L. Edwin, the internationally hunted fugitive arrived at Biloxi, Miss. March 4, 1925, the day the Plainview State Bank voluntarily closed its doors back home. After leaving Plainview on Saturday February 28, he had gone to Chicago but immediately left for Cincinnati, where he remained one night. The next day he went to Chattanooga Tenn., where he remained another night. From Chattanooga he went to Birmingham and on to Biloxi arriving there March 4. "I wandered around Biloxi like a lost man for days," he told County Attorney Foley, "looking for work and a place to live but on March 27 I secured work with Mr. Hoffstetter on his truck farm two miles from Biloxi, tending gardens and peddling vegetables. Here I remained for three months." Hoffstetter is the man who wrote Governor Christianson that Sylvester was in Biloxi, and who will probably get the $1,000 reward offered for his capture. At the end of three months Sylvester, or Edwin as he was known there, secured a job in a sawmill near Waynesboro, Miss., but the work was too hard for the bent old man. He could not keep pace with the Negroes with whom he was working and was let go after three weeks. Sylvester then secured a job as a farm laborer near Lucedale, Miss. where he worked for five months. This work at first was hard, but agreed with him and he soon gained back some of his old strength.
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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."
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