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Insane Sisters - Or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town (Paperback)
Loot Price: R897
Discovery Miles 8 970
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Insane Sisters - Or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town (Paperback)
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Total price: R917
Discovery Miles: 9 170
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Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice
Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property
dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation - the Atlas
Portland Cement Company.In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border
of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal -
home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most
acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed
itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control
of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when
Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of
the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband
had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him
the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who
had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue
influence. To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians
who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her
shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her
co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri
Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to
the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a
guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's
sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged
a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political
conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company
town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered
confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the
Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight.
Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered
and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender,
class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book
also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of
corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to
punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.
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