The George Sechler Story

This year will mark the 123rd anniversary of the events surrounding George Mowrer Sechler of Danville PA, my great grandfather, and a brief interval in history where Danville, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were dramatically drawn together. I’ll tell the story in daily installments, corresponding to the days of that fateful week in April 1907. Along the way, perhaps some of you might be able to fill in some of the missing pieces.

George Sechler was born in Danville, Pennsylvania in 1873. Danville is a small town in east-central PA on the banks of the Susquehanna River, today best know as the home of the Geisinger Medical Centers. I know little about his young life except that his father Aaron Sechler, a Civil War veteran (of the Sherman campaign) died when George was 13 from typhoid pneumonia (he is buried in the Shiloh cemetery in Danville). George left home as a young man to go to Groton CT and Brooklyn NY, presumably to seek work as the mining-related industries in Danville were in decline. I don’t know the exact order of events, but George married his wife, Laura Wright, in Groton in 1894 and soon followed his in-laws to Brooklyn. Laura’s family were shipbuilders who followed Navy work, eventually settling down to work for many years at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The Wrights were recent immigrants to the U.S. from Prince Edward Island after several generations of exile from the U.S. resulting from ancestors finding themselves on the losing side of the American Revolution at its conclusion (they were Quakers, but apparently were on record expressing just enough loyalist sentiments to them get booted out by the new US Government). This contrasts with George Sechler’s ancestors, some of whom fought with George Washington and lived through Valley Forge.

In 1907 Manhattan was already almost completely developed and Brooklyn was expanding rapidly. Not being shipbuilders themselves, George and Laura struggled to establish themselves for a number of years. The 1900 Census shows both of them living and working at the Long Island State Hospital, a mental hospital that is actually located in the center of today’s Brooklyn. (Some scenes from the movie “Awakenings” were filmed there.) It occurs to me that Georgeʼs family’s proximity to the state hospital located in Danville might have led him to consider the Brooklyn facility as a place he could find work. George is listed as a “Nurse” in the census—he was a big strong guy and Iʼm sure that part of his job involved keeping control over the patients.

It must have been a wonderful thing when, in 1905, George landed a job as a patrolman with the New York City Police Department. He was 32 at this point and by all accounts quickly became a respected, trusted member of the force. One newspaper account describes his effectiveness in fearlessly raiding pool halls, sometimes single-handedly. With this new job, George and Laura were able to move to downtown Brooklyn, a few blocks away from the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge—a neighborhood that most of us could not afford today. Their house has since been subsumed by the Brooklyn campus of the New York University. In late February 1907, George and Laura had a daughter, Ruth.

George’s mother, Rebecca Roberts Sechler, died in 1906 and is buried in the Odd Fellows’ Cemetery in Danville, the following appearing in the June 15 1906 Danville Intelligencer:

This background brings us up to April 13, 1907. Story to be continued…