FARNSWORTH CONCLUSION

Edna Farnsworth was laid to rest on June 25, 1889 in a suicide's grave in Ross Bay Cemetery. Her remains had been placed in an "elegant casket with a silver plaque on the lid and a cluster of flowers surrounding it." What is equally surprising is that Reverend John E. Starr conducted a service for Edna in the very 'house of ill repute' in which she killed herself.

"Of her past nothing should be said in censure now. She is dead…if she sinned in life, no one knows what provocation caused it, and the secrets of the human heart have never been read. So let her rest in peace…"

Because she was buried in the Wesleyan Methodist section of the cemetery and Della Wentworth, the madam, was herself a Methodist there is a possibility that she was the one who paid for the expensive burial.

Of the house at 14 Broughton Street nothing of the original structure remains. It is now the site of a Robbins parking lot where modern day Victorians park their cars in order to do a day of window-shopping. Standing there, with people bustling back and forth along the sidewalk and the cacophony of modern life in the distance, one cannot sense that more than one hundred years ago there was a brothel standing on that very location. Or that a girl named Edna Farnsworth ended her life with one staccato burst of gunfire one June morning back in 1889.

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