Whistling Through the Graveyard
Chapter 2 - The Mobster With No Marker
Chapter 3 - Albert Fountain Must Die!
My apologies for the overly dramatic title, but I couldn't resist given the subject of this article. I suppose if I had written the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" instead of the late Harlan Ellison, it would have been called "Edith Keeler Must Die!" instead.
The city of Pasadena, California passed an ordinance early in its existence that effectively outlawed cemeteries within the city limits. Because of that, a number of Pasadena natives and residents who might have wanted to be buried in their home city ended up at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, an unincorporated city just north of Pasadena. A few of the notables buried at Mountain View are the physicist Richard Feynman and science fiction writer Octavia Butler.
There are many other people buried in Mountain View who are not as well known as Feynman and Butler. One such is a man named Albert Fountain. I don't even remember now how I stumbled across him but it really doesn't matter, he ended up coming to my attention.
Steve and Linda Malkson created a memorial for him on Find A Grave with an exact plot location within Mountain View, a link to a Los Angeles death index page that confirmed his date of death, his approximate age, and his place of birth. The Malksons are very meticulous about their postings on Find A Grave so I am much less skeptical about what I see from them than many other contributors on the site. That sounds like I'm praising with faint damns. I shouldn't qualify it, they do good work and solid research. If more people on Find A Grave were like the Malksons I would probably still be posting and updating information on the site.
Beyond working over people on Family Search Dot Org, sometimes I do silly things like google searches and searches on duck duck go to see if I can find anything else out about a person, some information just floating around on the internet. When I tried searching for "Albert Fountain" 1896 on the web, I was deluged with results about Albert Jennings Fountain who disappeared mysteriously outside Las Cruces, New Mexico on 1 February 1896.
The thing that struck me as a very strange coincidence was that both Albert Fountains died the same month (February 1896, assuming that the one in New Mexico died on the night he disappeared, which seems a virtual certainty), they were about the same age (one born in 1838 and the other probably born a year or two earlier) and both were born in Staten Island, New York.
I did a real double take here. In my own research I've seen first cousins that have that kind of similarity that were born around the same time, given the same names, and born in the same county. There was only one problem with assuming these guys were related. The famous "Albert Jennings Fountain" wasn't really named Fountain. His birth surname was Jennings and his mothers surname was DeLaFontaine, for some reason he took her surname, anglicized it and went by that name. He was using Fountain by 1860, which is the earliest census I located him in.
I backtracked and looked at all the sources to see if there was some way that information from one of the two could have been inadvertently assigned to the other.
I went back to the Los Angeles death index that listed the Albert Fountain who lived in California in 1896. He died on 9 February 1896 in Los Angeles, although his residence was in Pasadena. He overdosed on laudanum (a tincture of opium that was readily available back then) and died as a result. The Los Angeles death index entry clearly states his birthplace as Staten Island, New York.
If we lived in a perfect world, everything that was ever written down or set to printed word would be true. Unfortunately, as we can well see from the world around us, we are surrounded by misinformation, disinformation, fake information and just plain wrong information. I have found many, many errors in death records, marriage records, obituaries, etc.
The case of Colonel Albert Fountain and his eight year old son's disappearance very likely made the national news, as Fountain was a public figure. He had been the 14th Lieutenant Governor of Texas and had been in both the Texas and New Mexico state legislatures. He had defended William "Billy the Kid" Bonney at one of his trials. He was also a Civil War veteran and a wealthy and influential landowner in Las Cruces.
Is it possible that the hubbub going on about the disappearance in New Mexico of a man named Albert Fountain might have corrupted the recording of information on the Albert Fountain who died in Los Angeles a week later?
Well yes, it is possible. It is also possible that by a weird coincidence both men actually were born in Staten Island. I believe in Occam's Razor, but there is also another proposition that states "If something can happen, it eventually will."
By the way, it's not as if we are talking about a really common name here. I see Smiths and Williams and Williamsons and Millers and Browns all the time. I have even seen cemetery lots where people were buried in the same lot with the same surnames who I could find absolutely no connections between.
I did some more digging. At the time I subscribed to an obituary service that was useless most of the time but very occasionally useful. I did manage to find an obituary for the Albert Fountain from Pasadena. It was not as informative as it could have been (it referred to his wife, for example, as Mrs. Fountain, yeah Captain Obvious!). It also listed two children, E A Fountain, and Mrs. Granger.
I went back to the cemetery records I had on Mountain View. I scraped their website in 2017 and there were over 100,000 names at that time. I was able to search the location Albert was in and I did find a Clyde W Granger who died in 1903. That sounded like an in-law or possibly a grandchild based on what I had found in the obituary.
That should have been enough to find out more. But it wasn't. If Albert Fountain had lived long enough to show up in the 1900 census I might have been able to find out a lot more information on him. He didn't, unfortunately for him. Of course, if he had lived that long there would have been no problem with mixing him up with the other Albert Fountain, now would there?
The destruction of most of the 1890 census records by a fire (and then the destruction of the rest of them by the stupidity of the U.S. Congress) is one of those events that I sometimes feel profoundly regretful about. I have relatives who lived and died without ever showing up in a census because they were born after 1880 and died before 1900. It's quite frustrating sometimes. This is one of those times.
If there's no traffic, Altadena is only about a half hour's drive from me, forty minutes tops. The most time consuming thing about it is usually stopping at the Little Red Hen on Fair Oaks and getting some breakfast (usually a must if I go to Mountain View). I pointed a gun at my nephew David's head and said "You wanna go to Pasadena?" (just kidding, since I'm not Leland A. Varain). I didn't invite my wife as it started as an early morning activity and I don't drag her along on most of my graving outings.
David did come with me (he also enjoyed the Little Red Hen), and the two of us made it to Mountain View in early December last year, about a week after I started researching the two Albert Fountains. My one regret with David was that I was unable to show him the grave of his 3rd great grandmother who is buried in Mountain View, I found her in early 2017 but I didn't geotag her grave then and was unable to find it in December since I didn't bring along a map of that section. Mountain View isn't as big a cemetery as Forest Lawn Glendale, but it's still plenty big, big enough that you need to have GPS coordinates or section maps to find most graves.
I got a good number of photos (and later on managed to get a trip in to Forest Lawn Glendale as well, so it was a really, really productive day). However, as for finding out more about Albert Fountain or Clyde Granger, it was a dud. I went all through Lot 1004 of Sunset Lawn South. There were markers for some of the people. There were none for Albert or Clyde. The funniest thing I saw was a small round boulder that seemed to be someone's idea of a tombstone. Since there were no letters carved into it I have no idea whose marker it was supposed to be.
As I was writing this article I went back to Family Search again and looked at all the Albert Fountains I could find who were born in New York in the late 1830s. There is of course Albert Jennings Fountain in Las Cruces who has caused all this trouble. There was another Albert D Fountain who lived in Staten Island up through the 1880 census. There is an entry for what looks like him in Find A Grave with a death date of November 1895. However, the cemetery is a derelict cemetery on Staten Island and there is no marker photo or any other information that would positively confirm that he is buried there. Even if there were a marker it could be a cenotaph, I have seen that many times where a spouse died and the remaining spouse moved away but left their name on a marker, usually with no death date.
If the Albert Fountain who never moved away from Staten Island did in fact die in November 1895, that would mean all three of these Alberts died within four months of each other. Of course a man dying in his late fifties back then was not unusual, many men died of natural causes at that age around the turn of the 20th century.
I found another Albert Fountain from New York who was last seen in the 1870 census in Winnebago County, Illinois. That is another possible suspect, but it would be nice seeing something in the 1880 census that gave an indication one way or another.
I have not tried to see if Mountain View has anything else in their paperwork on Albert or Clyde, but that would definitely be worth a try. I can also see what it would take to see a death certificate for the Albert Fountain who died in Los Angeles. We're not through with this story yet, I just don't know if I'm going to live long enough to see it to its end.
By the way, the unsolved disappearance of Albert Jennings Fountain is still apparently big news in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A cenotaph was erected for him and his son Henry in the Masonic cemetery in Las Cruces. His political enemies Oliver Lee and Albert Fall were never formally charged with a crime connected with his disappearance, but there was certainly motive, as Fountain had indicted Oliver Lee for cattle rustling just before his disappearance, and Lee and Albert Fall were political allies. Some of Lee's men were charged in the disappearance of Fountain's son Henry and Fall defended them in court, winning an acquittal as much through corruption as his own legal acumen.
We will run across Albert Fall again, but that's another article, I think.
I had a really silly thought about this whole thing. If you remember the plot from the original Terminator movie, the T-100 travels back in time to Los Angeles in 1984 and proceeds to murder everyone he can find named Sarah Connor, only being stopped when he is destroyed by Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor. I have this mental picture of a terminator going back in time to 1895 and doing the same to every Albert Fountain he can find.
I did say it was a silly thought. I just read that the Terminator rights revert to James Cameron in 2019 and he is already planning on making another sequel. If it involves someone named Albert Fountain I want my cut of the royalties, okay?
Sources:
Albert Jennings Fountain on Wikipedia
Albert Jennings Fountain on Find A Grave
Albert Fountain entry in Los Angeles Death Index 1896
Albert Fountain (Pasadena) on Find A Grave
Albert D Fountain (allegedly buried on Staten Island) on Find A Grave
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 - Love Is Stronger Than Death
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