In Carthage, a fire in March destroyed a portion of Augustinian Institute, the school at St. James Church. But that didn’t shake the community’s spirit like the goings-on just down the road, on lower State Street.

Carthage had become a lively little village, thanks to the paper industry.

Immigrants who came looking for work had bolstered the population.

Prosperity over the past decade had even spawned suggestions that Carthage merge with the quiet village of West Carthage, across the Black River.

But with prosperity came growing pains. Men seeking to quench their thirsts, display their combative skills or satisfy some other manly urges had a good number of choices along the west end of State Street in Carthage. From the Levis House down to the river, nine establishments for drinkers lined the street.

And the two village cops, it seemed, were shy about pounding this beat.

No respectable woman of the day cared to walk this route. There were no streetcars, and only privileged folk had an automobile or a carriage.

It was this Carthage, with its 3,500 residents, that a 21-year old preacher discovered when he arrived fresh from his ordination to take a temporary assignment in Carthage. The Rev. Albert Rantoul Fiske made no secret of his impressions.

“People in Carthage Who Ought to go to Hell,” read a sub-headline June 30 in a Watertown Daily Times news column telling of community events and the July 1 sermons planned in the churches.

Who could pass up the invitation? A large audience gathered to hear the young minister’s words in the Universalist meetinghouse on School Street, just south of State Street. The villagers were treated to an earful, The Carthage Republican reported.

“Today, right here in Carthage, there are many souls living literally in hell, in ignorance and vice; men and women who have separated themselves from God and Christ, the only true sources of life,” he proclaimed.

“The lower section of State Street, honey-combed as it is with saloons and resorts, comprises as true and horrible a hell as I can imagine. I know as a fact that many of our boys, sons of estimable parents, have deliberately left the heavenly influences of home and sought out these exports of hell.”

Minutes later, he challenged, “As vulgar as it may sound, I would exclaim to the Christian people of Carthage, emulating Christ’s example, go down into hell and take your heaven with you. For the time, forget that you are Universalist, Baptist or Catholic. Where there is ignorance, impart knowledge; where there is darkness impart light, and where there is poverty and misery imitate the example of the Good Samaritan and plant the seed of the Gospel.”

The New Hampshire-born preacher, who earlier in the year had studied at Canton Theological School (now St. Lawrence University), was expounding the Universalist belief that hell is a life experience, not the hereafter punishment. But one man who heard him that day took him seriously enough to take up the crusade.

John M. Cruikshank had earlier in the year returned to re-establish himself in his hometown, purchasing the weekly Repubican. The son of Scottish immigrants, Mr. Cruikshank was 41 and plagued “with a natural inclination toward tuberculosis,” his obituary would say six years later.

He was an aggressive newspaperman with a keen sense of news values, it was said. His return to the village where he grew up followed a journalism career in Brooklyn and Albany, where he had been legislative correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle.

After reporting the minister’s words, Mr. Cruikshank spent the next few July days observing the happenings on State Street and talking to the citizenry. When he had his story in print July 11, his headline announced “Lower State Street A Menace; Women Unsafe There At Night.”

The minister’s sermon and Mr. Cruikshank’s subsequent campaign provoked “a furor that lasted for several months, spawning accusations and innuendoes and nearly tearinig the two villages apart,” wrote Laura M. Prievo, village historian. Mrs. Prievo uncovered the controversy a few years ago while scanning microfilm of Carthage Republican editions, and wrote an account which she titled, “When State Street Was a Battleground.”

The Republican reported “fighting occurs...near the bridge almost nightly....On last Saturday night, a man was knocked senseless in a saloon near the bridge. He was thrown out in the street and then (sic) were cries to heave him off the bridge. All of this time, no policeman was in sight.”

Mr. Cruikshank called it the “tenderloin” section of Carthage. Taverns had special entrances to rooms where “women are entertained,” he wrote, and gambling “is allowed without interruption.

“Carthage was almost a model town ten years ago,” he wrote. But now, “The people of the West Side are indignant that such conditions should be allowed to exist. Carthage pays over $1,000 a year for police protection and gets very little of it.”

Mr. Cruikshank attributed the changed atmosphere to the village’s emergence as a “busy mill town.” He referred to the many strangers walking the streets, and bluntly pointed to certain nationalities, not being influenced by today’s more “politically correct” style of journalism.

Reaction was immediate and impulsive. Growth over the previous 10 years had promoted talk of the two Carthages merging to form a city. Now, a prominent voice on the west side was saying, “What we need most is a dry goods store and a post office, and we would be pretty independent of Carthage proper.”

West Carthage, as described many months later by Mr. Cruikshank, was a model village of about 1,500 people with “fine residences, beautiful lawns and absolutely no saloons or questionable resorts.” There was a year-old jail on the west side, he reported, but it was never occupied. That was good, since nobody ever thought about installing locks on the doors.

The West Carthage “holier than thou” attitude was not accepted in Carthage, the editor wrote. “Carthage police declare....that people live there who are no better than they should be; that the citizens of the ’Perfect Town’ have been known to do as reprehensible things as those of Carthage proper.”

Taking the heat for Carthage’s ills were the two policemen and the village trustees. Some defended police chief G. F. Ullman, arguing that he was a brave man who couldn’t be on the scene all the time. Besides, he was not getting support from the trustees, they contended.

With the board of trustees under pressure to investigate the police team, officers Ullman and his “terrorized” deputy, Officer G. W. Tapp, began telling barkeeps to prevent rowdy gatherings in front of their establishments.

And then, on a Saturday night late in July, Chief Ullman raided a poker joint in the basement of the Ervin House. He confiscated gambling paraphernalia, and sent proprietor Jacob Henry to village court. A $50 was assessed.

While improvements were gradually noticed, the tenderloin section was far from well done. Late in October, a foreign-born man had enough of the ethnic insults being cast at him in the Irvington Hotel. He stepped outside, pulled out a gun, and fired a number of shots through a window. Fortunately nobody was wounded.

The gunman scrambled across the bridge, frightening some women who were headed home from their West Carthage meeting of the Dickens Literary Club, “the oldest literary organization of Carthage....made up of well-known society women,” Mr. Cruikshank wrote.

Reacting to the incident, he editorialized, “The Republican realizes that the local authorities have no veto power over the granting of licenses, but they can make it uncomfortable for violators of the law. State Street is the public thoroughfare and ought to be cleared of disorderly and noisy resorts.”

As the calendar pages turned to another year, Carthage President Dr. Charles F. Adams “had had enough,” Mrs. Prievo surmised in her account. He did not seek re-election. The new village board retained the two policemen, and recruited six special volunteer officers.

Things did not quiet down overnight, but as years passed, the number of State Street, “gin mills” dwindled. So did the frequency of crowds gathering on lower State Street, with July 4th fireworks becoming the only main attraction, Mrs. Prievo noted.

Mr. Cruikshank’s stay in Carthage lasted close to four years. He went back to Brooklyn in 1910, spending his final two years of life as editor and proprietor of the Brooklyn Times.

As for the Rev. Mr. Fiske, his brief Carthage stopover was followed by a two-year assignment in Sherman, Chautauqua County. He went on to preach in Illinois, Vermont and Kansas, according to records kept by the Unitarian Universalist Church. He wrote a book about public speaking and taught the subject in New York City. He was 75 when he died in 1961 in Media, Pa.

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