Fay family
Biography
Horace Amsden Fay was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in 1827. As an adult, he engaged in the retail crockery trade. He married Calista Darrah in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1857 and a few months later the newlyweds relocated to Clinton, Iowa. Shortly thereafter, they moved to DeWitt, Iowa, the county seat of Clinton County. In the early eighteen seventies, Horace joined C.E. Shattuck in business at the Clinton Chair Factory. In 1877, he assumed charge of the DeWitt business of the Clinton County Advertiser. He spent the remainder of his life in DeWitt, dying there on March 12, 1905.
Horace Fay had two sons, Clarence Fay, and Louis E. Fay. Louis, born September 21, 1861, started as an office boy in the DeWitt business of the Clinton County Advertiser in 1877, the same year his father was engaged by the paper.
In 1882, Louis E. Fay bought the newspaper, where, according to a contemporary account in the Muscatine Semi-Weekly News Tribune, time, talent and energy zealously employed, served to develop it from a small weekly to one of the leading democratic daily papers of the state. At some point, Louis was apparently joined by his brother Clarence in ownership of the newspaper. Clarence also owned a jewelry store in Clinton.
At 4:30 on the morning of November 2, 1902, Clarence and his wife were roused from bed at gunpoint. A burglar stole thirty-one diamonds, worth $1300, from them. Louis used his own time and money to track down the burglars. A break came in the case in April 1904, when George Burrier, who was in jail for another robbery, confessed to being involved in the Fay burglary, and named the chief burglar in the case. Louis Fay's work on this case put five criminals behind bars and implicated Tom Denison, a wealthy policy king and gambler who had great power in Omaha politics. His work also helped to solve the Shercliffe diamond burglary in which $15,000 worth of diamonds had been stolen in 1892. One and a half years after they were stolen, the Fay diamonds were returned to Louis Fay in a meeting on a bridge between Omaha and Council Bluffs.
Found in 1 Collection or Record:
Fay Family Papers
Correspondence and papers relating to the Fay diamond case. Other papers include an indenture agreement dated 1837, several land warrants and deeds dating from the 1850's. A collection of about 300 postcards from various points in Iowa and the U.S.