Tragic Discovery @ Willow Point - Dec. 1894

It was an alarming, and very, very sad discovery.

          On the north side of Hamilton Bay, on the sands of the harbour’s shoreline in a cove formed by the point jut of land called Willow Point, on a cold December day, there and then Tessie Henderson’s body was found.

          Tessie Henderson was a handsome young lady who lived with her mother and uncle in an old frame dwelling near the Roman Catholic cemetery. She was a teacher in a Sunday School and a member of the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour at a church near her home.

          But on that cold December day, a Spectator reporter was alerted to the discovery at Willow Point. His poignant description of what he saw began by noting that the lifeless body that had been found had not been a victim of a drowning accident, but someone that had died of exposure to the frigid and wet weather of that time of year.

          “No more pathetic picture could be imagined,” he wrote, “than the sight of that handsome young form lying amid the ooze and slime of the lake’s margin. It represented the last sad scene in one of those really romantic love affairs that occasionally come to light in these modern and practical days.”

          Her uncle, Alexander Henderson claimed that his niece’s heart had been wooed and won by a young Methodist minister. An engagement was announced, a wedding dress was purchased and then the young preacher changed his mind and his decision to marry Tessie was reversed at the last moment.

          Ever since, Tessie had sunk into despondency and melancholy. Her brain, her uncle thought, had become, in his description, “affected.”

          To add to the unsettled nature of Tessie’s state of mind, her uncle recounted that “two drunken city roughs” tried to break into the family house on a Sunday afternoon when Tessie was alone inside.

          That incident seemed to further aggravate her mental instability and she took to her bed, where she remained almost all together since then.

          “She never expressed any particular wish to die or spoke of suicide,” her uncle told the young man from the Spectator, “but her interest in life departed.”

          One day, Tessie’s mother and uncle had been up late, preparing their goods to be taken for sale at the Hamilton Market the following day. Her mother was still churning butter as late as 11 p.m. and Tessie was still in bed as usual.

          Her mother went to the barn for a moment, and when she returned Tessie was gone. Alexander Henderson was prompted alerted and a frantic search of the farm’s property by lantern was initiated. The search was unsuccessful.

          The Spectator reporter with an eye for precise detail, described the scene along the Willow Cove shoreline when he arrived.

          “Just in the grey winter dawn, as the heavy mists were rising up from among the dry reeds on the bayshore, they found the body. It was lying in the tangled mass of weeds and drifted flotsam washed up by the waves in the pretty cove, just east of Willow Point.

          “There was nothing on the body but a night dress, and the deceased lay on her side, the feet being in the water. It is nearly a quarter mile from the house to the bayshore. She had evidently come down a rough path in the ravine, which is full of tangled brush and thorn bushes, for her face and arms were scratched and her feet cut by stones and pierced by thorns.

          “She was a tall, well-formed young woman with a ruddy, handsome face and long black hair.”

          Her distraught uncle told the reporter that “she will be buried in the dress that was prepared for her wedding. She was a good girl.”

          Rest in peace, Tessie. You were, and are, loved.