The Mysterious Identity Of The ‘Old Leatherman’ Urban Legend
It’s March 1889, and the grim business of an inquest into a man’s death is underway in Sing Sing, New York. Two doctors, Joel D. Madden and Charles S. Collins, report their findings on the cause of death. They cite “lupus, or ‘wolf’ cancer” as the cause of death and note that this affliction “made frightful ravages in his mouth, almost destroying the lower jaw.” This unfortunate man’s life did not end at home in his bed, for he owned neither of those things. Instead, he died alone in a crude, makeshift shelter on a farm belonging to one George Dell near the village of Briarcliff Manor, New York.
The Old Leatherman
Although he was a well-known character who tramped along the roads of Connecticut and New York State for many years, his real name was a mystery: he was known only as “The Old Leatherman.” A carpenter called Henry Miller was the person who found the vagabond’s lifeless body.
Miller told the inquest, “I went out for a walk with my wife on Sunday morning last, my wife expressed a wish to see the retreat of the Leatherman, so we went there. As we… [were] entering the hut, we… [thought] the man was asleep, but a second glance saw that he was dead.”
Leather suit
The farmer, Dell, was another who testified at the inquest. He said, “[The Old Leatherman] frequently stopped on my farm for a little over five years last past, in a rude structure he made in the woods for a shanty or a hut.” Dell also noted, “I thought he was a Frenchman. I asked him a few words in French and he answered promptly in French.”
Dell also explained the origin of The Old Leatherman’s name. “When I first saw him, 28 years ago, he wore then the same suit or one similar to it, and made of small pieces of leather, mostly boot legs sewed together with leather bands.”
An eccentric life
A second local farmer, Walter L. Whitson, gave evidence at The Old Leatherman’s inquest. He told the court, “The last time I saw him he looked ill and did not have the large bag. He was a mystery to me. I never knew him to work anywhere. He was about 60 years old.”
But it wasn’t just Whitson who’d found mystery in the eccentric life of The Old Leatherman. People far and wide across New York and Connecticut felt just the same way. His lifestyle had been truly extraordinary, following a set routine that he repeated without fail over many years.
The Old Leatherman’s routine
This was his routine: he would walk a 365-mile circuit which took him precisely 34 days to circumnavigate. Connecticut History.Org described the route in a 2022 article. He made a “clockwise trip through southwestern Connecticut and adjacent sections of lower New York State.”
The piece continued, “The trips took him through Danbury, New Fairfield, Watertown, Middletown, and New Canaan, into Westchester, New York, back to Danbury and again to New Fairfield.” It had been in 1857 that The Old Leatherman first came to wider attention, although sure evidence of his repeated circuits is only available for the last six years of his life. But he’d wandered through New York and Connecticut for 33 years.
Ten miles a day
While engaged on his seemingly compulsive circuit, The Old Leatherman covered around ten miles a day. In 2018 the Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough Historical Society noted, “His route was so consistent that newspapers published his itinerary and people claimed you could set your clock by his appearance.”
The tramp was supported on his trekking by the kindness of strangers; he had a series of farmsteads where he would make regular stops. In a 1937 edition of The Westchester Historian, historian Allison Albee wrote, “He would knock at the back door, place his hand to his mouth and mumble something.” That was his way of asking for food.
100 cave shelters
If benefactors offered cash or clothes he would usually refuse them, although he readily welcomed donations of tobacco or coffee. The Briarcliff history website records that “offers of shelter, even in the coldest weather, were also generally not accepted.”
Apparently The Old Leatherman “preferred sleeping in the various caves and rock shelters where he stored bedding materials…[and] firewood and occasionally kept a garden. Everything he owned he carried in a leather sack on his back.” Several of the perhaps 100 of the cave shelters the hobo used include Leatherman's Cave in Watertown and Tory's Den in Burlington, both in New York State.
60 pounds of leather
But there was something else about The Old Leatherman which caught the bemused attention of those who encountered him. That was his extraordinary appearance, especially his apparel. Albee described his look, writing, “Up the road he would come at a slow, steady pace, sometimes mumbling incoherently to himself.”
“[He was} always accompanied by the rhythmic motion of his staff and the distinctive sound of heavy leather moving and rubbing together.” Indeed, The Old Leatherman was always dressed head-to-toe in thick leather, apart from his feet, on which he wore crudely carved wooden clogs. The suit is said to have weighed 60 pounds and he wore it even in the heat of the summer.
Old boots
The appearance of his clothes was made even stranger by the source of the leather and the fact that he fashioned them himself. An 1870 report in The Burlington Free Press noted that his “outlandish costume” was “wholly of leather, and made apparently from strips and remnants of old boots, fastened together by means of an awl and twine.”
One legend about The Old Leatherman offered an explanation for this cumbersome leather outfit, as well as giving the mystery man an origin story. This tale came from a journalist called W.A. Sailson, and it was published in the Waterbury Daily American in 1884.
Jules Bourglay
During his lifetime there had been much speculation about where The Old Leatherman had appeared from, and that conjecture persisted for many years after. Nothing was known about him prior to his first attested appearance in 1858 in Harwinton, Connecticut. But, using sources he declined to name, Sailson claimed to have solved the mystery that had puzzled so many.
The Old Leatherman, Sailson confidently asserted, was actually French and his name was Jules Bourglay. Son to a wool merchant, Bourglay had been born in the French city of Lyon. The story went that while studying in Paris, he’d fallen in love with a woman whose father was a leather merchant called Laron. Bourglay asked Mademoiselle Loran to marry him, and she agreed.
A test
According to Sailson, the young Frenchwoman’s father had been none-too-keen on her proposed marriage to Bourglay. But swallowing his misgivings, Laron decided to give Bourglay an important job in his leather business. This would be a test: if Bourglay succeeded in his new position, Laron would grant permission for the marriage.
But, as Sailson wrote, “This was in 1857 the year when leather [prices] fell by 40 percent.” Bourglay had tried to dig his way out of a financial hole through speculation, but that ended in disaster. Laron’s business was ruined and marriage between Bourglay and his daughter was now out of the question.
A strange kind of atonement
Bourglay’s failure and the loss of the love of his life devastated him. In fact, so shattered was he that he had been forced to become a patient in a mental asylum for two years. After that, he’d traveled to New York to spend the rest of his life in a self-imposed exile in America.
What’s more, having ruined his future by his miscalculations in the leather business, Bourglay had elected to punish himself with a strange kind of atonement. He would spend the rest of his days dragging himself around and around New England while wearing that burdensome 60-pound leather suit.
Sparta Cemetery
Sailson’s account of The Old Leatherman’s life story continued to be the accepted one for more than a century. In a 1930s development in the saga Mrs. Edward Leikert identified the spot in the Sparta Cemetery in Ossining, New York, where the tramp had been buried in a pauper’s grave.
Leikert was able to locate the spot because she’d been at The Old Leatherman’s funeral back in 1889. She was the daughter of Dell, the farmer who’d given evidence at the inquest all those years ago. But it wasn’t until years later that the grave was formally recognized with a headstone.
Serious doubts
The Ossining Historical Society erected a gravestone with an inscribed plaque in 1953. Accepting Sailson’s story about The Old Leatherman, the inscription read “Final resting place of Jules Bourglay of Lyons [sic], France, ‘The Leatherman.’” At last, the tramp had a proper memorial. But just how accurate was it?
One who had serious doubts about the inscription was the late Dan W. DeLuca, who died in 2016 aged 68. He’d spent some 25 years unraveling the mystery of The Old Leatherman. One of the things that motivated him had been that gravestone in the Sparta Cemetery. And what DeLuca found out about the Sailson account of the vagabond’s life was game-changing to say the least.
Utter nonsense
In an interview with NPR in 2011 DeLuca gave his blunt assessment of Sailson’s tale of an unrequited French romance and a voluntary exile; he opined, “A great story. Not true though.” It was heartwarming that The Old Leatherman’s grave had been belatedly recognized. But DeLuca believed that the epitaph on his headstone was utter nonsense.
A 2015 article in The Village Voice by Jon Campbell confirmed DeLuca’s verdict. “The Leatherman was not Jules Bourglay. That name was just one of the countless myths and misattributions affixed to the Leatherman when he was alive, and long afterward.” The piece also pointed out that the epitaph had always troubled DeLuca.
Ludicrous tales
The lurid Jules Bourglay fiction was not the only bizarre story that had circulated during The Old Leatherman’s life. A reporter called A.E. Hammer filed a story about the tramp in the New Haven Daily Palladium which had been colorful, to say the least. This Hammer claimed he’d come across a secret trapdoor in the New England woods.
This had led down to The Old Leatherman’s secret and luxurious hideout. According to Hammer, “The carpet was the finest of Persian make. The furniture was so ornate with carving that every chair was a work of art. A malachite mantle of massive size supported several Venetian vases filled with giant ferns.” Another equally ludicrous tale claimed that the hobo had “caches of gold” hidden in the wilderness.
An obsession
As The Village Voice pointed out, “DeLuca wasn’t the first to be captivated by [The Old Leatherman’s] story.” Indeed the bizarre tale of the tramp and its unresolved mystery had become “an obsession for the people of Westchester County and western Connecticut.”
DeLuca though put more effort into trying to track down the truth about the hobo than perhaps anyone else. He published a book on his subject, The Old Leatherman, in 2008. The enduring popularity of the story means that the volume has gone through six reprints. But it’s not just that book that illustrates the lasting fascination with the tramp’s tale.
The Old Leatherman tours
In 1984 Connecticut public television aired a documentary about The Old Leatherman titled The Road Between Heaven and Hell; you can still find it on YouTube. There are The Old Leatherman tours available which take people on guided trips around some of the caves that were once home to the legendary wanderer.
The Old Leatherman has also been celebrated in song by Pearl Jam whose number named for the man includes the lines, “Once a month they’d spot him and here’s what they’d say. / “Here he comes. He’s a man of the land. He’s Leatherman.” Then there’s the Leatherman’s Loop, a 10-kilometer trail race staged every year at Cross River, New York, since 1987 to commemorate the hobo. As many as 1,000 runners turn out for this event.
A fraud exposed
But there’s one memorial to The Old Leatherman that’s been excised from history: that gravestone in the Sparta Cemetery. Once DeLuca and others had exposed the 1884 Sailson story published in the Waterbury Daily American as a fraud, something just had to be done about that glaringly inaccurate tombstone.
In fact, the story had been withdrawn by the very newspaper that published it the day after The Old Leatherman’s death. And before DeLuca started researching the hobo’s life, several others had gone to great lengths to try and verify the details of Sailson’s tale, entirely without success. Then in 2011 came a major development.
DNA testing
It was in 2011 that the Ossining Historical Society Museum’s board made the decision to take a scientific approach to The Old Leatherman’s story. His body, lying beneath the wrongly inscribed tombstone, would be exhumed. His remains would be subjected to DNA testing to see if that could shine any light on the hobo’s true identity.
Testing might also reveal any conditions that might have afflicted The Old Leatherman, such as autism. There were those who were unhappy with the idea of disturbing the tramp’s grave. But the museum board believed that his remains should be moved, as they were too close to a busy highway for the safety of the many who visited the site.
“A great history mystery”
Ossining Museum president Norm MacDonald recruited the boss of Connecticut’s Office of State Archaeology, Dr. Nicolas Bellantoni to work on the project. Dr. Bellantoni hoped that a fragment of bone or tooth might unlock some of The Old Leatherman’s mysteries; he supervised a two-day dig at the grave site.
Dr. Bellantoni spoke to The Village Voice about this attempt to pin down details about the hobo’s elusive identity. “To me it was just a great history mystery. His bones aren’t going to give us his name. But they might help us overcome some of the folklore, some of the innuendos that were being said about him.”
“I kinda went crazy”
The opposition to the exhumation grew as the project was developed. One of the main opponents was a man called Don Johnson of North Haven, Connecticut. He had fond memories of reading about The Old Leatherman in Yankee Magazine when he was a kid. The idea that researchers would disturb the vagabond’s last resting place horrified him.
Johnson told The Village Voice how he’d felt when he’d heard about the exhumation plans. “I kinda went crazy. I was like, ‘I can’t believe they’re actually doing this.’ For 30 years, he had gone to incredible lengths to keep to himself. And you would think, when you’re dead, you wouldn’t have to worry anymore.”
“People really cared about this guy”
Johnson started a website to campaign against the exhumation. He even spoke to DeLuca and Dr. Bellantoni to express his views. Dr. Bellantoni was unperturbed by the opposition. “I thought it was really fabulous,” the expert told The Village Voice. “People really cared about this guy. Any time you’re dealing with human remains, these are emotional issues, these are emotional things.”
DeLuca said that he saw the controversy as a way to keep the memory of The Old Leatherman alive. He also pointed out, “You know, they say all publicity is good publicity. And what happened was, all of a sudden, the newspapers were writing about…[him] again.”
Bitter disappointment
In any case, despite the opposition of Johnson and others, the exhumation went ahead in May 2011. The event had indeed, as DeLuca had hoped, attracted widespread attention. Journalists from NPR, NBC, The New York Times, and others congregated at the Sparta Cemetery to report on the archaeological dig.
Sadly, the event ended in bitter disappointment. Despite the best efforts of the researchers, all that emerged from the grave were some old coffin nails. Of The Old Leatherman’s body there was absolutely no trace. Dr. Bellantoni believed that the acidic soil in the graveyard would have accelerated decomposition; there would be no DNA testing.
The last laugh
For Johnson, the non-appearance of The Old Leatherman’s body was a welcome outcome. He said, “[The tramp] kind of had the last laugh. I felt like if he had walked by me at that moment, he would have given me a little wink.”
To honor the hobo’s remains, the researchers took some of the earth from the grave site and buried it in a new casket at another spot in the Sparta graveyard. And now the epitaph over this memorial for the unidentified man was put to rights. It simply read “The Leatherman.” The Jules Bourglay fiction had been laid to rest once and for all.
The kindness of strangers
So the upshot of all this is that we still have no idea about the true identity of the wandering man who trudged along the roads in parts of New England until his death more than 140 years ago. So what should we remember about The Old Leatherman, since we will probably never know who he really was?
Perhaps the most attractive part of the tramp’s legend is how he had been treated by the good folk of New York and Connecticut on his travels. For the truth is that the hobo had only been able to maintain his vagabond lifestyle thanks to the kindness of those he encountered as he made his 365-mile circuits of the countryside.
Tormentors
One incident illustrates the affection that many held for The Old Leatherman. As he had been traveling through Forestville, Connecticut, in 1887 “his Leathership,” as he was sometimes known, was confronted by two local bullies, Patsey Troy and Daniel Nash. The Waterbury Daily American reported on the incident.
According to the newspaper, “Troy and Nash approached and the three remained there some ten minutes. During this time, some boys say, the old man was crying and his tormentors were trying to make him take off his hat and cross himself, which he refused to do.” Troy and Nash had both been drinking.
Local outrage
Locals were outraged by this incident and the disrespect shown to The Old Leatherman by the drunken duo, Nash and Troy. Some were concerned that this ill-treatment might stop the tramp’s visits to Forestville forever. There wasn’t enough in the incident for the two thugs to be charged. But as the Daily American observed, “Ill fares the pusillanimous rascal who dares harm him and is proven guilty.”
On a happier note, there was the frequent compassion and even affection shown by citizens towards The Old Leatherman. As the Briarcliff Historical Society writes, “His visits were eagerly anticipated. Housewives were known to cook special meals. He was often invited into homes to eat; and photographs of the Leather Man were included in the family albums.”
Concern for The Old Leatherman’s welfare
More evidence of the concern that local people exhibited in their dealings with the hobo came as he became increasingly poorly towards the end of his life. The cancerous tumor that would eventually kill him had started to appear on his jaw in 1886 three years before his death. At first people assumed that he’d fallen victim to frostbite.
But as the disease worsened, it became obvious that something was seriously wrong. People now became so worried that The Old Leatherman had been forcibly taken to hospital. But that restriction on his freedom didn’t suit, and he soon left. It may have been a mistake to force the tramp into hospital, but well-wishers had clearly been concerned for his welfare. He died not long after this incident.
A “remarkable soul”
So The Old Leatherman’s identity is a mystery and likely always will be. We do at least know for sure that he wasn’t a Frenchman called Jules Bourglay who had wrecked his prospective father-in-law’s leather business, and fled to America as a consequence.
We’ll finish with the words of Albee, who spent many years researching the tramp’s life. In 1937 she said, “Occasionally, legend and reality unite in the form of some remarkable soul who, through peculiarity or chance, assumes a role resembling the mythical characters we read about in childhood’s fairy tales. The Old Leatherman was one of these.”