Purchase Price $160,000
2 bed · 1.5 bath · 2,453 sqft
Gorgeous home in historic downtown St. Joseph! Inside completely renovated with quality in mind! Large master bedroom and bathroom, walk-in closets, main floor laundry, sun room, ample off-street parking, 15 year tax abatement! Detached studio apartment great for a mother-in-law quarters, college student or just rent to make your payment!
Contact: Karla Denney at United Real Estate Kansas City
Call: 861-262-2011
House History & Gallery
Sometimes you look at a house and you know that it has great stories to tell. The T. W. Harl House at 514 North 10th Street is one of those houses. It is absolutely lovely and you just want to know more.
And wow! There is more to know!
The two-story brick townhouse was built around 1885 for prominent St. Joseph Lawyer Thomas W. Harl and his family. Thomas’ two sons, Frank and Charles, were both teenagers when their father built the home and they continued to live there with him and his wives off-and-on until 1900.
To say that the Harls were an interesting family is an understatement. Thomas himself was a criminal lawyer in town and at times seems to have been more criminal than lawyer. He was arrested on charges of bribery and other forms of corruption several times. His personal life was disordered as well. He had at least three wives and was divorced from at least two of them, and there are some indications that there was significant overlap between them.
But Thomas was positively upstanding when compared with his sons.
Frank Harl followed in his father’s footsteps and became an attorney – and also a hotel manager – and ran afoul of the law in spectacular fashion on multiple occasions. He and his father were the husband’s attorneys in the scandalous Roth divorce case in 1891. They were accused of enticing Mrs. Mary Roth to return to St. Joseph and essentially framing her for adultery. Charges they denied. In 1893, when Frank was about 30, the stable that housed his trotting horses at the fairgrounds burned, killing the horses and resulting in a large insurance payoff.
But it was the next year, in August 1894, when Frank became a sensational news story. He was living at 514 with his father when he shot and killed Charles Martin, a laborer that had been working at the house for over a year in the barn at the rear of the property. The story that Frank told was that he had accused Martin of stealing and Martin threatened him with an axe. The coroner’s jury found in Frank’s favor and the case was declared to be justifiable self-defense.
Now that would be enough excitement for most people for a lifetime, but that’s just not the kind of guy that Frank was. About 18 months later in January 1896, the family strains inside the Harl house at 514 N. 10th St. exploded in to the headlines. Edna Harl, Frank’s step-mother, accused Frank of trying to strangle her in her bedroom. Apparently, Edna and Thomas had been having marital problems and Thomas had been sleeping at his office for weeks while Edna remained in the family home with Frank and his wife. Frank decided that the situation was untenable and that Edna needed to go and he made his point with his hands around her neck – or so she said. He said that there had been no violence beyond harsh words and that Edna was the source of the problems and that in fact it was she who had attacked him with an iron poker. The result of all of this was, not surprisingly, a divorce between Edna and Thomas.
The excitement for Frank did not end there – in 1900, when the family sold the house to Enterprise Furniture Store owner Samuel Hassenbusch, Frank took over management of the Donovan Hotel and much of the family joined him there. On November 21, 1900 the Gazette Herald reported, “The guests of the Donovan hotel were awakened at 1 o’clock this morning by the alarm of fire in the building. Frank Harl and some friends were in the bar room of the hotel, and at the alarm of fire Mr. Harl ran to the third floor where the fire was, and found the elevator shaft in the east end of the hotel in full blaze.” The fire department was called and the blaze was put out without serious damage. Frank continued to practice law and make the news – he even ran for Prosecuting Attorney in 1906 – until May 1911 when he was granted a divorce. Apparently his wife of 23 years had taken $15,000 and went to live with their daughter in Denver. Frank wasn’t lonely for long, he remarried soon after and went to live in St. Louis where in December 1914 he suffered an epileptic seizure and fell and hit his head resulting in his death.
You would think that Frank’s very colorful career would be all the scandal that this family would offer – but you would be wrong. When Thomas died in 1905 his obituary referred to his two adult sons: Frank, the attorney, and Charles, a minister. So a family of two crooked lawyers and a preacher, sounds like a Netflix series. But it gets better.
Charles C. Harl is as colorful as the other men in his family. As a young man he attended law school with the aim of following in the family business, but that never really worked out. He then became an evangelist (which likely means that he was an itinerant preacher working the revival circuit) and later a real estate salesman. He ended up in Memphis, where life is always a party where he became notorious, “It has developed that he was intimate with many women, at least two of them married, and that threats, caused by jealousy had been made against him. He was formerly a good salesman, but is alleged to have been of such unsteady habits that he had made only a bare living for a number of years.” On Valentine’s Day 1917 he was found shot three times near the corner of Market & 3rd Street in Memphis. He refused to identify his attacker before he died and his remains Memphis PD’s oldest cold case.
Given all the excitement from the Harl family, the neighborhood must have breathed a sigh of relief when the house was sold to Samuel and Dora Hassenbusch and their three sons. Samuel was the owner of the very successful Enterprise Furniture and the family were highly respected members of the Jewish community. The Hassenbusches lived at 514 for more than three decades, working hard to build a successful business and to contribute to the community with generous charity work.
The T.W. Harl house is a contributing structure in the Museum Hill National and Local Historic District. This means that it is eligible for historic tax credits, grant support such as the Save Our Heritage grants, and perhaps even listing as a Local Landmark.
