New Jersey & Kentucky: Industry and Ambition

October 1900, Paterson, New Jersey. A seventeen-year-old silk mill worker named Jennie Bosschieter walks to

a drugstore on a Thursday evening. She never comes home. Four men from the city's wealthiest families drug

her with chloral hydrate, assault her, and leave her body by the Wagaraw Bridge. The murder trial exposes a city

where the families that owned the mills believed they owned the law, too.

Eight hundred miles south, Perry County, Kentucky, 1887. Two merchants in a town called Hazard turn a dispute

over coal mineral rights into a seven-year shooting war. The French-Eversole Feud kills more than twenty

men, burns down the county courthouse, and brings the state militia into Appalachian Kentucky. The outside

companies that started the conflict get exactly what they wanted.

The Victims

Jennie Bosschieter was seventeen years old, Dutch-American, the middle child of an immigrant family living at

155 East Fifth Street in Paterson's Riverside section. She had been working at the Paterson Ribbon Company on

Vreeland Avenue since she was thirteen — twelve-hour shifts on a doubling machine, barely a dollar a day. She