Miser ^(Myth)

These writers will also say he was cheap with groceries, too, and made the family eat rancid mutton for days on end rather than throw it away. This bank president and real estate developer was so greedy for any extra dollar that he put extra eggs from his farm in a basket and tried to sell them on his way downtown. His poor daughters were so embarrassed by their substandard house and their father’s famous penny-pinching that they never had a chance at marriage. Or so says the myth.

What Was the Reality?

When Andrew Borden bought his house at 92 Second Street in 1872, it was a two-family dwelling. He immediately had it remodeled to make it a fairly spacious, 2288 square-foot home for a family of four, along with a live-in servant. As soon as city water was available, he had a sink with a pump installed in the kitchen, in the cellar, and in the barn. He also put two flushable toilets in a water closet in the cellar. He had a coal burning furnace installed in the cellar as well and radiators placed throughout the house for warmth in the winter.

Electricity was beginning to make an appearance but was not yet widely available in town, and lines had yet to reach the Borden house. (Even three years later, in 1895, only 43 houses in Fall River could boast of having electricity.) Piped natural gas had recently become available for lighting but was known to be dangerous, so most didn’t trust it at that time. Phones were also a new method of communication but were used primarily in businesses, not private homes.

While Andrew undoubtedly could have afforded a larger home with nicer touches, it’s doubtful he could have provided his family with more conveniences, with the possible exception of a bathtub or bathroom upstairs. Because he always kept a full-time domestic servant, his daughters did not have to do any housework except to look after their own rooms. He also owned a summer home on one of his farms in Swansea, which the family visited most every year.

As for the oft-repeated assertion that Andrew was tight-fisted with his daughters, we know he paid for Emma to go away to college for four semesters. He also funded Lizzie’s five-month Grand Tour of Europe. He paid for seamstresses to come and stay once or twice a year to make custom garments for his daughters. He also gave them the same amount of weekly spending money that he gave his wife. (It was $4 a week then, which would be the equivalent of about $150 a week in 2026 according to the Consumer Price Index calculator.)

As for the food he provided his family, we know that each morning fresh milk and sometimes fresh eggs were delivered to the house from his farm in Swansea. Lizzie testified that Abby went out almost daily to do the marketing and buy fresh meat. In the one interview that Emma Borden ever gave to a newspaper, in 1913, she addressed the persistent rumor that her father was “niggardly” and refused to give his family enough to eat. “That is a wicked lie,” said Emma. “He was a plain-mannered man, but his table was always laden with the best that the market could afford.”

Several people, including Mrs. Mary Brigham, mentioned to the press that Andrew had started looking for a new house in a nicer neighborhood for his daughters. As his colleague William Chace told Lizzie’s lawyer, Andrew knew he was getting old and wanted his daughters to have a better place to live. And just weeks before the murders, Andrew bought back the house on Ferry Street he had previously deeded to his daughters for $5,000, which would have the purchasing power of $183,000 today.

None of these facts matches the description of a penny-pinching skinflint who kept his daughters deprived. A plain-mannered man Andrew might have been, but he was not a miser. As Edmund Pearson observed in 1937, “Before a man is described as a miser it has to be considered by what standard he is judged. Today, some folk will insist that a wealthy man must wallow in champagne, whether he likes it or not. For Mr. Borden to cut a dash would have been absurd; he would have been miserable.”

We do find newspaper accounts of the time describing Andrew as wearing clothing that was long out of style or ties that had become threadbare. As Denise Noe writes in The Hatchet, “He probably spent little on his own clothes simply because that was something that did not much matter to him…. The pattern that emerges when examining both his frugality and his generosity is that of a man who was tight-fisted when spending on himself but generous when spending on his wife and daughters.”

While Andrew Borden did not flaunt his wealth or spend a lot of money on himself, the assertion that he was a Scrooge-like miser who deprived his children of a good life is clearly another myth about a man who, as Noe concluded, “worked hard to provide comfort and enjoyment to the women about whom he cared.”

So Why the Myth?

In another essay for The Hatchet, Borden scholar Michael Brimbau theorized on how the portrait of Andrew as miser became so entrenched in Borden mythology. He noted that early rumors that well-bred Lizzie had done the killing, a notion too difficult to credit, led a restless press to search for a more suitable villain of the horrific crime.

“Possessing a citywide reputation as a prudent and hard-nosed businessman, Andrew Borden fit the mold perfectly—thus, the victim became the malefactor, the mob was satisfied, and the sale of newspapers, brisk. The press contrived its scapegoat, its whipping boy, for a nightmarish homicide that lacked a scoundrel, and Andrew Borden became the stand-in and earned the regretful reputation of rogue early on. How dare he have all that money and not acquire the luxuries it could buy. No wonder he was killed. For reasons of its own, the press sunk its teeth into the victim, the house he lived in, and the sort of life he led. It chose to exaggerate, overstate, and aggrandize it all, making Andrew Borden the bad guy, the miser, cheapskate, a Scrooge—and they never let go. Over time, one author after another celebrated the labels bestowed on Andrew Borden by the press, measuring the old banker’s character by his billfold … Today, most writers [continue to] shake Borden’s ethics, condemn his frugality and denounce the choices he made in furnishing his home, almost insinuating culpability in his own death.”

Brimbau’s analysis seems spot-on. But whatever the reason the press originated the characterization of Andrew as miser, Brimbau is right that the villainization of the victims has long been a morally reprehensible aspect of Borden mythology. Yet it stubbornly hangs on, because it gives a woman with seemingly no motive to kill her parents at least some reason to be irritated at them. In order to maintain our cultural bias that Lizzie was guilty, the creative artists who choose to make Lizzie the protagonist in their dramatizations must then give her antagonists to vanquish. And so, the myth of Andrew Borden the parsimonious miser persists.