The horsewhipping of Dr. Curran at Harris station

A whipping at the station platform

The Mount Holly News of July 23, 1912 reported that Dr. Martin W. Curran, of South Park, had come to Mount Holly and "swore out a warrant for Albert LeDuc, of the same place, on a charge of assault and battery." The paper described Curran as showing "the appearance of having been pretty well battered up." By his account, he had been "horse-whipped on entering the passenger station at Harris, on the Central Railroad, near Chatsworth," the previous Saturday, where he found LeDuc waiting with whip in hand. LeDuc is reported to have said, "You are the man I have been looking for," before applying the whip "with vigor." Expecting arrest, LeDuc himself came to Mount Holly and was held under bail for court by Justice Hellbron.

Everything above is the newspaper's report of what Curran told it: the paper introduces the whipping as "the doctor's story" and does not say the charge was ever proved. South Park, named in the report as home to both men, was a small settlement on the sand roads between Vincentown and Chatsworth, near Apple Pie Hill — the same ground Henry Charlton Beck crossed in More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey (1937), where he found the local fire warden, Albert B. LeDuc, waiting for him at South Park. Whether that man is the Albert LeDuc of this 1912 report is not established by anything read here.

Curran's sanitorium and a history of friction

The same report supplied background on Curran's medical practice in the area. Some time earlier he had been tried in the Mount Holly court for practicing medicine without having recorded the required certificate at the county clerk's office — the paper describes this as resulting from "neglect" rather than a substantive licensing problem. The Pine Crest Sanitorium Company had purchased a tract at Apple Pie Hill, where it built "a bungalow and several tents for the care of patients," sank artesian wells, and made other improvements; Curran was said to hold a one-fourth interest in the operation. The paper reported Curran's own claim that "certain parties have been fighting to get him out" of the business, that he stood to "lose all he owns" if forced out, and that "Italians alleged to be patients" had been sent from New York by the company "to make it unpleasant for the doctor and his wife." The article concludes only that "there has been more or less trouble since Dr. Curran located in that section of the pines" — it does not explain what quarrel, if any, connected LeDuc to this dispute, and it identifies LeDuc only by name and by his residence at South Park.

The one independent trace of the sanitorium found this session is in Beck's 1937 book, which describes the buildings on the top of Apple Pie Hill as the remains of a hospital "called Pine Crest on the labels of the health water bottles," and attributes the venture to a New York physician, the late Dr. William A. White. Beck does not mention Curran, and nothing read here connects the two men; the point of the passage is only that a place called Pine Crest really did stand on Apple Pie Hill.

No later issue was checked for the outcome of the assault-and-battery charge against LeDuc, so whether the case went to trial, and what if anything resulted, is not established here.