THE COUNTERFEITERS

What I inherited from my criminal great-grandparents.

- BY JESSICA WINTER

Around sunset on a rainy Saturday in November, 1906, a woman walked the streets of Rochester, in western New York State, trying to offload a stack of counterfeit two-dollar bills. She looked about forty, tall, broad in the beam, with dark eyes and dark hair; she wore a black fascinator and a long brown coat. At a grocery store, she traded one of the bills for a box of graham crackers. On a main drag, she bought children’s clothes: an undershirt, a pair of drawers.

A mile southeast, her fortunes cooled. When she offered one of her notes at a butcher’s shop, the clerk “discovered it was a counterfeit, she said she had no other money and left the meat,” according to a report by L. William Gammon, a U.S. Secret Service agent on the woman’s trail. At a drygoods store, where she attempted to buy a pair of child’s stockings and garters, a clerk was sent out on the pretext of making change, but he was really seeking a policeman. The “woman shover,” as Agent Gammon referred to her, slipped away before she could be apprehended.

None of the shopkeepers seemed to recognize her; she steered clear of stores in her own neighborhood, in the north of the city. Depending on the witness, she had either “large features” or “very large features.” One clerk wondered if she was a man. A more exacting witness recalled a prominent gold crown in her left lower jaw.

After the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that the Secret Service was investigating the fake bills, the woman in the fascinator wasn’t spotted for weeks. Meanwhile, word spread among local merchants about the bad deuces in circulation. On December 22nd, she rematerialized at a bakery, and then at a shoe store, with a two-dollar bill in hand. A clerk summoned a policeman. In his daily report, Gammon celebrated the arrest of “Mrs. Selma Winter of 108 Carter Street for attempting to pass a Counterfeit $2.00 United States Silver Certificate.”