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40 Greatest Stories

The Prisoner of Highland Park

Coming home in search of a vanished childhood, a writer finds one of the ghosts that haunted it was very real.
By China Galland |
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(photo: Highland Park Library)

Cosette had another favorite target: J. C. Muse, Highland Park city attorney, who represented the town during the suit. During the height of the battle, Cosette was invited to state her case on the Art Linkletter show. Claiming she had been named after her father’s favorite character in Hugo’s Les Misérables, she likened J.C. Muse to Javert, the vengeful policeman who hounds his victim to death during a 20-year pursuit. The offended Muse, in turn, reportedly demanded equal time on the show and called Cosette “crazy,” an act for which he suffered public retaliation. Once when she was on the stand, Bradford recalls, he asked her to tell him what was in front of the house at 4005 Miramar. Cosette mentioned trees, fences, and … umbrellas. As a rather fanciful element in her fortifications against vandals, Cosette had 31 umbrellas set in cement, upright and open, in the front yard. But no, she went on to correct herself, there were 32 umbrellas, 31 on the ground and one, with “J.C. MUSE” painted on it, perched on a tree top. Cosette called it the “J. C. Muse Indignation Umbrella,” and refused to take it down until he publicly apologized for calling her crazy.

The year 1956 seems to have been the high point of the controversy. The case was continuously appealed and had almost made its way to the Texas Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, which in effect upheld the appeals court ruling that the ship had to be dismantled.

In January of that year, Cosette announced that the house was “For Sale to Negroes Only.” While this stirred a flurry of publicity, the neighbors did not seem perturbed. The NAACP replied that they had no interest in entering a neighborhood feud after hearing that Cosette was willing the house to them. They wanted no part of it. Crosses were found burning on her lawn shortly thereafter. The Ku Klux Klan? Pranksters most likely.

In February of 1956, she opened the house to the public for tours. Initially there was a group of 40, bolstered by a sizeable press contingent. A newsclip states that “almost 500 persons, including men, women, and babes in arms toured the house.”

Finally, on April 18, 1956, the controversial ship was torn down. A Times Herald article noted that it had taken 15 years to sink the good ship Miramar.

But that was not the end of the battle for Cosette. In another suit that originated in 1959, she sued the Town of Highland Park for refusing to give her a building permit to repair her home. At one point, Addison Bradford even filed a suit against Highland Park on behalf of Cosette’s workmen, charging harassment.

Kelly Pierce represented the Newtons in the new suit against Highland Park and recalls them fondly as ideal clients who had their side of the story. “She may have been eccentric, but she was brilliant,” he said. Cosette’s suit against the town dragged on for five years, with countless cross-actions, motions, interventions, and judgments. She maintained that it was un-American for her to be refused a permit to repair. Highland Park tried to hold her to a list of remodeling specifications that was four pages long, including a note that the basement had to be painted.

During much of the late ’50s, Cosette lived away from 4005 Miramar, and kept up with the state of the property through employees, photographers, and secretaries. Her blood pressure was such that her doctor suggested that she stay away from the place, she explained to a friend. Dr. Frank continued his medical practice, as always, except for the necessary court appearances in their fight to save their home.

At long last Kelly was able to secure the hard-won permit to repair, but by 1964, their funds were so depleted that the Newtons finally decided to give up their home. It was placed up for public auction. The street was roped off, and the house was bought by Charlie Seay Sr. A newspaper article on the event punned that the S.S. Miramar had finally gone to Seay. Seay bulldozed the remaining structure, and the house that was built in its place stands quietly today among the well-shaded homes on Miramar.

• • •

The S.S. Miramar Museums at 2215-2219 Cedar Springs were Cosette’s last great dream project. They occupied her full-time between the sale and razing of her property on Miramar and her death 11 years later. The museums were also, as the courts and press had been before, the medium of continual attempts to tell her side of the story and vindicate her name.

Almost everyone in their late 20s or older who grew up in Dallas has heard of the Miramar Museums, like “the Negro in the attic” and “the ship in the back yard.” It seems, though, that few natives took the time to go through the museums when they were open. Most of the people I’ve found who went there were writers, artists, collectors, or mavericks of one variety or another, or from another town altogether. The average resident who knew of the exhibits seems to have stayed away, having heard that, like the house and the woman, the place was “strange.”

One result of the battle of the Miramar was that Cosette maintained a fervent attack on the problem of “juvenile delinquency.” The museums were part of the fight. A full-page ad in the Dallas Yellow Pages states its purpose as to provide

…interesting, artistic, and inspirational exhibits for law-abiding youths; to establish scholarship funds for borderline delinquents; to create a research fund for lawyers to make a study of effective ways to handle delinquents and — especially — to study the dilemma of the victim and analyze our own tragic Case…

Behind its eye-catching facade, the many rooms of the S.S. Miramar Museum originally held three major displays: the S.S. Miramar, which housed dolls and toys from around the world; the International Exhibits of Antique and Imperial Oriental Art, which housed Cosette’s collection of jade, brass, ivory, tapestry; and the “Alamo” Miramar-Home Museum.

How to describe the museums? Originally, as one can see from photographs, they were brimming with Oriental art, vases, paintings, statues, musical instruments. The crowning piece was Cosette’s beloved Chinese Imperial Jade Screen, which was also periodically displayed in the Woman’s Building at Fair Park, during State Fair time. The screen had eight panels, each 8 feet tall, and its elaborate carvings were done in more than 20 varieties of jade, as well as tiger’s eye, lapis lazuli, aventurine, goldstone, and rose quartz, all embedded in cinnabar.

But the museum, born out of the ashes of the S.S. Miramar, was also an exotic travel experience. For example, when a group of Camp Fire Girls and Blue Birds were to visit, Cosette arranged for patriotic music to set the pace as the girls boarded “a make-believe ship for an exciting tour around the world through 14 countries, all gloriously displayed in the most enchanting decorum [sic] and the most beautiful lighting.”

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Cosette reportedly had more than 5,000 dolls, many of them antiques, which she arranged throughout the museum to tell parts of her life story. In the Room of Mirrors, for example, there was an incredible display of large bisque dolls dressed as Cosette and her family, depicting scenes from her life. In one mirror-backed case, marked No. 18, beside a doll wearing a gold lamé dress and tiara, was a plaque: “Dr. Cosette, the Socialite/Arrayed in sequins gold and bright/Loves to dance but watches the time…” Next to the doll is an antique clock set at three minutes before 12. In another, a boy doll dressed in doctors’ whites, has a sign: “Dr. Frank H. Newton, giving his beloved wife both love and freedom, bids her goodbye and remains behind to keep the home fires burning.”

“Money was not important to Dr. Frank,” recalls his medical secretary, Julia Wise. “He let Cosette get whatever she wanted.” But during the long Miramar dispute, the Newtons had used up Frank’s income, mortgaged all their property, and gone deeply into debt. Piece by piece, Cosette’s collection had to be sold off, and the mix of art and junk on display in the museum began to lean heavily toward the latter.

Cosette’s personality seems to have undergone much the same transformation as her displays. Her mix of eccentric intelligence and outrageous bravado slowly fermented into a full-blown persecution complex. In the basement of the museum, I turned up box after box full of pamphlets and circulars describing her martyrdom at the hands of Highland Park, with titles like “Spiritual Gleanings From The Miramar,” “An Empty House Speaks,” and “The Murdered Home.”

The Newtons lived at the museum, venturing out into the world less and less as they grew older. Joyce Clem, a close friend of Cosette’s, recalls the patterns of their life there: “I knew her the last six years of her life. She had gone into seclusion, except for rare occasions like birthdays, when I would give her a party. She and Dr. Frank lived in different parts of the museum. They were both hard of hearing. He would make notes on activity in the museum during the day — what was sold off and for how much — and give them to her. At night she’d add her comments to the notes and return them in the morning.

“I fixed up lunch trays for her two or three times a week, and Easter baskets, valentines, clippings from magazines. When I came over, she would put on a fox fur scarf. She loved jewelry, perfume, make-up. Dr. Frank would help her dress up when I came over.

“I saw the true Cosette. She was very intelligent, had all her faculties up to the end. I have only a high school education, but she never once made me feel inferior. I was devoted to her. When I go back to the museum I can feel her presence sometimes, and smell her perfume in the air. She loved joy.”

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Cosette eventually came to see the long Miramar episode in a more spiritual light. She would periodically rearrange the museum displays to reflect her new understanding. Late in her life she went so far as to decide that she had been “Honored to be allowed to Suffer for Him, just as His Son was crucified and made to suffer…” and described herself in the third person:

The Captain immediately expressed her appreciation of the Honor by ordering a rose-colored beautiful granite monument and having it inscribed in memory of hers and her husband’s homestead. She devoted one alcove of the first floor at 2217 Cedar Springs to the Garden of Grief. A transparency picture of Christ kneeling at Gethsemane was lighted and placed to the left of the monument. Flowers and shrubs and wreaths and white doves adorned the area. A grandmother doll still remains seated to the right of the beautiful crepe-draped monument, in memory of her dear little Mother who was so grieved for the shattered desecrated homestead.

Over the years the museum gradually took on the shape of her story, as she would have depicted it, much as sand takes the shape of a footprint. Her life, her story, her collection — they were no longer distinguishable in the end.

Not long before I left Dallas in 1976, I was at the museum, which was being disassembled and was in complete disarray. In the back I found a small room completely lined with jail bars on all sides and even on the ceiling. The bars were intertwined with pink and white plastic roses. The ceiling was translucent, only a piece of rippled heavy plastic such as one finds on greenhouses. Leaves were scattered over the roof. Occasionally the wind would stir and they would scratch along the plastic. The sound was eerie. I turned to find, off to one side, a life-sized mannequin, dressed in Cosette’s “Captain’s” outfit, draped in black net, standing next to one of the many granite tombstones she had carved: “To the S. S. Miramar, Killed by the hate, greed and envy of her Highland Park neighbors.”

• • •

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And so ends the story of Cosette, at least for this telling. When I finished writing her story, I went back down to the creek for an evening wade. The fireflies were out, and the night pooled wet around my feet as I wandered back toward my grandfather’s house. It had been sold a year or so ago after housing the family for over 50 years. I hadn’t been back since. As I drew closer, I noticed that the lights were still on in the living room downstairs. It was getting late, but I decided to inquire whether I might go through the house again. I knocked. They said, “Who is it?” I explained, and the door was thrown open wide. I was immediately invited in for a tour, handed a glass of iced coffee, and asked a myriad of questions about the house. I was pleased to find that the new owners were restoring the house, keeping it close to its original condition. They’d even kept the old laundry chute that ran from the upstairs nursery down to the laundry room below. When I saw it, I had to laugh at all the memories that rushed up. Three generations of us had clambered up and down that laundry chute, our “secret” entrance to the house.

Mrs. Shelton, the new owner, told me that whenever she mentioned her new home to people, they said, “Oh yes, the Verhalen house.” She had resigned herself to the fact that after one family lives in a house for such a long time, the house takes on their identity, new owners notwithstanding.

When I left after an hour or so, Mrs. Shelton walked out to the street with me. As we descended the slate walk and steps to the sidewalk, she pointed out a long-forgotten earmark of 3600 Drexel. Down on the first step of the walk is a heart, blue slate, small and embedded so naturally with the other pieces of slate that I’d overlooked it in the familiar patchwork of the walk. She said that when she saw that heart, she knew that this was the house for her. I said, “Yes, I understand. Thank you again and goodnight.”

40Gr8

Author

China Galland

China Galland

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