“Ella Adams, the seventeen-year-old girl, who was suspected of an attempt to poison the McIntosh family, at Pine Grove Furnace, has confessed to the deed. She put “Rough on Rats” in the family coffee pot. She was taken from the Home in Lawrence county, and adopted into the family in 1886. About the same time a sister, Artie Chaffin, was adopted by a family in St. Albans, West Virginia, and by a very strange coincidence, on the very day that Miss Zell, the matron of the Home, received word of Ella’s crime, she was notified by the St. Albans’ family, that she would have to come after Artie, as she had threatened to poison the family. It is not thought that there was any collusion between the girls, but the coincidence is certainly a singular one.”1
