The Kentucky Gazette

A Family Living in the Same Apartment
with Horses, Cows, Dogs, Goats and
Geese.
From the Philadelphia Times.
August Witman, a young German, of
535 North Third street, lodged complaint
at the office of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children several
days ago, to the effect that his step-
father, Jacob Stosser, had been treating
his family in an inhuman manner.
Agent De Lange went with the complaint
to Stosser's haunt, in the swamp lands by
Tacony Creek, near Harrow Gate, in the
Northern suburbs of the city. It was
found that Stosser was a raiser of swine.
The shanty in which he and his family
lived was a miserable one-story hut,
about twenty by thirty feet, made of
warped planks and slabs. Inside were
Stosser, his wife, two children, a horse,
a cow, goats and geese. The children and
horses had stalls side by side, and the
cow was separated from the rest of the
brutal people by a thin partition. In one
corner was an old rusty stove, and near
it stood an old box used as a table. A
few feet away was the bed occupied by
man and woman. It was full of vermin,
and stunk with filth. The geese and goats
had the run of the belittered and noisome
floor. Unwashed dishes, cracked and
broken, covered the floor. Everything
was filthy. The starving animals were
more cleanly than their keeper, and
chained outside were two dogs with
barely strength enough in their skin and
bones to howl. Stosser, a hard-faced,
repulsive man, about forty years old, and
his wife, who is a little ugly woman of
about the same age, were arrested by Mr.
De Lange, the society also taking the
children in charge. On Saturday afternoon
it was testified by Mrs. Witman, August's
wife before Alderman Urian, that the
children were sent out to beg, and beaten
if they returned empty-handed; that Stosser
maltreated the children horribly, that
frequently he would sharpen a knife and
threaten to cut their throats, and knock
them down and jump on them. August
Witman said that when he was a boy in
Germany, Stosser took him out doors in
the middle of winter, stripped him naked,
and with a bunch of soaked and frozen
twigs tortured him for an hour. He had
seen Stosser, so the testimony ran, pick
the young children up by the hair, and
dash them against the wall and once the
fiend sharpened a butcher knife, stuck it
into the table before him, and swore that
he would cut the throat of the first child
that should enter the hut. Annie Harding,
a colored woman of 3113 Chatham, who
lived next door to Stosser some time ago,
testified that she had seen him knock the
children down and kick them; and another
colored woman, a Mrs. Howard, of 507 Ann
street, also testified to the brutality of
the man. Stosser was held, in $600 bail
and his wife in $400 to answer at Court.