Seeking a pre-Halloween experience in a mansion on a hilltop brooding over solved and unsolved murders, overlooking a town where secrets are buried? The Llano County Library System Foundation’s got you covered, Bubba. Look up a foundation board member or go to the web site at https://lclsf. org/events/f/a-night-atthe- norton and nail down as many tickets as you can to the Night at the Norton costume themed cocktail party. That’s set for Friday, Oct. 21, 7-9 p.m. at Stinson Distilling, 2255 E. State Hwy. 29. If Stinson Distilling doesn’t ring your chimes for a spooky evening, you should look up the site’s history. It’s where the Norton sisters, Catherine and Cordelia, lived until they were poisoned and died within a day of each other. Arsenic, you see.
The case was prominent enough to shake up the science of forensics at the time, according to the online blog ForensicReader. com: “Rod McCutcheon, [the toxicologist who performed the autopsy] based his experiment on the principle that even high temperatures cannot destroy heavy metals and, after the cremation, arsenic has to be present in the ashes as solid or gas.” Until then, apparently, no one knew arsenic lingered in hair and fingernails after death.
Gary Cartwright wrote of the place in Texas Monthly in 1989, “For more than a century the mansion had housed the damned and the dying. Its original owner, F. R. Malone, was an investor who came from Louisiana after the Civil War to make his fortune in the iron boom. After that it was owned by a group of doctors who turned it into a tuberculosis sanatorium and attempted to maximize their profits by forcing their patients to live—and frequently die—in neat rows of tents on the mansion grounds.
The doctors went broke in 1911, and four years later another mining magnate, Tom W. Norton, bought the property, burned the death tents, and scrubbed down and renovated the mansion as a home for his wife and five daughters. When the last of the Nortons died in February 1988, the mansion once again fell dark and silent, its secrets intact.” They promise “live music, a silent auction, delicious food, a contest for the best dressed attendees, and cocktails featuring Stinson Distilling’s craft spirits.” Stinson owner Clint Blythe promises as many custom cocktails as bartenders can handle, depending on the crowd.
All is included in the $50 ticket price. Proceeds, of course, go to the Llano County Library System.
The idea of a costume event was that of event chair Diane Moster, according to Foundation President Leila Green Little.
“The (Foundation) Board is fully supportive of Diane’s vision to throw a literary costume party to get attendees thinking about their personal connection to literature, and as a way to make it a fun, signature, fundraising event,” Little said.
That means tickets are limited and you should probably not delay.
After you secure those tickets, your next trip will be to a thrift store, or maybe the attic: the costume theme, after all, is “favorite literary character.”
“We encourage all attendees to dress up in homage to a favorite author or book character, whether it’s the beloved pooch from John Erickson’s Hank the Cowdog series or one of Leo Tolstoy’s 500 characters in War and Peace, and to come have a wonderful time with fellow readers,” Little said.
Expect to see anybody from Anne Frank to Henry VIII on Oct. 21. Maybe even Dracula.
