Immigrants flooded Barre during the last two decades of the 1800s, swelling the city’s population from roughly 2,000 inhabitants to more than 10,000. Most of the new arrivals were, like Corti, Italian, but many others came from places like Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Canada.
They mostly came for work in the city’s granite industry. Many labored in the quarries. The more skilled gravitated to the granite sheds, where they crafted massive chunks of stone into monuments.
Among the most gifted was Corti. So when members of the Barre’s Scottish community wanted to erect a monument to their countryman, famed poet Robert Burns, they commissioned Corti and his partner, Samuel Novelli, to do the work. While Novelli carved the likeness of Burns, Corti took on the more intricate panels depicting scenes from Burns’ poems that would adorn the monument’s base. The resulting work is widely admired within the granite-carving community. At one point, the New York Times called Corti the nation’s greatest granite carver.
The Robert Burns Memorial stands in front of the former Spaulding Graded School, now home of the Vermont Historical Society. It also stands as a symbol of what was lost when Corti, only 34 years old, was gunned down on Oct. 3, 1903.
That night noted socialist journalist Giacinto Serrati was scheduled to speak at the city’s Socialist Party Labor Hall, which served as a social and cultural hub for the Italian community.
Some saw the visit as inflammatory. Barre was a hotbed for anarchists and Serrati regularly attacked anarchists in the pages of the Socialist Labor Party’s weekly newspaper, Il Proletario.
In fact, a year earlier, Serrati had visited Barre to debate Luigi Galleani, an internationally known anarchist who lived in the city under an assumed name and published the newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (or Subversive Chronicle). The city’s Italian community was divided between anarchists and socialists – though presumably many Italians didn’t actively support either faction.
The political activity of the immigrants had brought benefits to workers by defending their rights through the work of unions. By 1900, fully 90 percent of workers in Barre belonged to unions.
The hurly-burly of local politics, however, sometimes triggered violence. In December 1900, anarchists ambushed the local police chief, a sturdy Irishman named Patrick Brown, shooting him in the abdomen, but he survived. In a similar attack the following year in Buffalo, an anarchist killed President McKinley.
Vermont anarchists allegedly planned to disrupt Serrati’s talk. He was supposed to speak at 7 o’clock. But the hour came and went, and no Serrati. Perhaps he feared for his safety.
Anarchists, who had packed the Labor Hall in hopes of giving Serrati a rough greeting, began to jeer the socialists present. The taunts led to a scuffle and soon a full-scale brawl. Men threw punches. One was struck over the head with a chair. Socialists should be killed, some anarchists supposedly shouted.
At this point, a 39-year-old socialist named Alessandro Garetto, who had been sitting and waiting for the speaker to arrive, joined the fight. At his subsequent trial, Garetto claimed he had been trying to leave the building when he was attacked. Others claimed he entered the fray willingly.
As he stood in the midst of the brawl, Garetto pulled a pistol from his pocket and fired at least twice. One shot grazed one of the anarchists he was fighting. The other struck Elia Corti in the stomach. Corti slumped to the floor as Garetto charged down the steps and into the night.
What Corti had been doing just before being shot has been debated ever since. Some claim he was among the anarchists in the melee. His political beliefs at the time of the shooting are difficult to reconstruct. After arriving in Barre in 1892, Corti had served as secretary of the city’s anarchist club. But in recent years, as he grew more successful and became the father of three daughters, his interest in politics seems to have waned.
Some witnesses said Corti had been playing the role of peacemaker. Still others said he had just entered the building when Garetto fired.
Fearing that a mob would kill him, Garetto ran to the nearby offices of a judge, who turned the frightened man over to the police. Realizing that Garetto was in danger of being lynched, Chief Brown transported him by wagon to the jail in Montpelier. Along the route, Brown had the wagon stop to pick up a patient who needed urgent medical care at Heaton Hospital in Montpelier.
Thus it was that Garetto came face to face with his victim. Chief Brown held up a lantern so Corti could see Garetto’s face. “You are the man who shot me,” Corti said twice.
At these words, Corti’s partner, Novelli, who was also in the wagon, became enraged. He grabbed the lantern and threw it toward Garetto, but it struck Chief Brown in the head instead. Novelli then tried to grab Brown’s revolver, but was subdued and pulled from the wagon by police.
Despite the efforts of three surgeons, Corti was doomed. The bullet had passed through his stomach and lodged near his spine. He lingered about 30 hours before dying. At his request, he was buried the next day. Hundreds of people attended the service at Hope Cemetery. His death stunned the people of Barre and led to a temporary truce between anarchists and socialists.
His brother and brother-in-law carved a remarkable monument to mark his grave. It depicts a dapperly dressed Corti seated with the tools of his trade strewn at his feet. One his hands rests on a broken column, representing his life cut short. In granite, Corti wears a pensive, perhaps confused, look, as if he were trying to figure out what had happened.
In December 1903, Garetto was tried and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 12 years of hard labor at Windsor Prison.
Three decades later, as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, an interviewer asked an old Italian granite worker about his long-dead friend, Elia Corti. The old man remembered learning of the verdict just before midnight on Dec. 23. Soon afterwards, he walked up the street by the Robert Burns Memorial.
“It was snowing and not many people were out on the street,” he recalled. “When I got close to the statue I saw a man there. It was Corti, plain as day I saw him.
Just standing there, his head down a little, and looking at those panels he carved. Sad, he looked, standing there in the snow.
“It seemed natural he was there. I had been thinking all day about him … I wanted to say something but he was gone – just like that! But I saw him. It was Corti all right. And it was one Christmas Eve I can’t forget.”
