| OCR Text |
FIGHT IN I 1 N COURT COUR B LE LEFT BY A RECLUSE SUPPOSED TO BE POOR peculiar document on which 1 Is based a claim for a part of the fortune now new york may 28 A preliminary step in a bitter contest over the giop property of art an aged and eccentric recluse who aled in this city several years ago in seeming poverty bul buk who it turned out left securities of the value of nearly was taken ln in the supreme court on a motion to discontinue a suit brought there in order to take a case to the united states court ambrose B burbank wag in the tobacco I 1 business in henderson Hc ky in war times and made a great deal ot of i money he lost some of it during the i war and finally decided to come to I 1 j new york his friends and relatives opposed lie he had bad lost all ho he had but he be I 1 had not been here long before he be I 1 gan to invest sums in southern municipal and state bonds As they accumulated i he placed them in a box in the vaults of tho the safe deposit com I 1 pa pany ny he used to cut the coupons himself I 1 always demanding payment in gold which he stored away in another box of the vaults when enough gold had been collected to pay for another bond he would buy it and so on oil for years the recluse all this time living in a single room apparently almost in poverty 1 burbank never married and his bis est relatives were some nephews and I 1 cousins ile he died in 1901 at the age of 89 leaving a will naming caleb it burbank his nephew and george H southard as executors A will drawn in 1889 was produced in which burbank was made residuary resi residuary r legatee af ter a few small bequests it now ap pears that when the old man was in business in henderson he had asso dated with him bim a young man named eleazer burbank newcomb of whom he always spoke as his favorite favorit a nephew in the years that intervened this n nephew had died leaving a wife and two children ind and in 1904 mrs newcomb new comb brought suit against Burb illar bank anand alq Bou bouchard thard a asking I 1 alj therbe they be aum quero of cf theold the old man s z securities tle s I 1 basing her claims on a letter alleged mohave to have been written to her by him I 1 it was a peculiar document and cont com bained ta ined the clauses that the write rhad no jno confidence in wills will as lie he bared that even so e eminent a lawyer as samuel J tilden had drawn one that had been broken land and that therefore he wished to take care of the wife of his favorite nephew by giving her of the securities which are specified by num number berand and name just before the date set for the trial mrs newcomb died and the case wal wai scratched off the calendar then her two ch children Aldren david buban ewbank 1 newcomb and mary alary ellen newcomb her executors brought suit in tho the united state court the defense of the suit is that the document I 1 sold by the now new combs was a forgery and when tile the case comes up for trial the fight on this point will be long and hard A peculiar feature will be that the old man inan in his last years had sciatica in his right arm and learned to write with his left several hundred specimens of hla his handwriting including standards of both styles have been collected by the lawyers for the defense and they have retained some of the best handwriting experts in the country the New newcombe combs claim amounts tt nearly 11 |
