James Lewis went to the French cabin to buy corn. Aaron French had been ill, and selling his crops would help him take his wife and five children somewhere with a milder climate. Lewis had thought the arrangement over before returning in October 1854. When he reached the fence, the family’s boarders met him with news: the Frenches had left the night before. A brother had arrived with a wagon and taken the whole household away toward Illinois.
The boarders, John and Sarah Hubbard, said they had bought the corn, garden produce, and furniture. A day or two later, another neighbor, Stearns Fisher, called to ask whether the family needed help and received the same explanation. Both men knew Aaron had wanted to leave. The people still occupying his house had given them a story that fitted his plans.
The cabin stood on Isaac Keller’s land, about four miles west of Wabash, in the neighborhood then called Keller’s Station and later known as Rich Valley. The Wabash & Erie Canal ran nearby, and railway construction was bringing more workers into the district. Boats, wagons, farms, and construction gangs kept people moving through the valley. A household could take in a boarder for the extra money; a laborer could stay as long as the work lasted, then leave for another town.
The Frenches had lived in the neighborhood for six or seven years. Aaron worked when his health allowed, raised a little corn and garden produce, and relied on neighbors when the household ran short. With seven people to support, payments from lodgers mattered. John Hubbard, his wife, and their son were boarding there by September. Within weeks, the family that had made room for them ceased to appear.
Aaron’s proposed move helps explain why the disappearance passed without an immediate search. Lewis had come to make that departure possible. Fisher had come to offer assistance. Each left believing the family had already received help from a relative. The Hubbards remained in the cabin, with the household goods they said they had purchased, and the autumn gave way to winter.
During those months, another man came to stay. Edward Boyle was an Irish railway worker who had nearly died of an illness that summer. Believing he might not recover, he had entrusted four to five hundred dollars in gold and silver to a Catholic priest, with instructions for its disposal if he died. He survived, and the priest returned his savings. John Hubbard then persuaded Boyle to board at the cabin and carried his baggage there.
Boyle’s money was a considerable sum. The local newspaper would later value the Frenches’ corn, garden produce, and furniture at no more than fifty dollars. He had a physician who knew him and acquaintances through his work, but no close family nearby to demand news when he disappeared. Hubbard supplied an explanation for him too: Boyle had gone toward Lafayette to teach school. He was remembered as a man with some education, so a teaching job offered a plausible reason for his departure.
In the spring of 1855, the canal water was lowered for repairs. Fishermen drawing a seine through it brought up a man’s body. There were injuries to the back of his head, and one arm was bruised and cut, apparently from trying to protect himself. At the first inquest, nobody identified him. He was buried between the canal and the river.
The search for his name reached the railway works. Dr. Elias B. Thomas, who had treated Boyle during his illness, and the contractor who knew him from work recognized the description. The grave was reopened, and the missing boarder became an identified murder victim. His physician had helped him survive the summer; now he helped establish what had happened to him afterward.
John Hubbard and his son were arrested. Sarah continued visiting her husband in jail, and officers pursued the question of Boyle’s missing money. As that investigation developed, the Frenches’ disappearance came under renewed scrutiny. On Tuesday, April 10, Constable James Wilson went out with a warrant for Sarah, who was found at the railway construction works. A man named Loveland urged him to look into suspicions that the family had been murdered the previous autumn.
Wilson spoke with Fisher, then borrowed a shovel and pick from the works. He had trouble finding anyone willing to accompany him; according to the newspaper account, the men there did not believe the story. Eventually he and fellow constable M. I. Thomas went to the cabin. Finding the door locked, they pulled out the staple with the pick and entered.
Inside, part of the floor had already been raised. Another constable, Miles Morgan, had searched there a short time before, found a piece of skull bone, and gone away. Wilson and Thomas continued digging in the disturbed earth. They uncovered the badly decayed body of an infant, then stopped and returned to Wabash for the coroner.
News reached town about dark. Within half an hour or less, Coroner David Squires, an inquest jury, and thirty or forty citizens were on their way to the cabin. They arrived around seven that evening. Fisher and Lewis, the neighbors who had called the previous autumn, were among the jurors. The search now brought them back to the home of the people they had tried to help.
Seven bodies were recovered. Aaron French and his wife lay at the bottom of the grave, with their five children above them. The adults could still be recognized by people who had known them. All had suffered broken skulls. The entire household had been buried beneath its own floor, where the Hubbards had continued living through the winter.
The Wabash Gazette announced the discovery in a report reprinted by the Plymouth Banner on April 19. Its headline began “AWFUL DISCOVERY!” and its account carried the story of the cabin far beyond the neighborhood. The paper declared the Hubbards guilty before the trial. By September, when John was prosecuted for Aaron French’s murder, selecting a jury had become an ordeal: the later county history records 115 prospective jurors being considered before twelve were seated.
Hubbard maintained his innocence. His defense sought more time to bring in witnesses who, he said, could place the Frenches alive near Peru after the alleged date of the killings. The jury convicted him, and an appeal left the death sentence in place. On December 13, 1855, people crowded into Wabash in heavy rain to watch him hang on the courthouse square. The execution was supposed to be private, but the fence around the scaffold was low enough for the crowd to see. Afterward, his body was carried back into the jail.
Sarah received a life sentence after a separate trial the following year. Seventeen years later, she was among the women transferred from Jeffersonville to Indiana’s new women’s prison in Indianapolis. Accounts of her husband’s remains followed a different course, through stories of physicians seeking his body, anatomical preparation, and a skeleton used in schools. In 2021, the Wabash County Historical Museum reported keeping human remains associated with Hubbard in two cardboard boxes, while acknowledging that their identity could not be confirmed.
The French family’s story has survived largely through the man convicted of killing Aaron. Their own lives are harder to recover. The discovery report described three girls and two boys, the youngest about fifteen months old, but gave none of their names. It left their mother unnamed as well. Before they became the family beneath the floor, they were seven people trying to get through an illness and find enough money to move. Lewis’s visit to buy the corn preserves a little of that life: a neighbor returning with an offer that might help them leave, and finding someone else at the fence.
Bones in the Box follows the French family murders, Edward Boyle’s death, the Hubbard trials, and the disputed history of the remains through the newspapers, family accounts, and institutions that preserved the story. Read Bones in the Box on Amazon.