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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region's history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.
The two boys were born a few miles apart -- Clarence in 1857, Alfred a year later -- and grew up in the same small town where they became chums at the academy they attended next to the church.
Their friendship took root despite the fact Clarence was the son of Amirus Darrow, a furniture maker whose godless, freethinking ways earned him the derisive title as the "town infidel."
Alfred, in contrast, was a member of the town's most prominent and prosperous family. In fact, the town bore the family name of Kinsman ever since Alfred's grandfather founded it in the vast wilderness of the Connecticut Western Reserve before Ohio was even a state.
Alfred's father Thomas became a successful farmer known for his herd of Durham cattle. After marrying Sophia Burnham in 1847, he built an Italianate mansion where they raised their four daughters and two sons. Their eldest son, Thomas Kinsman Jr., graduated from Oberlin College and served for decades in the Ohio General Assembly.
But if the Darrows were social misfits sneered at by their neighbors, Alfred found himself an outcast when, in the years after his father's death, he was left out of inheriting any of his family's vast fortune. All of it was bestowed to his brother Thomas Jr. and two surviving sisters.
But his siblings were not heartless. They arranged for a sum of $55 to be deposited each month in their brother's name at the Kinsman National Bank. But they also attached the strings they believed were necessary to keep him from squandering it. Those strings were controlled by George W. Birrell, the bank's longtime cashier and the owner of the big hardware and general mercantile store next door.
In practical terms, this meant Alfred had to go to Birrell, hat in hand, and explain why he should be given access to his own money. More often than he liked, Birrell denied those requests.
These unusual circumstances reveal how, for very different reasons, both Clarence and Alfred developed a heavy chip on their shoulders that decided their fates.
Darrow carried his chip to Chicago where he used it to propel his rise as a slippery, silver-tongued lawyer with a national reputation for taking on the toughest of cases no sensible lawyer dared touch. Alfred, in contrast, allowed his resentment to fester into a deadly poison of wounded pride that ultimately drove him to murder.
As his brother Thomas Jr. told The Western Reserve Democrat, on the afternoon of June 18, 1907, upon his return from a shopping trip in Youngstown, Alfred flew into a dreadful rage upon discovering a new slate roof had been installed on his house without his knowledge or consent.
Thomas Jr., (who by this the time was an Ohio state senator recently married and living in a stately mansion of his own) explained how Alfred had wanted to put a new slate roof on his house for several years, but had been thwarted again and again when Birrell refused to give him the money to pay for it. Upon seeing the new roof, Alfred grabbed his .38 Winchester rifle in a fury and shouted to his landlord that he was going to see his mother. The landlord called Alfred's mother to warn that her son was armed and angry and coming her way.
Except Alfred was actually headed into town, where he made a beeline to Birrell's hardware store where he asked the clerk for a box of bullets for the rifle he carried in with him.
The clerk set a box on the counter, but sensing trouble, took it back with the excuse that the bullets would not fit his gun.
Alfred knew better. When the clerk was not looking, Alfred had removed a single bullet from the box and slipped it into the chamber. The bullet fit.
And at that very moment, the man he intended to kill with it was walking their way. Things might have turned out differently if Birrell would have listened to Alfred's landlord who by then had rushed into town to find Birrell and warn him about Alfred's agitated state.
The landlord caught up with Birrell outside the hardware store, but Birrell brushed him off.
Once inside, Birrell spotted Alfred and offered a friendly greeting as he walked past him. At the sound of Birrell's voice, Alfred wheeled toward him and shouted, "Now I've got you!"
Then he raised his rifle, and fired. The bullet tore into Birrell's left shoulder, but he stayed on his feet long enough to fight with Alfred for control of the gun before the two men fell to the floor. Bystanders quickly pulled Alfred off him, then asked Birrell if he was hurt.
"Yes, he got me in the shoulder," the 65-year-old Birrell said. The bullet had severed a major artery and Birrell bled to death where he lay.
At the time of the shooting, Darrow was in Boise, Idaho, nearing the end of a sensational trial defending "Big Bill" Haywood, one of a trio of United Federation of Miners leaders who stood accused of masterminding the murder of the former Idaho governor who had been killed by a bomb blast outside his house.
Darrow, at this point in his career, had reached the height of his oratorical powers, which he used to full effect during an 11-hour closing argument that began on July 24 and extended into the next day. "I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men who, in darkness and despair, have borne the labors of the human race," Darrow said as he stood before the jury. "The eyes of the world are upon you -- upon you 12 men of Idaho tonight."
Darrow's impassioned appeal produced its intended result. Two days later, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
In the days after the Haywood verdict, Alfred Kinsman no doubt felt a surge of hope when Darrow visited him in his Warren jail cell and agreed to take on his defense. But Darrow's promise to his old friend was never kept.
In September, after returning to Idaho to defend another union member faced with a murder charge, Darrow developed a painful infection that eventually spread to the mastoid bone behind his ear. He continued with the trial, but at a heavy price. By the time he gave his closing argument in late November, Darrow was so weak he could barely stand. The union official won his freedom when the jury was unable to reach a verdict, but Darrow ended the year fighting for his own life in a Los Angeles hospital.
By early January, Darrow was so gravely ill that a Chicago newspaper sent a telegram to reporters in Los Angeles asking them to gather his "famous last words."
But Darrow fooled the pundits yet again, this time by refusing to die. Later, he quipped that he had been granted "a continuance."
Back in Warren, the murder trial of Alfred Kinsman began that same December without Darrow there to pull off any last-minute heroics. Alfred was found guilty, but insane. Alfred Kinsman died nearly 26 years later, 15 days before what would have been his 75th birthday, at the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Gary Moss is a local writer and historic home preservationist who with his wife Donna is restoring the Swift-Kinsman House and Clarence Darrow Octagon House in Kinsman.