On the day that the Texas Supreme Court halted a lower court order that would have allowed one woman to circumvent the state’s abortion ban, I visited the Southington grave of Emma Gill, who died 125 years ago after terminating her pregnancy illegally.

Abortion was then a serious crime in every state, including “staid old Connecticut,” as newspapers elsewhere called it. Nonetheless, hundreds of women were said to be on the client books of “Dr.” Nancy Alice Guilford, the provider charged with Gill’s murder. In the 1890s, her easily decipherable ads ran regularly in Connecticut newspapers, announcing her treatment of “diseases of women” at her gracious home on New Haven’s Wooster Square and a downtown Bridgeport office.

As the historian James C. Mohr has observed, any schoolgirl would have recognized this to mean abortion.

Guilford wasn’t the first choice of practitioner for Emma Gill’s sexual partner, Harry Oxley, who was paying for the abortion. Both in their early 20s, Oxley and Gill had known each other since childhood but were of different social classes. Managing his parents’ variety store, Oxley socialized with the swell set. Gill, the daughter of a factory worker, was a domestic. Although engaged to a traveling salesman, she began a monthslong affair with Oxley that ended with the discovery of her pregnancy.

In the summer of 1898, the pair traveled around the state seeking to end the pregnancy. A Waterbury doctor proved useless. In New Haven, a known abortion provider, the Yale-trained Dr. Ernest LeRoy Thomson, met with Oxley but declined the case. Even in New Haven — dubbed “a hotbed of abortion” during a recent public hearing — a zealous citizens’ group, the Law & Order League, was pressing for strict enforcement of the ban.

That left Guilford, still practicing in Bridgeport after she’d jumped bail in New Haven following an arrest. Facing mounting legal bills, she negotiated a stiff fee with Oxley, leaving him scrambling to raise funds while Gill’s pregnancy advanced, making abortion riskier.

On the last day of school vacation in Bridgeport, some young boys spied white packages on the mud flats under a bridge. Fishing them out with the help of adults, they found a head in one bundle, limbs in another. The police appeared, along with hundreds of curious onlookers. More body bits emerged the next morning.

A medical examination revealed that the woman whose remains these were had recently undergone an abortion, dying from a subsequent infection. Suspicion immediately fell on Guilford, who’d just moved into the Bridgeport building where she’d practiced part-time for several years.

The body had been cut up after death to conceal a “criminal operation,” said the city prosecutor, speaking exclusively to the World, a sensational New York paper that hesitated to print the word “abortion” but made its meaning clear in a headline: “Death Resulting from Criminal Practices is Murder in Connecticut.”

As journalists descended on Bridgeport, Guilford went missing. Struggling to link the crime to her, the police asked the public to help identify the victim, whose head was placed in a glass-topped bucket at the morgue.

Hundreds of men, women, and children filed past, but no one recognized the upturned face. Mailbags full of tips poured in from all corners of the Northeast. Although abortion was outlawed in every state, the practice was commonplace. Everyone seemed to have a wife or neighbor who might conceivably have sought the procedure.

In the end, Emma Gill’s remains were finally claimed by her family and laid to rest — twice, because a coroner ordered exhumation for a dental identification — and a half-burned money order tied the abortion payments to Oxley, who turned state’s witness. Guilford interrupted her trial to plead guilty to manslaughter for a ten-year sentence.

Near Emma Gill’s grave at Southington’s Oak Hill Cemetery, Harry Oxley lies buried with the woman he married, a teacher. He lived to age 69. The cemetery’s most famous resident, former Connecticut Gov. Marcus H. Holcomb, represented Harry Oxley at the trial.

Dwarfed by the monuments to the men in her story, Emma Gill has been erased from history and even her headstone: erosion has left her name barely legible. Regrettably, however, her tale lives on in the penny-dreadful stories emerging from states with abortion bans.

Marcia Biederman grew up in Bridgeport and lives in New York. She is the author of The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England. forthcoming from Chicago Review Press on January 23.