Sixty-four-year-old Anson Ingraham took 48-year-old Ella Maria Francis as his second wife on Oct. 18, 1904, in Boston. They settled in Warwick and may have been as typical as any couple could be. But Anson had a backstory.

His personal history included his first wife, Harriet Burnham, whom he married in 1859 and who had left him a widower in 1893. It included his long-standing career as a dealer of intoxicating beverages from his place on Railroad Avenue in Woonsocket. It also included his stint as the proprietor of a house of prostitution.

Anson ran the house of “ill fame” during the 1880s in Burrillville. He and Harriet resided with the girls who worked for him as well as a middle-aged male hostler named George Leach.

In 1880, Anson’s working girls included Rhode Island natives Mary Ford, who was 24, Nellie Smith, who was 27, and 20-year-old New York native Lizzie Brown. Five years later, Nellie and Mary had moved on but Lizzie was still there plying her trade. Twenty-one-year-old Ella Smith had settled into service there, as well as 23-year-old Jennie Cummings.

The Ingraham family business was not an oddity in Rhode Island by any means. The first recorded house of prostitution in the Ocean State was running in 1848. Many such places were run by widowed or divorced women. Others were run by single men or men with families, and occasionally the wives and daughters of the owners worked as hired girls.

One Rhode Island family which relocated to Connecticut was running a house of ill fame in the 1800s at which the daughter worked as one of the hired girls while the two teenaged sons worked as bartenders in the house’s private saloon.

It was against the law for a woman to be “lewd and wanton” and against the law for anyone to maintain a “public nuisance” such as a bar, which most houses of ill fame included on the premises. Throughout the 19th century, Rhode Island’s prison, State Farm and Almshouse counted prostitutes among their inmates. Some were teenaged girls, others were women in their late 50s. Often these women had been diagnosed with syphilis.

Prostitution in the olden days was far more rampant and accepted in the western part of the country than on the eastern side. However, we still had our fair share of women desperate for a way to support themselves and men willing to spend a portion of their hard-earned paychecks for alcohol and female company.

As for Anson Ingraham, he got out of the business and later died from the effects of pneumonia on Jan. 13, 1908, while on a visit to Nantucket. He was laid to rest in Scituate.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.