The 12-Year-Old Girl-Gang Leader Who Outraged 1870s San Francisco

One night in November 1877, a dainty 12-year-old girl named Mary Avery pried open the cellar door of San Francisco’s Allen & Co. gun store at 515 Market St. and entered with six cohorts.

By the time they had ransacked the premises, the children — all boys except for Avery — had snatched 112 pistols, as well as ammunition and gun powder. The haul was worth about $1,000, or nearly $30,000 today when adjusted for inflation. The kids went about concealing their illicit gains on their parents’ roofs and in their basements. (One kid named George Gasper went to the trouble of digging a three-foot hole in his parents’ cellar.)

Two days before the brazen gun burglary, Avery had led another break-in. This one took place at Fiegenbaum & Co’s — a “wholesale fancy good house” situated on the corner of Sansome and Pine in downtown San Francisco. That night, Avery and a co-conspirator named James Walsh utilized the roof of a Pine Street shoeshine stand to break in through Fiegenbaum & Co’s window, while a crew of their friends waited by the window to help cart the stolen goods away. Avery and Walsh used an interior elevator to get their spoils to their friends. This time what they mostly took were toys and expensive music boxes.

The group thefts were bold, but Avery was, by that point, an already experienced thief. After one arrest, police discovered that Avery was so dedicated to stealing, she wore customized dresses specifically designed for the purpose. Avery cut holes in her pockets and doubled up the petticoats underneath in order to take and conceal objects without detection. This was one of the reasons her friends called her “Little Dick Turpin,” after the infamous English highwayman who was hanged for his crimes in 1739.

For a couple of years in the 1870s, before she was even a teenager, Avery was a bonafide menace to San Francisco society. Avery was fearless, showed no remorse and thought nothing of making a mockery of both police stations and court rooms. She had no regard for authority and, as such, newspapers in the city enjoyed presenting Avery as the personification of everything that was wrong with San Francisco.

“Why in this wealthy city,” read one San Francisco Examiner headline of the time, “are the young suffered to grow up in vice and misery?”

Prompted by Avery and her crew’s misadventures, the San Francisco Chronicle decried their entire neighborhood. Avery and her friends lived in Tar Flat, an impoverished region of SoMa beset by stinking sludge from the San Francisco Gas Company’s coal-distillation process.

“The lower portion of Stevenson St. which forms the northern boundary of that delectable precinct known as Tar Flat is prolific of the worst examples of depravity that are discovered in the city,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The children are permitted to run wild, the only discipline to which they are subjected being punctuality in the conveyance of beer and whisky from the corner grocery.”

Avery and her friends might have gotten away with their burglaries were it not for the cockiness of one of the boys involved. After days of searching pawnshops for the stolen guns, police stumbled across the boy at Jessie and First Street, showing off “a beautifully mounted pistol.” They quickly apprehended him and took him to the city prison for questioning. Unfortunately for his co-conspirators, the boy sang like a bird and told all. When Avery’s name came up, the police weren’t even surprised. She had been arrested and sentenced to time at the industrial school in Balboa Park (a reform institution for delinquents) eight months earlier.

On that occasion, Avery and her friends’ crime had been relatively tame. She and five pals — all between the ages of 10 and 13, except for one homeless 17-year-old boy — had been found spending the night, lying in pairs, in a straw-covered loft over a blacksmith’s shop. It was how Avery behaved after her arrest, however, that got her the most notoriety.

When the children were first hauled into the police station from the blacksmith’s that night, they put on quite the show, crying and acting scared. It was after the police put the three boys in one cell and the three girls in the other that they realized just how unbothered the kids really were. The girls smoked, danced and sang at a volume loud enough to bother the whole police station. They talked “in the unintelligible slang used by criminals,” according to a report in the Chronicle. Finally, at 3am, after Avery started loudly propositioning one of the boys in an adjoining cell, she was removed from her friends and put in a separate cell of her own. Only then did the children lie down and go to sleep. Only then did the police discover that Avery was concealing a knife in her skirt.

On Mar. 29, 1877, Avery and her friends appeared in court over the blacksmith break-in, accompanied by parents. The three girls all brought their mothers, the two younger boys brought their fathers. The 17-year-old appeared alone. At first, the kids attempted to use their youth to appeal to the judge’s sympathy. “The vicious juveniles ranged in a tearful circle around the judicial bench for examination,” the Chronicle reported. Their efforts fooled no one. “The judge in a side movement remarked ‘I’ve seen the mothers frequently, as well as the girls.’”

Avery and her mom distinguished themselves by being loudly unbothered by the court proceedings. They laughed loudly at other girls’ mothers, called them out for lying, and applauded others’ sentences to the industrial school. The Chronicle referred to Avery — who was also sent to the industrial school that day — as “the smallest, prettiest and most abandoned of the trio of girls.”

Her first stint in the industrial school clearly didn’t dampen Avery’s desires to commit crimes. The thefts at Fiegenbaum’s and the gun shop happened shortly after she was released for the blacksmith break-in. Then, back to the industrial school she went once more. Perhaps that stint calmed Avery’s felonious ambitions, because, after that, the precocious thief quickly fell off the city’s radar.

The final crime that earned Avery a spot in San Francisco newspapers happened in May 1879. On that occasion, Avery and a friend by the name of Marcella Columbia were arrested for drunkenness after being located on the roof of a Jessie Street building with a group of “small boys screaming and swearing at the top of their voices.” The boys got away, but Avery and Columbia weren’t fast enough. They didn’t help their own situation, spewing forth a series of curse words at their arresting officers. (“The round oaths which fell in a continuous stream from their lips were shocking in the extreme,” the Chronicle reported.)

This may be the precise moment that Avery’s luck ran out. She was swiftly incarcerated at San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum. The institution for wayward girls — by then, the industrial school housed boys only — was run by Irish nuns who used their charges as free factory labor. According to census records, the 14-year-old Avery was still being held at the asylum, situated on the north side of where SF General stands today, in June 1880. Magdalen organizations were known for their harsh conditions and the fact that girls rarely got released from them until they turned 18. San Francisco’s didn’t close down until 1931.

What became of Mary Avery after her stint in the Magdalen Asylum is unknown. No death certificate is on file for her in California. No further crimes wound up in the newspapers. But, if she were as “incorrigible” and “vicious” as the newspapers of her day reported, it is unlikely that she would have given up her crimes willingly.

As the Examiner once said: “[Avery] has a damaging record in the line of petty thievery and display[s] a wonderful ability in that particular business. [Her] methods of contriving such bold burglaries would reflect credit on old hands in this business.”