Strippelmann, F. E., 1832-1877

F. E. Strippleman was the accountant at the Mississippi penitentiary during the 1870s.

Born in Germany in 1832, Strippleman moved to the United States as a child. He served in the First Texas Regiment in the Mexican-American War as a teenager. He remained in Texas during the 1850s, although he periodically traveled to Germany, marrying a girl there and bringing her back to the United States. Strippleman lived in Louisiana and then Vicksburg, Mississippi, after the Civil War. He was described as an expert bookkeeper, but was accused of embezzling $50,000 from people in Mississippi in 1870 and was subsequently arrested in New York on his way to Germany. Despite these accusations, Strippleman apparently avoided criminal conviction, as he returned to Mississippi and restored his reputation enough to be appointed the accountant for the state’s penitentiary for several years. In 1876, he took a job in the state auditor’s office in Jackson, Mississippi.

In 1877, Strippleman committed suicide by overdosing on morphine and laudanum (an opiate). A suicide letter blamed the “shame and disgrace” he faced from others, and requested that Jones S. Hamilton (a millionaire railroad tycoon in Mississippi associated with the penitentiary through his leasing of convicts for labor) assist his widow in returning to Europe. Strippleman is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi.

(Selma Morning Times, Selma, AL, June 12, 1870; The Weekly Copiahan, Hazlehurst, MS, February 26, 1876; The Clarion, Jackson, MS, December 5, 1877; FindaGrave)

F. E. Strippelmann belonged to the following social groups: