Thomas B. Fielders 19th Century Reporter

Thomas B. Fielders began his extraordinary career as a newspaper man in 1875 when, during the following three years, he investigated and reported the contract murders and other crimes of Molly Maguires for readers of the Shenandoah Herald in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. In 1882, he was both local editor of the Pottsville Miners’ Journal and manager of the Anthracite Base Ball Club. He brought to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, exhibition games with some of the top major league teams of that early period. 

Thomas delivered his big “scoop” to the New York Times when, in 1886, the Cunard ocean liner Oregon was struck by a heavily laden coastal schooner and went to the bottom. After moving to London for the New York Herald in 1889, his provocative interview with “Red Jim” McDermott, associated with dynamite plots in Cork and Liverpool in the year 1883, was widely read in England and America.

In Hamburg, Germany, an outbreak of cholera became epidemic in 1892, infecting over 17,000 and causing the deaths of nearly 8,600 people. Fielders was one of less than a handful of reporters to go there. He then became the “special” reporter, and later the associate editor, of the Pall Mall Gazette in London. It was the most creative and productive period of his life, climaxing with his explosive exposure of French military corruption and prejudice in the scandalous Alfred Dreyfus affair.

As the London Correspondent of the New York Times from 1899 thru 1900, he journalized all of the breaking news on the Second Boer War followed by the Boxer Rebellion. Fielders returned to America in 1900 and, for a number of years, became actively engaged in New York City politics. He retired to Block Island, Rhode Island in 1919 where he completed a book, Block Island: Fact and Fancy, containing hilarious stories about piracy, prohibition and the people of Block Island.