During the spring of 1886, the Victorian-era gossips of Ocean County were having a field day. Louise Blackman, a young Quaker schoolteacher from Tuckerton, had entered a school trustees meeting where she worked in Colliers Mills. At the meeting was former Sen. Ephraim P. Emson, the richest man in the county and the owner of the school.

Emson was attempting to have Blackman replaced for not having enough discipline over her students.