On April 10, 1898, four days after the death of his infant son, George Robert Gamble’s Urbana photograph gallery on West Main Street caught fire.
The cause of the fire was reported in The Courier as “starting from an explosion of chemicals, supposedly.”
Insurance paid $1,700 to Gamble, which he said would not begin to cover the loss.
In June of the same year, Grant M. Robeson woke in the middle of the night to the sight of a “partially dressed” man with dark hair and a mustache feeding the flames of a fire with oil on the wooden steps of another of Gamble’s studios at 105 W. Park Ave., Champaign.
This was the third time this particular building was set on fire.
Gamble was involved in at least half a dozen court cases in Champaign County.
One involved two other local photographers, Arthur W. Abernathy and Frank W. Stafford, with whom he had been in business as the Gamble Art Co.
The three businessmen verbally agreed in October 1897 that Gamble would lease the property on West Park to the latter two and retire from the photography business for five years.
In writing, however, Gamble provided no such non-compete agreement.
Gamble insisted the papers did not need to be reviewed by an attorney.
Abernathy and Stafford signed the contract without reading it thoroughly, trusting Gamble at his word.
Gamble then opened a studio on Main Street in Urbana, and, in September 1898, his former partners brought him to court for breach of contract.
After leaving Illinois and starting a string of blazes across Colorado, Gamble was finally convicted of setting fire to his flour mill in Zanesfield, Ohio, in 1906.
According to the Union County Journal on Aug. 6, 1908, “the jury had recommended that a light sentence be imposed upon him because of his age,” which was 65 at the time.
The paper also reported that his wife and son in California stated they would never speak to him again and did not wish to see him.
After an exhaustive search of his history, Ohio State Fire Marshal D. S. Cramer found that Gamble was to blame for 16 fires, eight of which happened in Champaign County — six in Champaign, two in Urbana and two in nearby Tuscola.
Gamble worked his scheme across the country, moving to a new town, buying property, insuring said property for multiple times its value and setting it on fire to collect the insurance money.
He left Champaign County with an “unsavory reputation,” according to the Courier in 1908.
The Inter-Ocean in Chicago compared Gamble to another famous arsonist in Ohio, George Letcher, who followed a similar path of lighting his properties on fire to collect the insurance money.
Letcher was part of a ring of arsonists operating between 1874 and 1902 in northwestern Ohio, southern Michigan and eastern Indiana.
Gamble went to prison for two years.
He was discharged on Oct. 10, 1910, and sent a letter to the Champaign Daily Gazette, which published the news of his release on May 23, 1915.
To see advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs associated with George R. Gamble and other local photographers, please visit the Champaign County Historical Archives during open hours, or contact us at archives@urbanafree.org or 217-367-4025.
