The Poison Pudding and Missing Men of Dutch Creek Ranch

            Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1862, Mary Elizabeth Anderson’s life was marked by tragedy and suspicion from the start. At age 16 she married a Texan, John J. Dunbar, with whom she had six children. When her husband died unexpectedly in 1891, she was left to raise all six children alone.  In 1916, Mary Elizabeth relocated to a beautiful and highly valuable property known as Dutch Creek (later called Spencer Farms). She remarried a man named Spencer, but he soon vanished without a trace, leaving Mary Elizabeth to run the massive ranch entirely on her own.

Her life took a darker turn when she married a man named Phillips. Just two months into the marriage, Phillips grew suspicious of his new bride. While eating a batch of pudding Mary Elizabeth had made exclusively for him, he felt a gritty texture and suspected it contained ground glass. He secretly saved a portion of the dessert and brought it to the local sheriff. Laboratory tests confirmed his fears: the pudding was laced with glass. Mary Elizabeth was promptly arrested for attempted murder. During her trial, she weaponized her own reputation as a terrible housekeeper, successfully claiming that someone had been cutting glass on the kitchen table and it must have accidentally fallen into the food.

Though she escaped a lengthy sentence for the poisoning, darker rumors swirled around the ranch. Two of her hired hands mysteriously vanished, only to be found drowned in the nearby lake. Throughout her time in the area, "Mrs. Spencer" was constantly accused of theft, financial swindles, and land-grabbing schemes.



While she served brief stints in prison, she always returned to the farm. Eventually, the mounting legal trouble and community hostility forced her to abandon the property for good. The scenic ranch was later purchased by Art Barlow, putting an end to Mary Elizabeth's notorious era and cementing the land's new legacy as Barlow’s Ranch.

If you would like to read more on this woman, please read Sue Silver’s Book Mineral County Nevada Vol. 4.