The celebrities of today have nothing on those of the 19th century. Right here in McLean County a romance ended tragically for "the Man with the Silver Horn." Born in England around 1835, W H Bishop was trained as a saddler, but became a vaudeville performer. Bishop headed up his own band of silver instruments, traveling the United States, adored by the crowds that heard him play. Like Charles Carroll Fell, Bishop did not choose to perform under his given name, but took on the name Harry Robinson. Some of Fell's earliest performances were with Harry Robinson's troupe in 1877. Like Fell, Robinson had both comic and acrobatic talent and performed a trapeze act and a comic magician act.
In the midst of his fame, Robinson married a young woman from Lexington, Ella Kerr. She was the daughter of a widowed woman who ran a hotel in Lexington for many years, Hannah Kerr Crary. No record of their marriage remains, but after several years of marriage, Robinson became afflicted with some sort of paralysis that caused him to retire from the stage. He continued to play occasionally in nearby towns, and made his last appearance in Virginia, Illinois.
But their comfort was ruptured by Ella's discovery that she was not, in fact, a wife. Poor Ella discovered that Harry Robinson had a wife and two children still living in New York, and that he had never been divorced from that woman. Ella immediately refused to live with Robinson any longer and filed for a divorce. To spare his feelings, she did not allege bigamy, but gave cruelty as grounds, for everyone knew that he abused her and would accept this as the reason for their divorce.
After Ella's discovery, Robinson was living in Wait's Hotel in Bloomington and was feeling despondent because of the divorce. He wrote a letter to his friend, Al Fulwiler, in Lexington:
On May 4 1889, Robinson took six grains of morphine before going to bed. In the morning the hotel staff called for him and found him in a stupor. In his room was also found a noose and loaded revolver. Robinson died later the same day.
Ella wanted to give Robinson a chance to make amends to his family in New York and be a husband and father to them. She notified Henry Fell to give Robinson money and a ticket to New York, but he would not take it, choosing to leave this life than take up his old one.
The Lexington cornet band played at his funeral at the Lexington cemetery where he is buried, his marker still bearing the words: "The Man with the Silver Horn." Ella Robinson paid all the costs of his funeral and placed a marker for him.