In the Summer of 1936, Harry Garvie was drinking at Barker House Hotel in Fredericton. He shouldn’t have been. He was a reporter who had an article due in the morning for the Daily Mail newspaper. Desperate for ideas, he decided to write the story of a dusty old relic sitting in the bar’s corner: the Coleman Frog.
By 1936, the once luxurious Barker House hotel was just a shell of its former glory. Its smokey bar attracted hard-drinking visitors with questionable backgrounds, such as reporters like Harry Garvie. Much like the hotel and its customers, the once-famous stuffed frog on display in the corner had also seen better days.
“The Coleman Frog sits mutely in a glass case at this local motel,” Garvie observed.
It wasn’t that nobody in Fredericton knew about the story of the frog. Rather, nobody cared. “The residents here have seen it hundreds of times and take it more or less for granted,” noted Garvie.
The reporter in need of a story wrote: “All kinds of stories abound about giant creatures of the earth. Some of them are true, others are figments of imagination. … But true or not, they always furnish a gossipy tale.”
He approached the hotel’s owner, whose last name was the same Coleman the frog was named after, and asked him if he “sticks with the story of the Coleman Frog.”
The hotel proprietor let out a sigh and retorted that he was “stuck with it.”
This Coleman was not the celebrated and gregarious Fred B. Coleman who had founded Barker House and made it into a prestigious high-end hotel. He had died years ago. The current owner of the Barker House Hotel was Fred’s son, Chauncey Coleman.
Garvie asked him to tell him the frog’s story. Chauncey protested that he had been “very young at the time the frog was captured.”
The reporter pointed out that nobody was in the bar anyway, and he would keep drinking if Coleman told him what he remembered. So he did.
The father, Fred Coleman, had long been an enthusiastic fisherman at Killarney Lake.
“One day, during the Spring of 1885,” recounted Chauncey “Mr. Coleman was trying his skill as a fisherman at the lower end of the lake where the shore is marshy. His attention was drawn by a movement near at hand among the swamp grass. Having a landing net he snapped it down over the spot where the grass was waving, and was astonished to find that he had captured a giant frog.”
At this stage, he meant "giant" relative to a normal frog. This was a slightly above-average-sized frog, not the beast it would later become.
At first, Fred Coleman confined the frog with a wire cage, but it later became tame, coming and going as it pleased.
“At meal time the unusual creature showed up and brought a real appetite,” remembered Chauncey, noting that his father fed it “lettuce leaves and other greens from the garden.”
“One day,” continued the hotel owner, “an eminent scientist from the United States, who was on a holiday tour, called to see the frog and suggested to Mr. Coleman the possibility of increasing the frog’s size with slaughterhouse blood.”
“The frog grew stouter and stouter until it reached the phenomenal weight of forty-two pounds.”
Garvie reassured his presumably dubious readers that: “you can readily believe that Mr. Coleman’s eyes grew bigger too, as he had witnessed the transformation in the frog.”
Chauncey reminisced about how, when he was a child, his father had been inundated with letters from far and wide asking about the frog. The elder Coleman was so overwhelmed with all of the letters that he didn’t have time to write full replies by hand. He would respond with picture postcards of himself with the frog which he had printed, as well as a boilerplate printed leaflet, instead of handwriting replies. (This would have been considered very rude back in the 1880s).
Chauncey recounted that his father had received “many enticing offers to sell the frog but for sentimental reasons always refused to part with it.”
When asked if he’d seen it himself, Chauncey simply said that many local people had been shown the giant frog in the waters around Killarney Lake by his father. He gazed across the room and warmly reminisced that his dad had “derived a great deal of fun and renown through exhibiting this freak.”
Evidently, the alcohol was getting to Garvie because he asked a rather incoherent question about the frog’s “thousands of pigmy brothers and sisters.” He even wrote down and published Chaucney’s bewildered reply: “Did we say pigmy??”
“One day in the summer of 1892,” continued Chauncey, ignoring the reporter, “the frog failed to appear for his morning meal.”
“A search was made on the lake. The frog was found dead, floating belly up, and surrounded by dozens of dead trout and bass which pointed to the fact that he had been the victim of fish
poachers who had used explosives to kill the fish. The poachers were either afraid of the thought of facing the irate Mr. Coleman, or possibly sensed the supernatural at the sight of the giant frog, for they beat it helter-skelter without making any attempt to collect the dead fish.”
A sizable reward was offered for information leading to the poachers' being discovered, but they were never caught.
A bereaved Fred Coleman apparently sent the frog’s remains to New England, where a skilled taxidermist mounted it.
“It has reposed ever since in a glass case in the Barker House,” Chauncey Coleman said, pointing at the sad-looking stuffed frog in the corner.
“So that’s the story of the Coleman Frog,” concluded reporter Harry Garvie. “Whether the story is authentic or not doesn’t really matter, for as P. T. Barnham knew (and said much more bluntly) there is a person born every minute who likes to listen to a good story.”
The Coleman Frog can be found today in the Fredericton Region Museum.
Author's Note: When I published this one in the newspapers, it upset a lot of people! Apparently, Frederictonians don't appreciate the frog being depicted as a barroom relic! So I wrote a sequel article, drawing on sources from its heyday (when it was alive.) Read the sequel, about the live Coleman Frog meeting a top American General, here!
