Rochester was just one stop on the 'Terrible Williamsons' decades-long scamming spree in the 20th century
Mar. 4—ROCHESTER — Davina McDonald held up an Italian-woven rug she just sold to a photographer, smiling for a picture.
It wasn't until she left that the New York photographer realized the carpet was machine-made — he had just been scammed by a member of a notorious crime family.
McDonald's photograph is the only one depicting the "Terrible Williamsons" in action, according to Post Bulletin reporting in 1958.
A group of around 100, the Terrible Williamsons traveled across the United States beginning in the early 1900s, swindling and scamming anyone who would pay them for their services. To join them, you had to marry into the family.
The family landed in Rochester in the 1950s, and many members stayed in town for several years after.
"If we find them here, they're in for plenty of trouble," Rochester Police Chief James Macken Jr. told the Post Bulletin in 1957.
Traveling in small groups, they would go door knocking to sell fake Italian rugs, Scottish woolens, Irish laces, lightning rods and cheap paint jobs.
In 1956, the Better Business Bureau estimated the family swindled at least $1 million, which is nearly $11.8 million in 2025, every year since starting its operation.
In 1956, the Post Bulletin reported that a local farmer, who wanted to show thanks to his landlord after having a bountiful harvest, hired the Williamsons to paint his barn.
After all, they offered him an unbeatable bargain — a faster job at half the price.
The night after the Terrible Williamsons finished painting the barn, it rained. The farmer woke up to discover the paint had leaked onto the ground. Law enforcement later found out that the paint was a classic Williamson combination: a mixture of gasoline, turpentine, old axle grease and "anything else that was cheap," the Post Bulletin reported.
Not only was the now-soaked wood on the farmer's barn harder to paint after, but it was an even greater fire hazard.
The Terrible Williamsons were well known in southeast Minnesota for swindles like cheap paint jobs, yet law enforcement had few records depicting the gang's crimes.
As the Post Bulletin reported, people were just too embarrassed to come forward.
"Anyway, it is a rare sucker who'll go to court and admit to being a chump who doesn't know rayon acetate from wool or crankcase oil from roofing compound," the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune wrote of the Terrible Williamsons scam victims in 1957.
After the family's years operating in Rochester, the city ordered them out in July 1957.
While there were occasional arrests made of one or two members of the group, law enforcement said they would pay the fines or post bail and move on to a new area.
Though the members were never interviewed by a news outlet, their movements over the past century have been documented in papers in nearly every state — and there's no reporting that depicts the Terrible Williamsons ever stopped swindling.
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