Around New England

Lizzie Borden House Owner Wants Nearby Coffee Shop Owner To Stop Using Lizzie’s Name

March 26, 2024

The company that owns the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River is asking a federal appeals court to order a neighboring business to stop calling itself Miss Lizzie’s Coffee.

U.S. Ghost Adventures, which owns the house where Lizzie and her father and step-mother used to live, claims the coffee shop is infringing of the house-owning company’s trademark.

In October 2023, a U.S. District Court judge denied a request from U.S. Ghost Adventures for a restraining order to prevent the coffee shop from using the name, as New Boston Post reported at the time.

The judge found that the coffee shop’s hatchet logo is significantly different from the Lizzie Borden House’s hatchet logo and that the coffee shop is latching onto “the historical story of Lizzie Borden” and not the trademarked name of the Lizzie Borden House.

On Monday, March 25, U.S. Ghost Adventures filed an appeal of the federal district court judge’s ruling in the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, according to the Fall River Herald News.

“Many consumers are not only actually confused, but also (understandably) angry and upset about being deceived by this false association,” the house-owning company’s brief states, according to the Fall River Herald News.

The Lizzie Borden House, at 230 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, about 450 feet northeast of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, is a bed and breakfast and museum.

Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) was a 32-year-old live-at-home spinster when her father, Andrew, and step-mother, Abby, died of ax wounds at the home in early August 1892. Borden was tried on murder charges. A jury acquitted her. Police never identified another suspect.

The case is the subject of a popular children’s rhyme that includes the words “forty whacks.”

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