Framingham Legends & Lore (6 page)

Local officials began holding hearings in meetinghouse—large, freewheeling affairs where the afflicted, accused, magistrates and interested neighbors all had their say. Gradually the case grew in scope, with more accused witches, including from Salem proper, as well as from neighboring towns such as Ipswich and Andover. By April 1692, the situation had escalated to the point that the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had become involved, with deputy governor Thomas Danforth presiding over hearings along with six of his councilors, including the eminent judge and diarist Samuel Sewall.

Accusations of witchcraft were hardly unknown at the time—six had been hanged for the crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony prior to 1692, while there had been several other investigations and significantly larger numbers had been executed in the far more populous English homeland. Indeed, Matthew Hopkins, termed England's “Witch Finder General,” had brought accusations against more than one hundred women in the county of Suffolk during 1645 alone, including eleven from Danforth's birthplace of Framlingham.

The Salem witch trials came to dwarf even Hopkins's best efforts: historian Mary Beth Norton has calculated that eventually 144 people faced legal action, 54 of whom confessed, 19 were hanged (including five men), 4 others died in jail and 1 man was crushed to death in an unsuccessful effort to make him enter a plea. These events have sparked endless fascination and a multitude of books and articles with innumerable theories seeking to explain the cause. For our purposes we shall focus on the cases of three sisters—Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Clayes and Mary Esty.

The three were the daughters of William and Joanna (Blessing) Towne. William and his family had come from Yarmouth, Norfolk County, England, in 1639, settling in Salem by 1640 and removing to nearby Topsfield in 1651. Rebecca had married Francis Nurse and settled in Salem Village, where they reared eight children. In 1692, she was seventy years old and a member of the church in good standing. She was the first of the sisters to be accused, in March 1692, and it was a sign of things to come that so established a member of the community could be named as a witch. Initially she was visited by a delegation of church members, including her brother-in-law Peter Clayes, who returned a favorable report on her conduct. Nonetheless, a formal complaint was levied against her on March 23, 1692, and she stood before the community the next day to face an inquiry.

As Rebecca was questioned by magistrate John Hathorne, members of the community began to shout forth accusations. Henry Kenney stated that he had been seized since she had entered the meetinghouse, and Ann (Carr) Putnam stated that she could see the apparition of “the Black Man” (the devil) whispering into Nurse's ear. When the accused woman continued to profess her innocence, Putnam collapsed into fits on the floor and was carried from the building by her husband. Hathorne later cut his interrogation short due to the excessive commotion and noises that Nurse's presence elicited among those afflicted by “witchcraft” in the room.

Sarah Clayes was the next of the sisters to stand accused. Twenty years younger than Rebecca, she had been born in Salem, married Edmund Bridges and had five children. After his death, she married Peter Clayes. (The Clayes name has had a variety of spellings—Cloyes, Cloyce, etc.—but we will use “Clayes” for the sake of clarity.) She was examined at the hearing on April 11 presided over by Thomas Danforth. The first witness declared that Clayes, in spectral form, had choked him and demanded he sign her book (to sign away his soul), to which Clayes interjected that he was a liar. She maintained her defense for a time, but once the third accuser, Abigail Williams, had declared that Clayes had been a “deacon” at a witches' sacrament at her uncle's house, she seemed to lose heart. Clayes requested a glass of water and then slumped to the floor, while an observer noted that her spirit must have “gone to prison to her sister Nurse.” As at her sister's hearing, the session was disrupted by a number of the afflicted experiencing fits and spectral visions that they attributed to the witches in their presence. Sewall later wrote in his diary that he was much affected by the demonstrative suffering of the victims, and one might presume that Danforth shared the same reaction.

Ten days after her sister Sarah's hearing, Mary (Towne) Esty was said to have been among a company of nine witches in spectral form seen gathered on a hill in Salem Village. Esty actually resided with her husband Isaac in neighboring Topsfield, but the fact that two of her sisters had already been imprisoned for witchcraft no doubt hurt her case. The next day she was interrogated, while those who accused her enacted scenes of great torment and mimicked her movements, as if entranced. Judge Hathorne rejected her claims of innocence against the seemingly overwhelming evidence he saw before him. The validity of the charges was further buttressed by the confessions of some who had previously been accused. Their confessions were no doubt prompted by the knowledge that those who confessed to the crime of witchcraft demonstrated by their confession that they were now free of the control of evil spirits, and their lives were therefore spared. The confessors were then forced to name their accomplices, offering seemingly concrete proof of the existence of a genuine conspiracy of evil in the land. It was only those who maintained their innocence to the end who received no mercy.

By sheer coincidence, a new royal governor arrived at Boston in May 1692, bearing a long-awaited new charter and dissolving the existing colonial government. (This was also the measure that brought the previously independent New Plymouth Colony under the jurisdiction of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.) This meant that Thomas Danforth was no longer deputy governor. The extent to which Danforth had supported the witchcraft prosecutions early on is debatable, although he had certainly been a willing participant by presiding over the hearing in April. There is no doubt, however, that once the Court of Oyer and Terminer was established in May to try the cases, he became one of its fiercest critics. The dissolution of the court five months later, and Danforth's reappointment to the position of magistrate, played a significant role in winding down the crisis. While some cases continued to percolate through the legal system until May 1693, there were to be no more executions, and the climate of public opinion shifted with remarkable rapidity so that the entire episode was soon widely viewed as a shameful miscarriage of justice.

House built by Peter and Sarah Clayes on Salem End Road.

In 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall publicly repented of his role in the trials. His friend Thomas Danforth's actions spoke of his own feelings, as his land in Framingham soon became populated with members of the families of the three Towne sisters. Between 1693 and 1699, the names of Towne, Clayes, Bridges and Nurse entered into the rolls of the community, and the street along which they settled still bears the name Salem End Road to this day. Though derelict and neglected, the house that Peter and Sarah (Towne) (Bridges) Clayes built still stands there as well. (Jonas Clayes, who fashioned House Rock into grindstones, was their great-great-grandson.)

But Danforth's act of charity came too late for Sarah's sisters—Rebecca (Towne) Nurse had been hanged on July 19; Mary (Towne) Esty had been among the final group sent to the gallows on September 22.

F
RAMINGHAM
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INALLY
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ECOMES A
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OWN

Whether it was the influx of the Salem settlers, or perhaps the end of his term as deputy governor, by 1693 Danforth had shifted his focus back to developing Framingham into a town. Other new families had recently secured land from him whose names—Frost, Haven, Mellen and Winch—would continue to populate the town for decades, if not centuries, to come. Framingham was finally growing, and Danforth sought to plan for its future.

The model he used was the English one. Instead of selling his land outright, which he had sometimes previously done, he would instead lease it out on a 999-year basis as a means of ensuring perpetual income for himself and his heirs.

As he thought about how the town would take shape, he reserved three large parcels of land. The first was 140 acres for the building of a meetinghouse and the establishment of a minister, located in a swath running along the west bank of the Sudbury River from the Old Burying Ground on Main Street, curving around the base of Bare Hill (site of today's Framingham State College) back along Maple Street. The second was a large block of undetermined acreage composing the entire southwest corner of Framingham, to be used as a commons for grazing or woodcutting by those who leased Danforth's land. (This would not include those settlers who had already bought or been granted their own land, however, such as the Eames, Stone or Rice families.) The third reserved tract was 600 acres on the south side of Doeskin Hill and Nobscot Mountain, to be reserved for the exclusive benefit of Danforth and his heirs. The remainder of Danforth's land would be leased out to new settlers.

By the mid-1690s, Framingham was populated by more than forty families, and the settlers made their first halting attempts to form an independent town. Due to the piecemeal way Framingham's land had been granted, the forty families were not at all united in their desire for a new town. Danforth's lessees, such as the Salem End families, were interested in his vision coming to fruition, as were many of the other settlers. But the town of Sherborn laid claim to the cluster of farms that were now laid out along either side of what is today Concord Street in downtown Framingham—indeed, the area became known as “Sherborn Row”—made up of the next generation of the Eames family and those families who had bought land from them. Sudbury was willing to relinquish the settlers who lived on the northern fringes of Framingham, but those families had already contributed to the building and upkeep of the ministry of that other town and would have preferred to remain within their bounds. Further complicating matters was a tax dispute between the Framingham settlers and the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Nonetheless, all these issues were eventually overcome, and by an act of the provincial government, Framingham was incorporated as a town on June 25, 1700. Danforth's dream, nearly forty years in the making, had been realized. Unfortunately, he was not able to celebrate his achievement, having died the previous November at the age of seventy-six.

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HE
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IRST
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EETINGHOUSE AND THE
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REATION OF
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RAMINGHAM
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ENTRE

One good way to stump someone is to ask them where Main Street in Framingham is. Unless they have lived in town for a while, chances are they have no idea that it is the stubby little street that runs east from the Minuteman statue at Buckminster Square before terminating at Route 9 a few blocks later. They may never even have been on it. But there, on a slight rise within the bounds of the Old Burying Ground, was where Framingham's first meetinghouse was erected in 1698, two years before the town's incorporation.

If today it seems a somewhat obscure and out-of-the-way place to locate the center of town life, in 1698 it was even more so. About the only thing that Framingham's scattered clusters of residents had in common then was that none of them lived anywhere near what we now call Framingham Centre. But since it was more or less centrally located within the geography of the town, it was at least an equally inconvenient location for all the town's inhabitants. Furthermore, it lay closer to the settlers at Sherborn Row than Sherborn's own meetinghouse, thereby bolstering Framingham's case in the long-running border dispute with the town to the southeast. So it was on this rather inauspicious note that the village that would remain the civic and cultural center of Framingham until the twentieth century was created.

Even so, Main Street's time in the sun was fleeting. In 1735, a new meetinghouse was built on the east side of Edgell Road, just to the south of the site of the Plymouth Church across from the Centre Green. Three quarters of a century later, Main Street effectively became a side street with the construction of the Worcester Turnpike (today's Route 9) in 1810.

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UBIOUS
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EGACY OF
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OSEPH
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UCKMINSTER

The creation of Framingham was primarily a moneymaking operation for Thomas Danforth, and he probably never would have gotten the opportunity to buy so much land at relatively low cost had he not been a high-ranking official in the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire his sense of noblesse oblige, his genuine civic-mindedness, his role in curtailing the Salem witch crisis and his concern for others demonstrated in his actions toward the Eames and Salem End families in particular.

These virtues are cast into particular relief when one considers the career of Danforth's de facto successor, Joseph Buckminster. Buckminster was born July 31, 1666, at Muddy River (now Brookline), Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was only two years old when his father died; perhaps the resulting economic insecurity of his family while he was growing up contributed to the development of his subsequent character. The Reverend William Barry, an early chronicler of Framingham, reports that he was “a man tall and athletic of great physical power, and of a resolute spirit.” To say he possessed a resolute spirit may have been an understatement.