Salem Witch Judge (40 page)

The Great Marsh includes every place that Samuel Sewall mentioned in Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, his 1697 essay prophesying the location of Christ’s return. The Merrimac and Parker rivers still flow in from the sea near the northern tip of Plum Island. Hiking trails meander through woods and marsh at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge, a haven for birders in Newbury and Rowley. Crane Pond, a widening of the Parker River several miles inland, is on protected land along the border between West Newbury and Groveland. Turkey Hill, at an elevation of 135 feet, stands on the southeast shore of Artichoke Reservoir, just west of Interstate 95 at the border of Newbury and West Newbury. From the summit of Newbury’s Old Town Hill, which the Trustees of Reservations maintains, the public can view an expanse of coastal Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. These and many more sites that Samuel knew and loved are marked on Protected Open Space of Essex County, a 2004 map published by the Essex County Greenbelt Association (www.ecga.org).

In the center of modern Newbury, the seventeenth-century house of Sewall’s parents still stands and is occupied. It sits beside a gas
station on the western side of bustling Route 1A just north of the intersection of Parker Street, near the Town Green. Newbury’s First Church Congregational, erected in the early 1900s, is on the same side of Route 1A, slightly to the north. The site of the meetinghouse that Samuel and his family attended, where he once filled in for his teacher the Reverend Parker, was across the road, at the southerly portion of Newbury’s Old Burying Ground. At the northern edge of this cemetery, among the oldest gravestones, are slates purchased by Samuel to honor his parents, Henry and Jane, and his son Hull (1684–1686).

The original village of Newbury, which Samuel’s grandfather and father and other English settlers founded in 1635, was about two miles south on Route 1A, at the Lower Green, between the Parker River and Old Town Hill. The landing place of the first settlers is marked by a stone alongside the river. Across the river, below the Route 1A bridge, Fernald’s Marina rents kayaks for exploring the river and sound. Inland along the Parker River, a mile east of Interstate 95 on Central Street in Byfield, one can still see the waterfall beside which Samuel enjoyed strawberries and cream with his sister Anne Longfellow in June 1686 while visiting his twenty-two-month-old son Hull. “The Falls,” as he called it, is just one of many places on the North Shore where members of Samuel’s family owned acreage. Not long ago I discovered that land along the Ipswich River owned by my aunt Judith, who was named for Samuel’s youngest daughter, was in the mid-seventeenth century the property of Samuel’s father.

About twenty-five miles south of Newbury is Salem, which now advertises itself as the “Witch City.” Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum has a large collection of documents and artifacts from the witch hunt. Adjacent to the museum, beside the seventeenth-century cemetery in which Judge John Hathorne and Governor Simon Bradstreet are buried, is a stone memorial to those who died during the 1692 witch hunt. The cemetery, now named after Charter Street, was then the Burying Point. The house of Samuel’s brother Stephen is long gone, as are most houses linked to the witch hunt. However, Judge Jonathan Corwin’s house, at 310
¹
/2 Essex Street, is open as a museum, the Witch House of Salem.

In 1992, the tercentenary of the witch hunt, the nearby town of Danvers, which was then Salem Village, erected a roadside memorial at 176 Hobart Street to honor those hanged as witches. The handsome
house and hillside farm of Rebecca Nurse, at 149 Pine Street in Danvers, are open to the public and well worth a visit. Nurse was the basis for the heroic central character in the film Two Sovereigns for Sarah. Her body was buried on Gallows Hill, but her family erected a memorial stone beneath a tree down the hill from her house.

Twenty miles to the south one can still find Samuel’s grave, a large gray slab marked SEWALL, near the back of the Old Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street in downtown Boston. This cemetery, a short walk from the Park Street subway station, opened in 1660 and closed for health reasons in 1879. Many prominent early Bostonians, including forty members of the Sewall, Hull, and Quincy families, are buried here. A few short blocks away, at the Old South Meeting House, at 308 Washington Street, Samuel’s initials—S.S.—are still visible in the granite cornerstone. Old South was built in stone in 1629–30 to replace the cedar Third, or South, Church in which Samuel worshipped for half a century. In 1773 Old South was the site of tax protests that led to the Boston Tea Party. One of Boston’s oldest public buildings, it was scheduled for demolition in 1876 but saved by preservationists. While Samuel’s church and his family crypt remain today, the city surrounding them has dramatically changed. Not only have Boston’s wetlands and bays been filled in and built over, but also its population has increased roughly a hundredfold—from fifteen thousand people then to nearly two million today.

To see Sewall’s farm, Brooklin, which gave the suburb of Brookline its name, take the Green Line subway train outbound to Brookline Village or Coolidge Corner. While the exact extent of Samuel’s vast acreage here is no longer known, it included much of Brookline Village and Coolidge Corner, Beacon Street between Coolidge Corner and Kenmore Square, the Minot Rose Garden, most of Cottage Farm, the Graffam-McKay Historic District between Coolidge Corner and Commonwealth Avenue at the western edge of the campus of Boston University, and a portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike in Brighton. The Smelt Brook, a tributary of the Charles River that exists today only in the form of damp basements north of Coolidge Corner, was the farm’s northern border, which suggested to Samuel its name, Brook-lying, which he shortened to Brooklin. Several Brookline streets still carry his family names, such as Dummer Street and Sewall
Avenue, near Coolidge Corner. A good way to view Sewall’s now densely settled farm is to walk the portion of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace from Jamaica Pond, at the Boston-Brookline border, north past Hall Pond to the Muddy River, alongside the Longwood Medical Area, to the Fens and, finally, Kenmore Square, where the Red Sox play at Fenway Park. Kenmore Square, which was known as Sewall’s Point in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the easternmost—and marshiest—part of his farm.

Cambridge, just north of Brookline across the Charles River, is much changed from Samuel’s day. No building he knew at Harvard College remains. The nearby town of Malden too bears little resemblance to the village Samuel visited in 1686 for the trial of the Reverend Thomas Cheever. Still, the names of towns around Boston area recall men of Samuel’s era. The towns of Hull (after his father-in-law), Quincy (for his mother-in-law’s family), and Stoughton (after the chief justice) are south of the city. (William Stoughton’s elaborately carved gravestone can be found at the Dorchester North Burying Ground, at the intersection of Columbia Road and Stoughton Street in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner.) The town of Winthrop—named for the first governor, who officiated at the 1647 marriage of Samuel’s parents-in-law—lies just north of Boston, beyond Logan International Airport. Beneath the pavement of the airport are several former islands, including Hog Island, which Samuel purchased for family outings in 1687.

Located directly across Boston Harbor from the airport to the south, behind the John F. Kennedy Library, in Dorchester, the Big Dig Museum at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives contains a remarkable collection of the discarded belongings of a Sewall contemporary. Katherine Wheelwright Nanny Naylor (1630–1714), a daughter of the Reverend John Wheelwright and a sister-in-law of Nathaniel Williams, a member of Samuel’s private prayer group, lived in the North End in the late seventeenth century. She married in succession two Boston merchants, Robert Nanny and Edward Naylor, and occupied a house on Cross Street beside Mill Pond near the landing place for the Charlestown ferry. Three hundred years later, during the massive downtown roadway reconstruction project dubbed the “Big Dig,” archeologists unearthed her backyard privy, a stone-lined chamber dug into the ground for use as an outhouse and trash disposal.

The Big Dig Museum offers a permanent display of many of Nanny Naylor’s discards, giving us an intimate look inside the home of a high-status seventeenth-century Bostonian. The exhibit includes imported ceramic tableware, English pottery, iron keys and belt buckles, decorative fireplace tiles, pewter spoons and knife blades, leather shoes, and a tiny brass pincushion. The privy contained more than a quarter of a million pits and seeds (mostly from cherries, but including thirty-two varieties of plums), animal bones, the wings of granary weevils, herbs, corn and wheat pollen, and parasite eggs.

Continuing south to Quincy, one can visit the canary yellow house in “Braintree” (now a separate town south of Quincy) where Samuel often stopped on his way to and from the South Shore, in which his wife’s cousin Daniel Quincy died in August 1691. The Quincy Homestead, as the house is known, is open to the public one Saturday afternoon a month in summer, courtesy of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, who call it “one of the few houses in Massachusetts in which the elements of a seventeenth-century building are still clearly visible.” Located at the corner of Hancock Street and Butler Road, a quarter mile north of the Quincy National Historic Site, the house occupies part of the farmland that the General Court granted to Judith Quincy Hull’s father in 1635. It was built in 1685 by Edmund Quincy Jr. (Samuel’s “Uncle Edmund”) and renovated in 1706 by his son, Daniel’s younger half brother, “Cousin” Edmund Quincy (1681–1738). Five generations of Quincys, including Judith Quincy Hull and Dorothy Quincy Hancock, “Cousin Edmund’s” granddaughter, occupied the house. John Hancock’s decrepit chariot remains in its garage. John Adams, Josiah Quincy (another grandchild of “Cousin Edmund”), John Hancock, and other patriots gathered here before the American Revolution.

Farther south there are still several Indian meetinghouses on Cape Cod. However, the Indian meetinghouse in Sandwich that Samuel funded in 1688 no longer stands. It was located between Buzzard’s Bay and the Herring River on a plateau that forms a watershed in modern-day Bournedale.

In Samuel’s thirties, when he was a successful merchant and member of the General Court, he spent almost a year in his native land on a mission to protect colonists’ rights. He departed Boston on
November 22, 1688, and landed at Dover, England, seven weeks later. Traveling to England is far easier today, as is following his steps to the usual tourist stops at Canterbury, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Oxford, Cambridge, Hampton Court Castle (where he went “to wait on the king”), Greenwich, and London. At the Tower of London the lions, leopards, and polar bear he enjoyed are not present, but the fourteenth-century mint, royal armory, and crown scepter are.

Samuel’s base in England was a flat above his wife’s cousin’s hat shop, the Hat-in-Hand, in Aldgate, just northeast of the City of London. During a March 1689 perambulation of the East End of London, Samuel toured “the Jews’ Burying Place at Mile End,” where he told the friendly grave keeper, “I wish we might meet in Heaven.” There are now five Jewish cemeteries in the East End, all in disrepair. The one he visited is the Betahayamin Velho cemetery, which is owned by a Sephardic synagogue and closed to the public. Britain’s oldest Jewish cemetery, founded in 1657, Betahayamin Velho is near the Stepney Green tube station, up the Mile End Road past the Half Moon Pub. This bedraggled cemetery, not visible from the road, lies behind the Albert Stern House. An effort is afoot in London to restore and open to the public these historic Jewish cemeteries.

A high point of Samuel’s tour of England was his visit to Winchester College, where he would likely have been schooled had he not emigrated as a boy of nine. Winchester College is in Hampshire’s handsome county seat of Winchester, now an easy hour’s car or train ride south of London. Today the college employs a hundred dons to teach seven hundred male students, roughly half of whom go to Oxford or Cambridge and then to positions in government. Visitors to the college enter through iron gates manned by uniformed guards. My guide to the campus was Dr. W. Geoffrey Day, a don and keeper of the library, who led me across the campus to the architectural oddity that Samuel described as “the chapel on the green.” At Winchester College, and nowhere else in the world, a fourteenth-century chantry (in which monks chanted for the dead) is set on a grassy lawn inside a cloister.

Dr. Day ushered me inside the chantry and up a spiral marble staircase to the “library around the stairs” that so impressed Samuel on February 25, 1689. A light-filled room with timber beams, white plaster walls, and delicately mullioned Gothic windows, this was then the
Winchester College library. While the collection has since moved to a different building, the books that Samuel encountered remain at the college, including the twelfth-century Historia Scholastica, the vellum songbook inscribed by a suitor to Queen Elizabeth I, the early-thirteenth-century Life of St. Thomas Becket, and the 1587 Heidelberg Bible.

Samuel’s Indian Bible, which he handed to the college librarian that day, is now the most valuable book in the collection. The Bible is kept in a locked vault in a strong room behind an inch of oak and a half inch of steel. There are only four Indian Bibles in all of England, according to Dr. Day, and but twenty in the entire world. Samuel’s Indian Bible is brought out for display at Winchester College once every five years. “The boys are here for five years,” the don explained, “so they all see it.” In his view the Indian Bible “has everything, starting with impeccable provenance. It has had only two owners, and we know exactly where it’s been. It has his signature and the date he received it, and his diary tells us the date he gave it to us. It also has wonderful foreshadowing: this Bible was owned by the man who would recant his judgment at the witchcraft trials.”

The market town of Romsey, where Samuel’s formal education began, lies about ten miles southwest of Winchester. As an adult he returned to Romsey and to the neighboring village of Lee, where his father still owned property. Lee—Saxon for “a gap in the woods”—has changed little in the intervening centuries, according to Don Bryan, a local historian and Blue Badge guide. Lee’s one remaining thatched farmhouse is likely to be on the erstwhile Sewall land. Romsey too retains much of its seventeenth-century character. A great Norman abbey, begun in the ninth century and completed in the twelfth, dominates the town. One of four abbeys in Hampshire before the Reformation, this was the only abbey that survived King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. A Benedictine abbot saved it in 1544 by cleverly transforming it into a parish church. Across the street is King John’s House, which dates to the thirteenth century. A Tudor tea room, open for business, occupies its early-seventeenth-century addition. The River Test, one of Europe’s finest trout and salmon rivers, runs just west of Romsey, crossed by a seventeenth-century bridge.