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New England Lyceums of Learning, 1820’s-1870’s

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In 1826, 40 citizens of the town of Millbury, Mass., organized a society for educational lectures. It was called a “lyceum.” Within three decades, 3,000 lyceums brought ordinary people together to educate themselves. They listened to lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. The lyceum movement ultimately led to the establishment of 60 land grant institutions, including a college in each of the 50 U.S. states.

Lyceums, or places of learning, were known in the Greek world. The Lyceum in Athens was a temple dedicated to Apollo., where education and debate took place. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato frequently taught there.

Start of the Lyceum Movement

Josiah Holbrook (1787-1854) of Derby, Conn., founded lyceums in America. He graduated from Yale in 1810, then taught and lectured.  Holbrook got interested in educational reform, believing democracy depended on a well-informed public. He then started the first industrial school on his family farm in Derby in 1819. It emphasized both academics and practical skills.

In 1826, Holbrook was delivering science lectures in Millbury, Mass. That’s when he encouraged the townspeople to organize a society to diffuse knowledge and exchange ideas.  Lyceums promoted personal improvement through learning with others at the grassroots.

From Millbury in 1826, the movement spread to Worcester’s Mechanics Hall in 1827, Concord in 1828, Lexington in 1829 and Boston and Salem in 1830. By 1850, the United States had 3,000 lyceums.

The School of Athens by Raphael, with Plato on the left, Aristotle on the right.

The Lyceum Catches On

The newspapers of the day reflected the growth and popularity of the lyceums as they spread throughout New England and into the Midwest.

  • The first annual meeting of the Connecticut State Lyceum appeared in the Hartford Courant on May 11, 1839.
  • “There have been delivered before the Lyceum ten lectures…science and philosophy and eloquence – our language, our earth, our physical structure…our social, civil and political institutions”reported the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier in Maine in April 1837.
  • “NEWPORT LYCEUM a lecture will be delivered before the Newport Lyceum…Question for debate next Tuesday evening ‘What is the most glorious, philanthropic or beneficial act or event in the last 100 years?” appeared as an advertisement in Herald of the Times of Newport, R. I., on Dec. 17, 1840:
  • “AKRON LYCEUM The first lecture…for the winter was delivered by Prof. Loomis of the W.R. [Western Reserve] College…the subject was Magnetism,” appeared as a notice in the December 1841 Summit County Beacon of Akron, Ohio.

Massachusetts Lyceums

In Massachusetts, the Boston, Salem and Concord lyceums were especially active. The Salem Lyceum lecture season of 1848-49 had over a dozen speakers including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner. -Topics included history, agriculture, economics and philosophy.

In an essay on Holbrook, Vyacheslav Khrapak noted the lyceums benefited women especially.

“Women, too, were properly represented in Salem; they were expected to contribute to the intellectual symposia. Egalitarian access to the Salem Lyceum’s lectern provided a powerful tool for educated women to express their intellectual capability and to represent their ideas freely…”

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone at Lyceum Hall in Salem.

Illiberal Prejudice

Although the lyceums generally opened to all, the one in New Bedford, Mass., didn’t. In 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson refused to speak to the New Bedford lyceum because it wouldn’t allow Black people to join. The abolitionist newspaper The Liberator editorialized on December 19: “We really never thought to see in the heart of good old New England such a deplorable and disgraceful exhibition of illiberal prejudice of people of color as has been afforded in New Bedford, Massachusetts…by denying the privilege of membership in their Lyceum to all black persons.”

After the Civil War, the Chautauqua movement started to overshadow the Lyceum movement. It began in 1874 as the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly in western New York. Its original purpose was to train church workers, but later included general education, music and recreation. Other “Chautauquas” then spread throughout the country. The original Chautauqua is still active today in Chautauqua, N.Y.

The Hall of Philosophy at the Chautaqua Institute

Lyceum Lecturers: Emerson and Thoreau 

Lyceums helped launch America’s literary renaissance. Thoreau and Emerson, the leading Transcendentalists, developed some of their most important work as lecture material for the lyceum circuit.

Emerson began his career as a minister, serving congregations around Boston including the historic Second Church. However, after an 1833 tour of Europe, and especially the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he began to see the divine in nature. Emerson decided to become a lecturer and writer. He stated “the lyceum is my pulpit,” and began building his literary reputation on the lecture circuit. He delivered over 100 lectures in Concord alone.  In fact, many of his later essays and books were first written as lyceum lectures.

wheeler-thoreau-shanty-emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In April 1869 the Springfield Weekly Republican promoted Emerson’s lecture at Boston’s Horticultural Hall: “MR EMERSON’S LECTURE: The Sage of Concord in Exaltation of Natural Religion.” His lectures on natural religion became his controversial book Nature in 1836. It laid the foundation for Transcendentalism, an idealistic philosophy that held the deepest truths come from personal insight rather than logic and experience.

Thoreau gave lectures in Concord in 1847 while still living in his cabin at Walden Pond. He lectured for two weeks on “The History of Myself,” which later made up most of Walden.  He first presented “Civil Disobedience” at the Concord Lyceum, then published it in 1849 entitled “Resistance to Civil Government.”

Thoreau quote on sign near the site of his cabin

Thoreau spoke at the Concord Lyceum in 1851 about the interrelationship of God, man and nature. A 2017 New York Times essay called it “the opening salvo of the modern American conservation movement.”

Twain on the Lyceum Circuit

By the 1860s, a promoter named James Redpath had organized the scattered lyceums into a circuit. Mark Twain traveled it for many years. In his autobiography, he recalled how the “Lyceum Circuit” was in full flower in 1866-68. The James Redpath Bureau managed it throughout the northern states and Canada, operating out of his School Street office in Boston. Redpath farmed out the lectures in groups of six or eight to the lyceums all over the country at an average of about $100 a night for each lecture.”

Vanity Fair caricature of Mark Twain

Twain ranked as one of the country’s most popular lecturers, but he didn’t do so well in one particular venue. He wrote, “I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it in any possible way.”

In 1871, Mark Twain traveled and lectured in a large circuit, covering Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C. and New England; then into the Midwest and back. Newspaper clippings from that tour can be found here.

Josiah Holbrook’s Non-Lyceum Interests

In addition to founding the Lyceum Movement, Josiah Holbrook also manufactured educational equipment for learning. In 1828 he founded the Holbrook School Apparatus Manufacturing Co. in West Boylston, Mass. The company made educational equipment, especially globes for illustrating geography. After Holbrook’s death in 1854, his son Dwight moved the company to Connecticut. Inmates from Wethersfield State Prison made Holbrook’s globes, according to the Connecticut Historical Society.

Holbrook was also a scientist who had studied geology at Yale. In 1849 he moved to Washington, D.C., to further promote his lyceum idea. But he also began going on geological explorations, one of which led to his untimely death. In June 1854, as he was examining mineral deposits and geological formations near Lynchburg, Va., he accidentally drowned in Black Water Creek, according to the June 22 Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Holbrook had been working with school children, teaching them about rocks and minerals. He was buried in Lynchburg, and the only mourners were a few of the boys that he was teaching.

In its obituary, the Lynchburg Daily Virginian wrote, “Mr. Holbrook has been long and favorably known in the scientific world. His name is familiar to thousands who never saw his face.”

In June of 2022 a Josiah Holbrook historical marker was placed at the Blackwater Creek Trail.

Morrill Land Grants for Colleges

One man influenced by the Lyceum Movement was Justin Smith Morrill, a U.S. congressman and senator from Vermont. As a young man he worked as a clerk in Portland, Maine from 1828-1831. He undoubtedly knew of the Gardiner Lyceum about 50 miles north.

Justin Morrill

Back in his hometown of Strafford, Vt., he became a merchant and a strong advocate for education, especially for rural farmers. This interest led to his creation of the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890. These acts gave federal land and support to colleges to teach agricultural techniques, engineering, mechanical arts and home economics.

More than 60 land grant institutions were created, forever changing adult and higher education. They especially benefited women and the working classes, according  to Khrapak in “Reflections on the American Lyceum.”

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Agricultural experiment stations were also developed for further research in farming and food production. Every U.S. state and territory has at least one land grant college or university. They include the universities of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, MIT and Cornell University. Further information and a map can be found here.

End Notes


Rebecca Rector of Troy, N.Y., is a history and genealogy researcher, and retired librarian from Siena College. She has been transcribing letters and diaries for Newberry Library and National Archives for the past three years.

Images: By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95298769; Lyceum Square marker By Chris Light – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64996756. Professor Bell Professor Bell in Lyceum Hall, Salem, addressing a party of scientific men in Boston / From sketches by E.R. Morse. Salem Massachusetts, 1877. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645960/. Thoreau quote By PoetishBookwormus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124757352. Hinged globe By Norman B. Leventhal Map Center – [Terrestrial Pocket Globe], CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101522627.

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The Last Salem Witchcraft Trial and a Case of Attempted Murder

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In the spring of 1878, Daniel Spofford of Newburyport, Mass., was astonished to find himself facing charges of mesmerism and witchcraft.  He was accused of using evil thoughts to control the mind of Lucretia Brown of Ipswich, causing her great mental and physical harm.

Daniel Spofford

The case was scheduled to be heard in Salem, the Essex County seat.

Predictably, the press dubbed this case the last witchcraft trial in Salem.

Both Spofford and Brown were followers of Christian Science, a Christian belief system led by Mary Baker Eddy.

Christian Science

Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist officially in 1879, but had practiced and promoted it for years before, building a devoted circle of followers.  The basic tenets of the belief are found in Eddy’s 1875 book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy considered herself a healer and taught others her healings arts.

Mary Baker Eddy in the 1880s

Christian Scientists believe that the material world is an illusion, and that reality is in the spiritual world. Because illness of the mind or body is part of the material world, they don’t really exist, and the assistance of a trained practitioner through silent prayer can lead the ill person to see that the ailment is just an illusion, thus precluding the need for medicine.

In Christian Science, evil doesn’t exist, but evil thought does.  Practitioners of mesmerism, or something Eddy called malicious animal magnetism, can project evil thoughts that can cause mental or physical harm to an unsuspecting person.

Eddy maintained a tight grip on her followers, demanding total obedience and loyalty.  She was litigious and not afraid to sue a follower with whom she had disagreements, often accusing them of practicing mesmerism.  This was the case with Spofford.

The Defendant in the Last Witchcraft Trial

Spofford was born in New Hampshire in 1842, and later moved to Massachusetts as a young boy, where he became a watchmaker’s apprentice.  Eddy’s biographer describes him as an idealist and somewhat melancholy, with intense blue eyes and a gentle manner.   He enlisted in the United States Army during the Civil War.

While in the army, Spofford frequently wrote letters to his mother describing the details of daily life: the weather, endless marching, the mud and poor morale.  In one he mentions that a fellow soldier was a medium who made predictions about the future.  Was this Spofford’s introduction into the spiritual world?

After the war, Spofford met Eddy, becoming a devoted student, agreeing to pay Eddy $100 to learn the healing arts and to provide the Association 10 percent of his earnings from his practice. He opened his private practice in Lynn in 1875.

He became Eddy’s chief adviser and treasurer of the Christian Science Association and worked diligently on the publication of her book Science and Health.

A dispute over royalties from that book’s first edition led to their eventual parting in 1877.  Spofford insisted that any royalties be given to the book’s main supporters, two students who contributed $1500 towards the publishing costs, whereas Mrs. Eddy felt the royalties should go either to her or toward a second edition of the book.

Spofford was officially expelled from the Christian Science Association in January 1878. In April, Eddy sued Spofford for failure to provide the contracted 10 percent.

The Accuser

Lucretia Brown was a semi-invalid who lived with her mother and sister in Ipswich. The Brown household was known for its cleanliness and its inhabitants for their abstemious diet.   Long plagued by spinal issues, Brown was often bed-ridden and able to walk only short distances. She supported herself by contracting crocheting jobs.

Lucretia Brown

Brown was a Congregationalist but in 1876 sought out Christian Science to treat her ailment. Through the ministrations of Miss Dorcas Rawson, one of Eddy’s earliest students, she was relieved of her suffering to the extent that she could walk two to three miles at a time without any ill effect.

Brown converted to Christian Science, and during her training took a course from Spofford.

Brown lived in the house to the left on Ipswich Green

At some point, Spofford paid a visit to Brown, who soon after suffered a relapse, apparently unraveling all the good works of  Miss Rawson.   Eddy believed that Spofford was using mesmerism to afflict Brown.

Brown and Eddy sued Spofford, demanding he desist from his malignant mesmerism.

Salem’s Last Witch Trial

The initial hearing of the mesmerism trial was held on Tuesday, May 14, 1878, presided over by Horace Gray, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  On that morning, Mrs. Eddy and 21 followers arrived at the Salem train depot from Lynn, making their way to the brick courthouse on Federal Street.   The structure still stands, although greatly altered from its appearance in 1878.

Horace Gray

This was an equity case, in which the plaintiff sought an injunction against Spofford, in effect a cease-and-desist order to keep him from mesmerizing Lucretia Brown.   The complaint accused Spofford of using mesmerism to cause Brown great suffering, including severe spinal pain and neuralgia, and that she was wholly unable to escape from his control.

Neither the plaintiff nor defendant were in court that day.  Arguing the case for Miss Brown was Edwards J. Arens, a Christian Scientist, who was not a lawyer.

Gray seemed skeptical. One of Eddy’s followers attending court that day said that at one point the judge laughed.  Yet, Gray agreed to hear the case further and ordered Spofford to appear in court. He set the date for later that week, Friday, May 17.

Excitement spread throughout Essex County and the commonwealth: a 19th-century witchcraft trial in Salem!

Essex County Courthouse, circa 1910

On Friday, a large crowd appeared at the courthouse, but the hoped-for fireworks never materialized.  Spofford didn’t show up.  Instead, his lawyer filed a demurrer, a pleading that challenges a lawsuit, in this case arguing that the court is unable to give relief. In effect, no court could control Spofford’s mind.

Gray agreed.

An appeal date was set for November, but the case was never heard. The last Salem witchcraft trial was a bust.

A Murder Conspiracy

But Spofford’s tribulations were not over.

Just six months later, Spofford was hiding in fear of his life.  According to The Boston Globe,  Eddy’s husband, Asa, and Edward J. Arens, the man who represented Lucretia Brown in the witchcraft case, allegedly hired a local thug to kidnap and kill Spofford for $500.  They felt that Spofford was interfering with the mind of Mary Baker Eddy, causing her great mental and physical distress. If the courts couldn’t stop Spofford, the malignant mesmerist, murder would.

Asa Eddy

The story reads like a crime novel with clandestine meetings on Boston Common, in dark alleys and at a “house of ill repute.” Eddy and Ames even used aliases in carrying out the plot.

The plan was to take Spofford into the country, ostensibly to treat a sick child, and kill Spofford while in a secluded spot, making it look like an accident.

Thankfully for Spofford, the hitman, James Sargent, got cold feet and alerted both the police and Spofford what was going on.  Working together with the police and Sargent, a frightened Spofford left town secretly, holing up at Sargent’s brother’s house in Cambridge. The police then planted stories in the newspapers saying that Spofford was missing.

This ploy was so effective that Spofford’s brother, with the aid of Newburyport police and a locksmith, broke into Spofford’s office there a week after his disappearance looking for any signs of him.

Sargent used Spofford’s absence as evidence that he completed his task and demanded final payment from the conspirators, which they willingly gave.

Asa Eddy and Edward Arens were arrested on October 29 and held on $3,000 bail.

The Arraignment

At their arraignment hearing at Municipal Court in Boston on November 7, The Boston Globe reported that Sargent claimed Arens approached him and said, “I want to get a man licked.  I want him licked so bad that he won’t come to again.” Sargent said he was the man to do it.

A bartender at Sargent’s saloon testified that Sargent had asked him to hide in a freight car at a railroad bridge in East Cambridge, so that he could hear the conspirators plotting.  He confirmed Sargent’s testimony.

Sargent’s sister, Laura Sargent, who ran a brothel on Bowker Street, said that she had seen Arens there four times and that he had exchanged money with her brother.

And finally, the state police detective, Hollis C. Pinkham, testified to seeing the three conspirators together on several occasions.

The judge ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to Superior Court on the December docket. A grand jury indicted the two defendants on two counts: conspiracy to commit murder, and specifically hiring Sargent to commit bodily harm against Spofford.

But the case was never to be.

The district attorney, Oliver Stevens, for reasons unknown, chose not to prosecute.  Perhaps the witnesses were too unsavory to get a conviction,  The defendants were released.

For the second time that year, a case involving Daniel Spofford came to naught.

Eddy fought back after the witchcraft trial, publishing the confession of a witness recanting his testimony, and providing alibis for her husband’s whereabouts at key moments.  But by then, it was beside the point.

Spofford left Lynn but continued with his healing profession in Boston and Newburyport.  He died in 1924, and is buried in Newburyport, Mass. , in a grave marked Pvt. Daniel Spofford.

End Notes

Image of witchcraft trial characters

Spofford photo. Unknown photographer. From Milmine, pp. 252-253. {{PD-US}}; Brown photo. Historic Ipswich (Mass.). https://historicipswich.net; Brown house painting. Historic Ipswich (Mass.). https://historicipswich.net; Mary Baker Eddy photo. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction No. LC-USZ61-215; Courthouses. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Reproduction No. LC-DIG-det-4a19770; Gray engraving. House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5772; Asa Eddy photo. Unknown photographer. From Milmine, pp. 168-169. {{PD-US}}; Arens photo. Author Kendall. From Milmine, pp. 252-253. {{PD-US}}; Newspaper report. The Daily Item (Lynn, Mass.), Oct. 23, 1878, p.4. Accessed from Newspapers.com, June 2, 2024.

Witchcraft trial sources

The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, 1909. Georgine Milmine. Exported from Wikisource on May 27, 2024.

The Boston Globe, May 11,12,15, November 8, 9, 1878. Accessed from Newspapers.com, May 23, and June 1, 2024.

Boston Post, October 24, 1878, p.2. Accessed from Newspapers.com, June 2, 2024.

Historic Ipswich (Mass.). https://historicipswich.net.

Massachusetts Historical Society. Collections online. Daniel Spofford Letters. Daniel Spofford to Rachel Spofford, 25 January 1863.

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7 Fun Facts About the Ten-Footer

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The ten-footer, once as ubiquitous in Massachusetts as a garage or an Amish shed, has pretty much disappeared from the landscape.

They measured 10 feet by 10 feet – hence the name – and stood about six-and-a-half feet high. Families used them as backyard shoe shops in the 18th and 19th centuries. Massachusetts dominated the shoe business then, and shoemaking was a lucrative side hustle for a lot of people who also farmed and fished.

At first, people came to a nearby ten-footer to order a pair of shoes or boots. The master cordwainer or journeyman measured their feet. They then found a last that corresponded to the measurements and cut leather pieces accordingly. Their wives and daughters stitched the uppers inside the house. Back in the ten-footer, the men tacked the uppers and soles to lasts and then sewed the uppers and soles together. Children and apprentices ran errands, lit the fire, waxed thread and did other mundane chores.

After 1820, the industry got centralized. Shoe shops sent cut leather to the ten-footers, which returned the finished shoes to the central shops. The shops then shipped them in barrels to Boston. From there, Massachusetts shoes and boots went to shod the feet of Europeans, Australians, West Indians and westward-migrating Americans.

Here, then, are some more fun facts about the ten-footer.

1, The ten-footer didn’t always measure 10 by 10.

Sometimes they measured 12 by 12, or even a palatial 14 by 14. They had no attic, but an open garret or “cock loft” reachable by a perpendicular ladder. A shoemaker typically believed everything comes in use once every seven years, and he filled the cock loft with all sorts of odds and ends: 50-year old lasts, candle rigging, old umbrellas, broken chairs, old hats, the bottoms of boots used as wax receptacles. “A mitigated museum,” noted one student of the ten-footer.

In winter the ten-footer often stank from a medley of tobacco smoke, burning leather, shoemaker’s wax and wood smoke.

2. The ten-footer started in Lynn.

In 1750, a Welsh shoemaker named John Adam Dagyr came to Lynn. Back then, people cobbled homemade shoes by the kitchen fire. Dagyr changed all that. Into a ten-footer he put four men – the shop “crew” — each at a bench, or “berth.” He then taught them how to divide up the work of making fashionable ladies’ shoes. His technique caught on. People called Dagyr “the celebrated shoemaker of Essex.” But he had trouble with booze, and he died broke. His legacy lived on: By 1795 Lynn had 200 master workmen and 600 journeymen who produced 300,000 pairs of shoes annually. By 1850, Lynn produced 4.5 million shoes a year.

A kid fox button ladies’ shoe

3. Every shoe town had a different specialty.

Towns in southern and western Massachusetts produced men’s shoes, brogans and high boots.

In Reading, just west of Lynn, nearly every family made shoes. They specialized in dancing pumps in the 1830s, then made infant and children’s shoes, some with fancy hand stitching.

Men’s work shoes, called brogans

Women’s pegged and common sewed shoes were made in Abington, Stoughton, Weymouth and Randolph, which also made heavy boots sold as far away as Australia. North Bridgewater had a reputation for making shoemaking tools.

Brockton led Massachusetts in men’s shoes. Many men in Brockton learned the craft in British prisons during the American Revolution.

4. The ten-footer hosted a school and a debating society.

The work of shoemaking didn’t require much mental effort, and so the men sitting in close quarters all day found a lot to talk about. Delivery men brought newspapers from Boston. Fishermen stopped by on stormy days with tales of the Grand Banks. Peddlers, preachers and politicians often swung by to contribute to the day’s agenda of discussion topics.

David Johnson, in his 1880 book, Sketches of Lynn, attributed the success of many shoemakers to their love of debate. “It has been remarked that more men have risen to eminence from the seat of the shoemaker than from the ranks of any other class of mechanics, except that of printers,” he wrote.

Henry Wilson, the “Natick Cobbler”

5. The 18th vice president of the United States started out in a ten-footer.

Henry Wilson started out as Jeremiah Jones Colbath, a poor farmer’s son born in Farmington, N.H. His father indentured him as a farm laborer when he turned 10. For a decade the boy toiled on a farm, apparently hating it. At the end of his indenture he received a yoke of oxen and six sheep, which he sold. He then went to look for a job. He couldn’t find one, so he walked 100 miles to Natick, Mass. He met a shoemaker willing to train him. By then he had changed his name to Henry Wilson. Some say he did it because he hated his nicknames, “Jed” and “Jerry.”

Henry Wilson’s ten-footer. Image courtesy Library of Congress

The name change brought him luck. In Natick, he found a shoemaker willing to train him. He hired himself out to learn to make brogans, bought out his contract and opened his own shop. In a ten-footer, of course.

Wilson started a shoe manufacturing company and eventually had more than 100 workers.

He then got into politics. He won election to the Massachusetts Senate and then the U.S. Senate as a radical Republican. “Radical” because he wanted to end slavery and empower workers.

He then served as Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president from 1873 until his death in 1875. All that debating in his ten-footer paid off.

6. The Civil War killed the ten-footer.

So many sons of St. Crispin went to fight (and die) in the war that a shoe shortage resulted. A South Attleboro man, Lyman Blake, invented a machine that sewed uppers to soles, speeding production so the Union Army could have enough shoes. Soon, automation took over the other stages of shoemaking. Enormous shoe factories then sprang up, and the ten-footer faded into obsolescence. They got moved, repurposed or torn down.

The Smith Shoe Shop in Reading, Mass.

7. A few remain.

The ten-footer behind the Stoneham Historical Society has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1984. Henry Wilson’s, at the Natick Historical Society, since 2000. Daniel Hunkins Shoe Shop stands behind the Haverhill (Mass.) Historical Society. The campus of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has one. And, happily, there’s one at the Lynn Museum in Lynn.

With thanks to D.N. Johnson (1880),. Sketches of Lynn, Or, The Changes of Fifty Years. United States: T.P. Nichols, Printer, and P.G. Faler (1981) Mechanics and manufacturers in the early industrial revolution : Lynn, Massachusetts, 1760-1860. United States: State University of New York Press.

Images: Stoneham Ten Footer (featured image): By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30063541. Smith Shoe Shop By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31199558. Hobnailed boots By Anthony Appleyard at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2560338.

 

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Rebecca Nurse Homestead, Homage to a Victim of the Salem Witch Trials

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Don’t be surprised if you tour the Rebecca Nurse Homestead with a descendant or relative of the innocent woman executed for the crime of witchcraft. Who knows, you might be a descendant as well!

The Story of Rebecca Nurse

Rebecca Nurse was a well-respected wife of a prosperous artisan, mother of eight and a grandmother. At 70 she was frail, possibly an invalid. People viewed her house, which sat on a 300-acre farm, as a mansion. By the standards of 1692 it probably was.

In January 1692, local girls in Salem began having fits. They started to accuse their neighbors of using black magic to torment them. Unbeknownst to Rebecca Nurse, they began to accuse her of hurting them.

One of the girls, Anne Putnam, said she saw the specter of Rebecca. Her father went to the magistrates and accused her of witchcraft. Some historians believe a property dispute lay at the bottom of the accusation.

On May 24, the sheriff came to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead and arrested her for witchcraft. She supposedly said, “I am as innocent as the unborn.”

Her arrest shocked the community, which viewed Rebecca as pious and upright. Thirty nine people signed a petition in support of her.

Her trial began on June 30, 1692.  The sheriff brought her in chains up the aisle of the meetinghouse. Her accusers, who included young girls who later recanted,  claimed she flew in on a broomstick to a Satan-worshipping ceremony performed by the Rev. George Burroughs. Others came, whole families of witches, they said.

Trial of Rebecca Nurse

According to the testimony, Burroughs started off with a trumpet and drum roll, then preached to the hundreds assembled that they must replace God’s churches with Satan’s. At noon, Burroughs administered the scarlet sacraments with help from his deacons Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Osborn, Sarah Good and Sarah Wildes. Then they had lunch, with Burroughs sitting at the head of the table next to a man in a white hat with a high crown. The Devil promised Burroughs he would reign as King of Hell.

A jury found her not guilty.

But the girls who first accused her started having fits and crying out against her. Chief Justice William Stoughton asked the jury to reconsider. The jury then found her guilty. “I am an innocent person,” she said.

On July 19, she was hanged with four other women, probably on Proctor’s Ledge in Danvers. Her body was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave nearby.

A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was recently created at Proctor’s Ledge.

Rebecca Nurse Homestead

The house itself is a First Period dwelling, a colonial saltbox built around 1678. Over the years it had many additions. Her great grandson Francis Nurse later lived in the house. After the Lexington Alarm, he marched from the house to the Battle of Lexington and Concord in Capt. John Putnam’s Danvers militia. Francis married Eunice Putnam. The Putnam family bought the property in 1784 and lived in it until 1905.

By 1908, a local woman named Sarah Hunt had raised enough money to buy the Nurse Homestead. The Rebecca Nurse Memorial Association took ownership of the house to restore it and turn it into a museum. The Association eventually turned it over to the Society Preservation for New England Antiquities, which then turned it over to a group of 18th-century living history reenactors called the Danvers Alarm List Company.

Today, the public can visit four of the rooms: the great room, sleeping chamber, lean-to and parlor. All have period furnishings.

Twenty-seven acres of alfalfa fields surround the house. On them stands a house owned by Zerubbabel Endecott, the son of Gov. John Endecott. The grounds also include a reconstruction of the Salem Village meeting house at the time of the trials. Moviemakers built it for Three Sovereigns for Sarah.

The property also includes the family burial plot, where Rebecca is believed to be buried. In 1985 her descendants dedicated a granite obelisk to her memory, the first memorial to anyone accused of witchcraft in North America.

The house includes a small archeological exhibit with artifacts recovered from the property.

Danvers, Mass.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is not in Salem, but 15 minutes away in Danvers, which used to be Salem Village. Some will find it a welcome respite from Salem’s crowded, witch-related tourist traps, especially at Halloween. Others who enjoy crowds and spectacle, not so much.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is near Glen Magna Farms, a historic country estate open to visitors. If you’re in the area for maritime history, head to Salem for the Peabody-Essex Museum. If architecture floats your boat, take a stroll downChestnut Street, once called the most beautiful street in America.

For lunch, try Red’s Sandwich Shop smack in the center of Salem’s historic downtown. Reds has had its doors open since 1945. Originally the London Coffee Shop, the patriots gathered there in Revolutionary times.

Five Things You’ll Remember About the Rebecca Nurse Homestead

Site of her Arrest.

Inside the house, you can stand in the doorway where Rebecca probably encountered the sheriff who arrested her and took her to Salem jail.

Replica of the Salem Meeting House.

Though it’s only a replica, it has a rustic, authentic feel that may make your skin crawl. Many of the events leading to the executions of 20 innocent people — along with five who died in jail — happened in and around the meeting house.

Family cemetery.

Though it isn’t 100 percent certain that Rebecca Nurse is buried there, she probably is. According to family lore, her children secretly disinterred her from the shallow grave and reinterred her in the family plot. In 1992, the body of another victim of the witchcraft madness, George Jacobs, was moved to the Nurse family burial ground. The cemetery lies a short distance from the house.

Authentic Period Furniture.

The restored house still has an authentic feel, with period furniture and household artifacts. A spinning wheel testifies to the way Rebecca would have spent a great deal of her time. Outside,  typical 17th-century crops grow in the kitchen garden.

Alfalfa Fields.

Twenty seven acres of greenery surround the house in the middle of dense suburban development.  You won’t see a single modern house from the vantage point of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, which helps take you back to 1692.

If you visit…

Check the times beforehand on the website and get there early. Volunteers run the homestead, so it’s sometimes closed.

The homestead has little in the way of signage, so read up on it beforehand, watch Three Sovereigns for Sarah or take a guided tour.

There’s a gift shop, and you can park on the grass. The mobility-impaired will not find it accessible.

Website: https://www.rebeccanurse.org/visitor-information/


Images: Featured image of homestead, By Willjay at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82142949. Interior of homestead by David  via Flickr, CC by 2.0. First floor of Rebecca Nurse House By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029532. Rebecca Nurse House (front view) By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029510. Proctor’s Ledge Memorial By Jangseung92 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95696697.

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7 Fun Facts About Needlework Samplers

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You’ve no doubt seen a needlework sampler at one time or another, framed and hanging on a wall. Perhaps it spelled out a pious saying, numbers, the alphabet, a charming border of fruits and flowers. Some may belong to collectors, prized as antiques created by a child in the 18th or 19th century. Some may have a more recent provenance, the handiwork of a gifted needleworker.

But you may not know the history of these cloth artworks. Here are seven fun facts to get you started.

Sampler made by 12-year-old Patty Coggeshall of Rhode Island, dated 1792

1. Boys made needlework samplers, too.

Young girls as well as young boys made samplers as teaching tools. They learned their letters and numbers by stitching them onto a piece of cloth, usually linen. Girls also learned the embrouidery techniques they would need as adults.

Girls generally didn’t get the same education as their brothers, because their household duties would circumscribe their lives. But they would have to know numbers and the alphabet, especially to meet the Puritan literacy requirements for reading the Bible.

A Connecticut sampler by Elizabeth Smith. in 1825.

Girls learned needlework from their mothers, grandmothers or from small local schools called “dame schools.” They resembled today’s grammar schools, and boys attended as well. Some boys made samplers, too. They called them “marker samplers.”

2. Needlework samplers helped catch a husband.

After grammar school, the well-to-do then sent their daughters to ladies’ boarding schools. There they learned more advanced stitches along with Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography and English Composition. The finished sampler had more of a pictorial, decorative theme than that first marker sampler.

A needlework sampler from Salem, Mass. Good enough to snag a spouse?

The finished sampler, with the girl’s name on it, was often framed and hung on the parlor wall. That showed a prospective suitor that she had a family wealthy enough to send her to school. It also showed her skill at needlework, essential for managing a household. And it displayed the desirable qualities of patience and submissiveness.

The needlework schools flourished from about 1785 until 1830, and then faded. Perhaps young women lost their appetite for obedience.

3. Myles Standish’s daughter made the oldest known American sampler.

Loara Standish of the Plymouth Colony made the sampler around 1645, according to the Pilgrim Hall Museum.  It measures 23-1/2 inches long and 7-1/4 inches wide. Loara, about eight years old at the time, used a variety of stitches to make an acorn, a rose, a carnation and this saying:

Loara Standish is my name
Lord guide my heart that I may do thy will
Also fill my hands with such convenient skill
As may conduce to virtue void of shame
and I will give the glory to thy name

Loara’s brother Josiah then inherited her sampler, and it remained in the family until 1844. The family then donated it to the museum.

For $299 you can make your own reproduction Loara Standish sampler with a kit from Etsy.

4. Older samples have missing letters.

They don’t have “J” and “U,” according to the National Museum of American History. The early Latin alphabet didn’t use those letters, so the needleworker used “I” for “J” and “V” for “U.” And “s” often looked more like an “f.”

Detail from an English sampler dated 1712. A few letters are missing.

The museum has a collection of 137 samplers. Lydia Dickson of Boston made the oldest in the Textile Collection, in 1735.

The world’s oldest sampler, by the way, dates from 200 BCE –300 CE. It came from the Nazoa people of Peru.

5. A collector once paid more than $1 million for a needlework sampler.

Sotheby’s sold the sampler at auction for $1,070,500 in 2017. Mary Antrim, a New Jersey schoolgirl, made the sampler in 1807. She stitched a large house next to poplar trees, with flowers and farm animals — a horse, a cow, chickens, a dog. She probably wouldn’t have minded getting paid herself for her work.

This one priced at $5,200 by 1st Dibs in May 2024. Late 18th century by Eliza Jordan.

6. Different schools of needlework taught different styles.

Some needlework samplers from the same town or region have remarkable similarities. That suggests one teacher or school taught a specific style.

For example, the White Dove school of needlework thrived in Deerfield, Mass., from 1798 to 1826. The samplers feature white doves outlined in black, and usually had an arrangement of baskets holding fruits and flowers. Above the picture was an alphabet or verse, and a border surrounded the whole thing.

A White Dove sampler from Deerfield, Mass.

In the 1830s, the Connecticut towns of Bantam, New Haven and Guilford produced samplers with a wispy, feathery appearance. That resulted from the use of the ray stitch for the lettering and design.

Sarah Stivours taught affluent young women embroidery in Salem, Mass., from 1778 to 1794. Her students’ distinctive samplers featured an Adam and Eve scene. They embroidered with the long satin Stivour Stitch on the diagonal across the linen. Inside a square, the alphabet and numbers took up the center of the sampler.

7. Needlework samplers could get stinky.

In colonial America, families spun their own thread and made their own cloth. They dyed the thread as well, with all kinds of substances: indigo, rusty nails, bark, moss, sassafras, poison ivy, elderberries. They also mixed indigo with something they euphemistically called “chamber lye.” We call it urine.


With thanks to A gallery of American samplers : the Theodore H. Kapnek Collection by Glee F. Krueger.

Images: English sampler missing letters by By Davidmadelena – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75216819. Connecticut sampler by Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (“CCO 1.0 Dedication”.

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Footnotes and Image Guide: Ward McAllister’s Newport Summers

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Footnotes

1. Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, King Lehr and the Gilded Age (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1935), 19.
2. The Newport (RI) Mercury, September 1, 1882, 2.
3. Rockwell Stensrud, Newport: A Lively Experiment: 1639-1969 (London: D Giles Limited, 2015), 376.
4. Deborah Davis, Gilded: How Newport Became America’s Richest Resort (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 3.
5. Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 40.
6. Sterngass, First Resorts, 40.
7. Maud Howe Elliott, This Was My Newport (Cambridge, MA: The Mythology Company, 1944), 36.
8. Stensrud, Newport, 324.
9. Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox” of American Revolutionary War fame, was Sarah’s uncle. Multiple branches of the family named descendants after him.
10. Horatio Gray, Memoirs of Rev. Benjamin C. Cutler, D.D.: Late Rector of St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. (New York: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1865), 95.
11. Gray, Memoirs of Rev. Benjamin C. Cutler, 95.
12. Ward McAllister’s full name was Samuel Ward McAllister. He was named after his uncle, the famous political figure Samuel “Sam” Ward. If you haven’t noticed already, the Cutlers loved their family names.
13. Louisa Cutler McAllister to Eliza Cutler Francis, April 3 [n.d.], Julia Ward Howe Papers, MS Am 1869, Box 1: 1-2, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
14. Ward McAllister, Society as I Have Found It (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1890),15.
15. Sarah Cutler to Eliza Francis, July 8, 1830, in Elliott, This Was My Newport, 44.
16. Stensrud, 324, 327.
17. Elliott, This Was My Newport, 42; and McAllister, Society as I Have Found It, 15.
Rev. Benjamin Clarke Cutler to “Mrs. P.,” a Parishioner of St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn, July 21, 1834, in Gray, Memoirs of Rev. 18. Benjamin C. Cutler, 149.
19. Elliott, This Was My Newport, 43.
20. Stensrud, Newport, 330.
21. Julia Ward (Howe) to Sam Ward, August 11, 1836, in Elliott, This Was My Newport, 53.
22. Elliott, This Was My Newport, 42.
23. “Cholera Statistics: The Cholera of 1832,” New York Herald, June 13, 1849, 1; “Progress of the Cholera,” New York Herald, July 2, 1849, 2; Edward Warren, Sketch of the Progress of the Malignant or Epidemic Cholera from its Arrival in America (Boston: Carter, Hendee, & Co, 1832), 37, 17.
24. Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Cholera Epidemic of 1832 in New York City,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 33, no. 1 (1959): 40.
25. Louisa Cutler McAllister to Eliza Francis, July 5, 1832, Julia Ward Howe Papers, MS Am 1869, Box 1: 1-2, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
26. Louisa Cutler McAllister to Eliza Francis, July 5, 1832; and U.S. Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, The Cholera Epidemic of 1873 in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), 580.
27. “Absenteeism,” The Southern Press, Washington, D.C., July 23, 1851, 3.
28. Sterngass, First Resorts, 43.
29. “Newport,” The Democratic Advocate, Westminster, MD, Aug. 31, 1889, 1; and Max Elton, “Letter from Newport,” Martinsburg (WV) Herald, July 11, 1885, 2.
30. Stensrud, Newport, 389.
31. Stensrud, Newport, 371.
32. McAllister, Society as I Have Found It, 45.
33. Stensrud, Newport, 329.
34. McAllister, Society as I Have Found It, 68; and CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1890?amount=806.84.
35. The Morning Call, San Francisco, CA, September 7, 1890, 3.
36. McAllister, Society as I Have Found It, 113.
37. “Newport Getting Gay,” Philadelphia Times, July 27, 1890, 7; Rev. Benjamin Clarke Cutler to “Mrs. P.,” July 21, 1834, in Gray, 37. Memoirs of Rev. Benjamin C. Cutler, 149.

38. Harriet Cutler to Sarah Cutler, September 12, 1832, in Elliott, This Was My Newport, 49.

Image Guide: Ward McAllister’s Newport Summers by Emily Parrow

  1. Ward McAllister
  2. Ward McAllister’s Picnic at Bayside Farm, from The Illustrated American (1890)
  3. View of the City of Newport, in The Past and the Present: Narragansett Sea and Shore: An Illustrated Guide to Providence, Newport, Narragansett Pier, Block Island, Watch Hill, Silver Spring and All the Famous Sea-Side Resorts of Rhode Island. By Reverend Frederic Denison (1879) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t9280gq77&view=1up&seq=12
  4. Sarah Marion Mitchell Hyrne Cutler
  5. Louisa Cutler McAllister, Age 64 (1865), California Historical Society Library
  6. Purgatory Chasm, in The Past and the Present: Narragansett Sea and Shore: An Illustrated Guide to Providence, Newport, Narragansett Pier, Block Island, Watch Hill, Silver Spring and All the Famous Sea-Side Resorts of Rhode Island. By Reverend Frederic Denison (1879) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t9280gq77&view=1up&seq=12
  7. From Paradise to Purgatory, William Trost (1878)
  8. Map of the New York City cholera epidemic “[Map of the New York City cholera epidemic, summer 1832],” Reese, David Meredith, 1800-1861, 1833, Book Stacks, 44325, Tennessee State Library & Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive, https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/9948, accessed 2024-05-09.
  9. Watching a Regatta from Newport’s Castle Hill (1885), Rhode Island Collection, Providence Public Library
  10. Newport’s Cliff Walk (1885), Rhode Island Collection, Providence Public Library
  11. Ward McAllister, Seated with Guests at a Picnic, from The Illustrated American (1890)
  12. Table settings at a Ward McAllister picnic, from The Illustrated American (1890)
  13. The Last Valley- Paradise Rocks, John La Farge (1867-1868)
  14. Ward McAllister at an 1890 Picnic, from The Illustrated American (1890)
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