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Newbury Mass.

The Ipswich Fright: Terror Strikes a Town Even When the British Aren’t Coming

In the days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a general panic seized the population around Boston. Would the British regulars march to other towns, murdering their inhabitants and burning their homes? Nowhere was the fear greater than on the North Shore, where a fast-spreading rumor caused the Ipswich Fright.

Hundreds of frightened Ipswich citizens fled their homes, filling the roads with carts carrying what household goods they could grab. Their panic spread to the nearby towns of Newbury, Newburyport, Beverly, Salisbury and even Haverhill, Mass., 20 miles to the west.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The rather ignominious show of fear might have been forgotten, save for John Greenleaf Whittier. He immortalized the Ipswich Fright in 1866 with a story about it in his Prose Miscellanies.

Whittier described the Great Ipswich Fright as “the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.”

The Ipswich Fright

Ipswich, in the days of revolution, was a steady, conservative town solidly behind the patriot cause, wrote Whittier. Midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport,

…the traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off to the seaside, forms a green background.

The John Whipple House in Ipswich

On April 22, the able-bodied men and boys of Ipswich had marched off to Cambridge after the Battles of Lexington and Concord three days earlier.

Rumors flew that the soldiers would come out again, and they would burn, kill and destroy everything that came in their way. Coastal towns had special concern that the British would attack from the sea.

So on that morning, old men, women and children rushed to the village green to hear the news.

“A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed on the coast and were marching upon the town,” wrote Whittier. “A scene of indescribable terror and confusion followed.”

Carrying Off Goods

Thomas Franklin Waters reported that someone had seen two small vessels standing in the Ipswich River. “We may be sure there was fright with good reasons at the farms on Castle Hill and Castle Neck,” wrote Waters in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1917.

View from Castle Hill

People hid their valuables, piled their household goods into ox carts and headed north to New Hampshire.

Diarist John Tudor described the scene that followed. “[M]en and horses driving past, up and down the roads…People were in great perplexity; women in distress for their husbands and friends who had marched. …All confusion, numbers of carts, etc., carrying off goods, etc.

Contagion

The rumor quickly spread to Beverly that the enemy had massacred every man, woman and child in Ipswich. The scene repeated itself.

At mid-afternoon in Newburyport, the town had assembled to hear the details of the Battles of Lexington and Concord., according to a later account in the Newburyport Herald. Parson Carey was opening the meeting with a prayer when a rider named Ebenezer Todd rushed up. “Turn out, turn out, for God’s sake,” he cried, “or you will be all killed! The regulars are marching on us; they are at Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!”

The people of Newbury ran to Salisbury, while the people of Rowley ran to Newbury. The people of Haverhill fled in boats across the Merrimack River to Bradford.

Many spent the night in empty houses in Salisbury. The houses were empty because their inhabitants had fled farther north into New Hampshire.

Woof of Comedy

During the Ipswich Panic, one woman threw her silver down her well. A man hid his private documents under a stone and stood guard in his home with a musket.

Another man put his family into a boat to find safety on Ram Island. Through the evening dusk he imagined the enemy pursued him. An infant started crying in the stern of the boat.

“Do throw that squalling brat overboard,” he said to his wife. “Or we shall all be discovered and killed.”

A woman ran four or five miles up the river. She stopped to take a breath and nurse her child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought the cat instead of the baby.

The Newburyport Herald also reported,

In another instance, a Mr. J. L. seeing Mr. C. H., a very corpulent man, standing at his door with his musket loaded, inquired of him if he was not going. “Going! No.” said he, “I am going to stop and shoot the devils.”

Not until the next morning did most of the refugees learn the truth. Some, however, found out earlier. According to Whittier, a young man from Exeter, N.H., happened to be staying in Ipswich.

[H]e mounted his horse and followed after the retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at night he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the welcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning home ward, their satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant conscious ness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.

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Learn more Revolutionary history in this complete guide to Revolutionary War sites in New England. Brought to you by the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy in paperback, here to order an ebook.

Images: Whipple house By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28573446. View from Castle Hill By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11189622. This story updated in 2025.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19^th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21^st century.

East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles. Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself. And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621, to M^r David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (excep^tBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…
The Old State House in Boston
Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of y^eplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

(Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before y^eTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.
Woodcut of New Haven, 1786
Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but y^eHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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The 1635 Perplexing Death of Maid Mary Sholy

In 1635, Mary Sholy had the tragic misfortune of meeting William Schooler. Schooler was not the sort of man the early settlers of Massachusetts wanted in their midst.

The Puritans who came to America were largely escaping intolerance. They wanted to establish a new country where they could practice their religion in peace. However, they also found America appealed to men and women who had other matters to escape. William Schooler was one of these

Schooler lived in London. He made his living selling wine and was married to an upstanding woman. But Schooler was a philanderer and a drunk. He would later admit his adultery. Schooler got into trouble in London when he wounded a man in a duel. He fled (likely to Holland) and from there made the journey to America.

In 1635, English colonists had small settlements under construction in Newbury, Mass. and Portsmouth, N.H. Schooler moved to the outskirts of Newbury and shared a house with another man. Their neighbors viewed them with a jaundiced eye because they lived as atheists.

Mary Sholy Goes Home

View of Ipswich from Castle Hill

Mary Sholy was a maid. She worked for a man in Portsmouth, and she had come to Newbury on personal business. The trip from Newbury to Portsmouth over land would have been a difficult one in 1635, roughly 30 miles on a narrow path, and a traveler would need to cross the Merrimack River.

Mary wanted to go home to Portsmouth, and William Schooler offered to guide her for a fee of 15 shillings. The pair departed Newbury, and it was the last time anyone would see Mary alive.

William returned to Newbury two days after he had left. Because of this unexpectedly quick return, the local authorities suspected something bad had occurred, and so they questioned William.

He told them he had crossed the Merrimack River with Mary, though not where he intended to, and guided Mary toward Portsmouth, then known as Pascataquack. However, she stopped part way and refused to accompany him any farther. He had then left her. He noted ominously that he had encountered a bear shortly after turning back.

Schooler’s neighbors noted that he had a scratch on his nose and blood on his clothing and hat. The blood, he explained, came from a pigeon he had killed to eat. The scratch was from a bramble. The magistrates at Ipswich thought the scratch was too large to be from a bramble. However, lacking any evidence of a crime they released Schooler.

William Schooler Can’t Keep Quiet

About one year later, Indians discovered Mary Sholy’s body in the woods, partially decomposed and undressed. She was about three miles from the Merrimack River.

William Schooler, meanwhile, had been conscripted to serve in the militia. He complained bitterly and loudly about this required service, and word of his complaining reached the governor who issued a warrant to arrest and question him.

When approached by court officers, however, Schooler assumed they planned to accuse him of murdering Mary Sholy, and he began loudly proclaiming his innocence. The protest renewed suspicions that Schooler had not told the truth about Mary Sholy, so he was again questioned.

Jailbreak and Back

This time the judges at Boston concluded he was guilty of a crime, and they sentenced him to death. While he was imprisoned on Powder Horn Hill awaiting execution, Schooler broke out of jail. But he returned and surrendered.

Some in the community, notably some ministers, protested the death sentence. The evidence against Schooler was purely circumstantial. They implored Schooler to confess to save his soul, but he refused. He had lied about certain details, but he had not murdered or harmed Mary Sholy in any way, he said.

John Winthrop

John Winthrop recorded the case in his journal. The clergy demanded that the court rescind the order of execution, but the court declined. Even if he had not actually murdered Mary Sholy, the court concluded, William Schooler had abandoned her in the woods and left her in great peril. And even when he suspected a bear endangered her, he did nothing. He was worthy of hanging for that behavior alone.

He was hanged on Sept. 28, 1637, protesting his innocence to the last.

If you enjoyed this article you might like Divorce, Murder and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of the New Haven Colony. This story was updated in 2022.

Photo Credit: by John Phelan [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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How the Daughters of Liberty Fought for Independence

On August 14, 1768, the Daughters of Liberty cheered from windows as the Sons of Liberty paraded through Boston to commemorate their riots against colonial officials three years earlier.

They were far more than cheerleaders, though they did rally the men in Newport, R.I., to steer clear of taverns selling English whiskey. The women organized boycotts of British goods, especially tea, and they manufactured replacement products, especially cloth. They pressured men to embrace the patriot cause, refusing to date anyone unwilling to risk life and property for freedom. Some even took on dangerous military missions.

The Daughters of Liberty, though not as celebrated as the Sons, were crucial to the cause of liberty in the run-up to the American Revolution.

“With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble,” Samuel Adams said.

Daughters of Liberty

The Daughters of Liberty didn’t always organize and people didn’t always call them the Daughters of Liberty. Some newspapers called them ‘Daughters of Industry’ or ‘noble-hearted nymphs.’

Abigail Adams, 1766 (Benjamin Blythe)

Abigail Adams is often linked with the Daughters of Liberty, though she wasn’t a card-carrying member. So are Deborah Sampson and Prudence Cummings Wright. Sampson dressed as a man and joined the Continental Army, while Wright led a group of women in capturing two British spies. Sarah Bradlee Fulton, a card-carrying Daughter of Liberty, was the ‘mother of the Boston Tea Party’ and spied for George Washington.

Well before the Revolution, though, the ladies formed chapters throughout New England to free themselves from British economic tyranny. The ladies equated political independence with economic independence.

A Daughters of Liberty chapter branched off from the Sons of Liberty in Providence in 1766, followed in Rhode Island in East Greenwich and Newport.

Parliament unintentionally provoked more resistance among the colonial women when it passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, taxing imports of British glass, lead, paints, paper and tea.

In Massachusetts, there were 300 daughters of Liberty in Boston by February 1770; they were also in Beverly, Byfield, Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley and Salisbury.

Spinning for Freedom

From early in 1766 to about 1771, spinning bees were all the rage in New England. Women wanted independence from British textile manufacturers, and started making their own cloth. Homespun became the politically correct fashion item.

On April 7, 1766, the Boston Gazette reported 18 daughters of liberty gathered at the house of Dr. Ephraim Brown. “There they exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience,” reported the newspaper.

Spinning for freedom

Newspapers continued to report on the smallest cloth-making development.

Spinning schools were revived and awards were offered for the person who wove the most cloth. A woman raised 6,000 silk balls from a single mulberry tree in Windham, Conn. A 70-year-old woman in Newport, R.I., learned to spin for the first time. In February 1769, two Connecticut women held an all-day spinning contest in which the winner spun seven skeins and two knots of fine linen yarn, just a little more than her competitor.

Women began gathering in large groups, often at ministers’ homes, along the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. For 32 months starting in March 1768, more than 60 spinning meetings were held from Harpswell, Maine, to Huntington, Long Island.

“I presume there never was a Time when, or a Place where, the Spinning wheel could more influence the Affairs of men, than at present, in this and the neighbouring colonies,” wrote one contemporary writer in the newspaper series, A Journal of the Time.

The boycott worked: The value of imported goods from Great Britain fell by half in 1769 over the previous year, from 420,000 to 208,000 pounds.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton

In 1770, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea. The Daughters of Liberty had already pledged not to drink the stuff. They made ‘liberty tea’ from currant and raspberry, basil, mint, even birch bark.

Then the Tea Act of 1773 gave a virtual monopoly on tea to the floundering Dutch East India Company. It also inspired the Boston Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party

Sarah Bradlee Fulton was a Medford, Mass., housewife and leader of the Daughters of Liberty.

She is credited with the idea of disguising the men who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor as Mohawk Indians. She painted their faces and found Native American clothing for them. After the Tea Party, the men returned to her home to clean off the paint and get rid of their disguises.

When war broke out, the Daughters of Liberty melted metal for bullets and sewed soldiers’ uniforms. Fulton organized women to nurse soldiers wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. She also served as one of George Washington’s spies.

During the siege of Boston, Maj. John Brooks had important dispatches to send from Medford to Washington. Fulton volunteered, thinking the British wouldn’t suspect a woman of spying. She walked across enemy lines at night, rowed to Charleston and delivered the message.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton died in 1835, and 65 years later a memorial stone was placed at the Salem Street Burying Ground in Medford.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Margery Brown and Owen O’Sullivan – An Unlikely Love Story

Margaret Brown of County Cork in Ireland had a fierce beauty and a temper to match. She crossed from Ireland in 1723 with her future husband, the tall and wiry Owen O’Sullivan. Together they would have two sons who helped shape the future of their adopted country.

Just how Owen and Margaret came to America is pieced together from several family histories. Owen was heir to his family estate and castle in Ardea in County Kerry on Ireland’s southeast coast. By 1723, however, the castle was in ruins. The O’Sullivans had sided with King James II in his effort to regain the British throne.

When King William of Orange dispatched James to France in the Battle of the Boyne in 1692, any chance of Owen O’Sullivan regaining his ancestral power went with him. Owen was raised and schooled in France.

John and James Sullivan portraits

Owen’s own father died in France, as Owen recalled: “My father died, as they told me, of an ulcer raised in his breast, occasioned by a wound he received in France, where he fought a duel with a French officer; and when he wounded his antagonist, another runned a sword through his back so that the point appeared at his breast.”

Owen O’Sullivan

Upon returning to Ireland after his schooling, Owen O’Sullivan fell in love. But his intended wife was not acceptable to his mother, who refused to consent to the marriage. Owen threatened that if she did not relent, she would never see him again.

With few prospects in Ireland, the 31-year-old Owen set off from Limerick to America. A well-educated Catholic, he arrived and settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts where he was indentured to a Newbury farmer to pay for his voyage.

But Owen had higher expectations. He wrote a letter to the Rev. Samuel Moody of York, Maine. He penned the letter in multiple languages, demonstrating his fluency in Greek and Latin, and expressing his hopes for a better position.

Moody, recognizing Owen’s talents, loaned him money to set himself up as a teacher in Berwick, Maine. For nearly 50 years, he taught in Berwick and Somersworth, N.H.

Margaret Brown

Margaret Brown came from less regal beginnings. Born in County Cork, both her parents died when she was just an infant. Margaret was tenacious. It’s unclear how she got on the same boat as Owen from Ireland to America. She may have pledged her labor to pay for passage, or she may have been a stowaway. Margaret was only nine years old when she crossed to America (Owen was 31).

About ten years later, Owen and Margaret would marry and they dropped the O from their name. Margaret, known as Margery, was a small woman, and one history describes her: “She was very remarkable for her beauty, her vanity, her talents and her energy; and not less remarkable for the violence of her temper.”

Margaret had none of Owen’s sophistication or education, but she had the drive to manage the family farm in Berwick and she imbued her children with ambition while Owen kept school.

The union of the mild, bookish school teacher and the fiery, beautiful stowaway would hit a major pothole in 1743. Overwhelmed by his wife’s demeanor, Owen left his family.

An Abject Apology to Owen O’Sullivan

To try to make up with him, Margaret published an advertisement in the Boston Post:

My dear and loving Husband, Your abrupt departure from me, and forsaking of your wife and tender babes, which I now humbly acknowledge and confess I was greatly, if not wholly the occasion of, by my too rash and unadvised speech and behavior towards you ; for which I now in this public manner humbly ask your forgiveness; and hereby promise upon your return to amend and reform, and by my future loving and obedient carriage towards you, endeavor to make an atonement for my past evil deeds, and manifest to you and the whole world that I am become a new woman, and will prove to you a loving, dutiful and tender wife.

Owen, for his part, never got over his first love in Ireland. Even at an advanced age, the memory of the girl he left behind in Ireland could bring him to tears. True to his word, he never communicated with his mother again.

By the time of their separation, Margaret and Owen O’Sullivan already had two children. They would reunite and eventually have four sons and a daughter. They lived together another 50 years until Owen died at age 104.

Two Governors

Two sons played prominent roles in the American Revolution. John Sullivan apparently took after his mother. A fierce soldier, short and stout, he became a general in the Continental Army and governor of New Hampshire.

James Sullivan, meanwhile, would rely on legal skills to win him fame. James suffered from epilepsy and a bad leg that was injured while working on the family farm as a boy. Nevertheless, he would become a key supporter of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. After the Revolution he was one of Massachusetts’ leading lawyers and was elected governor twice.

Thanks to: The Story of Berwick, The Life of James Sullivan and New Hampshire, An Epitome of Popular Government. This story last updated in 2022.

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The 1799 Tornado in Newbury – Panic and Renewal

It was a still September night just before the new century. Some residents of Newbury, Mass., were dancing at a late party. Some slept soundly while others felt restless because of an eerie calm. Then the 1799 tornado struck.

Tornado illustration from a children’s book, 1658.

Growing up in Newburyport, Mass., in the 1790s, Sarah Anna Emery’s mother, Sarah Smith Emery, recalled some of the most important events and colorful stories of her age, including the story of the 1799 tornado in Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian.

She was a young girl on her family’s farm in what was then Newbury when the storm tested the small community’s courage and spirit.

The 1799 Tornado

Her father, she wrote, had reached his goal. He had secured the whole of the ancestral acres through industry and economy,

His heart was in his work; he was a good agriculturalist, and had given great attention to fruit culture. He had planted and grafted some two or three hundred apple trees; there was quite a variety of pears and a thriving peach orchard on the place. Grapes grew spontaneously. The stone walls were covered with vines which bore luxuriantly large, luscious clusters both of the purple and white grapes. There was a difference in the quality of this wild fruit, some being equal if not superior to that produced in our gardens at the present time.

The farm that September presented a tempting array of fruit, she wrote. “The trees never looked finer than on the twelfth of the month. The day was warm and cloudy; at dusk it began to rain.” Sarah had a piece of linen whitening on the grass. Fearing it might mildew, she went to take it in, and was struck by the sultry stillness of the night.

She went to her bedroom and sat for a while at the open window, enjoying the quiet, steadily falling rain. Around midnight the unbarring of the front door awakened her. She hear her mother scream, “Something terrible is coming!” as she hastily opened and closed it.

A Strange Rush and Roar

“At the moment a strange rush and roar struck my ear, rapidly advancing. I could liken it to nothing but wagons rattling over frozen ground, but it more nearly resembled the noise of a railroad train. Lightning flashed, thunder pealed, and rain poured in torrents. Springing from bed, I seized my sister, a girl of ten, and with the half awakened child descended the stairs, and passing through the front entry, entered the west room.

The rush, roar, crash and din are wholly indescribable, accompanied by such dense darkness, that not a thing was discernible. Half way across the front room, we were stopped by a terrible bang and crack, at the same moment a missile was hurled through the broken window, which, striking Susan, fell in the fire-place opposite. The child shrieked fearfully; dragging her by the arm, I rushed into the kitchen screaming, “Sukey is dead, Sukey is dead!”

“I am ruined!”

The whole family had collected in the dark room. In the fright and confusion, no one could find a candlestick. Sarah mustered enough composure to bring a candle from the box in the cellar-way and light it from the hearth embers. As quickly as she had done it, the tornado had passed by the time she put the candle in the candlestick.

As I turned to place the light on the table, the moon burst from the clouds, its beams falling brightly on the white floor. Father opened the back door. With the exclamation, “I am ruined!” he sallied back into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Pale and dismayed, we peered forth. At first nothing was distinguishable but one general wreck and ruin, unroofed buildings, prostrate trees and fences, mixed with the debris of broken farming tools and household utensils.

My father was not a man to long succumb to misfortune. Proceeding to dress, he bade the boys get into their clothes.

They first thought of the cows. As they went outside to look for them, they met her Uncle Thurrell, his son and hired man — still too confused to know the extent of the damages. The roof had partly come off the barn and the corn barn tipped over. The tornado had lifted the large, heavy cider mill from its foundation and carried it several rods.

The cows, however, were safe, a frightened group in the field. “The horse had been at pasture half a mile away,” she wrote. “But as the men and boys went out she came whinnying towards them. Whether she ran or blew home we never knew, but she evidently had a long story to tell, if it could have been understood.”

Damage From the 1799 Tornado

The tornado took nearly half the roof of the house, and a third of the long barn. It blew a large shed from the end of the barn and flung it against the house. She then realized,

The concussion, as this came against the wall, was the cause of my fright as I crossed the room with my sister. From seventy to eighty trees laid on the ground.

A cart loaded with hay, left the previous evening in front of the barn, had entirely disappeared. “Not a vestige of it was ever seen excepting one wheel which lay near the back door,” wrote Sarah.

The tornado had carried two heavy ox-sleds piled in the yard a considerable distance. It took barrels and boxes from the garret with the roof and scattered about the yard. Those included a basket of feathers, set down unharmed by the front door. A brass kettle hanging by the back door was found some weeks after, battered and bent, in a swamp a quarter of a mile away. The twister had blown the potatoes from the hills. The shed that had come from the barn had shielded the wood-pile, and they found the milk-pails at the end of the house hanging upon the stakes.

More Damage

The Emerys discovered the tornado had uprooted about the same number of trees on Uncle Thurrell’s place as theirs. The Doles also sustained some injury to their orchard, but their buildings stood below the track of the hurricane. On Ilsley’s hill, the barn doors and the back door of the house were unhinged, and the cow-yard fence was thrown down.

Sarah then described how Jonathan Ilsley, going home from a party, to his surprise, found the cows in the corn field. As he drove them home, he saw the injury to the premises. Wrote Sarah,

Hastening into the house he awoke the family to learn what had happened, but not a soul could tell; their slumbers had been so sound, the storm had not awakened them.

Farther along, the tornado had entirely demolished Daniel Ordway’s barn. Daylight disclosed a straight line of prostrate trees, the path of the tornado as it had passed over Bradford woods, she wrote. After leaving Ordway’s, it had done little damage, but it had touched down on a wharf in Newburyport and overturned a small building.

It didn’t end there.

Havoc on the Hill

“The next morning we learned that a small house, about four miles above us in Bradford had been destroyed, one child killed and the rest of the family injured,” she wrote.

The furniture of this house was widely scattered. A bonnet belonging to the mistress of the place being found in the lower parish of West Newbury, some distance beyond Ordway’s barn. Before sunrise Mr. Stephen Noyes from the main road coming over Crane Neck Street, on his way to the grist mill at Byfield, to his consternation descried the havoc on the top of the hill. Scarcely crediting his sight, he drew rein at Mr. Pillsbury’s. The family had just risen; neither they nor that of then- opposite neighbor, Mr. Stephen Little, had been awakened by the tornado.

Good Neighbors

“In a body these neighbors hastened to our house. At that moment, David Goodrich, a young man residing a quarter of a mile below, rode furiously up the lane. The party that Mr. Ilsley had attended, had been at his house. Dancing had continued till past twelve; in the merriment no one had heeded the shower, and when the company dispersed the sky was clear, and the moon was shining. Going to the barn in the morning, and chancing to glance up the hill, to his utter amazement and fright, he saw the devastation.

Stopping neither for coat nor saddle, he mounted his horse and galloped to our aid. The neighborhood, and ere long, the whole town was aroused; many came from Byfield, and some from Newburyport. Bands were organized, and everybody went to work with a will to repair the damage. Amongst the first and most zealous, was Mr. Edward Hill. By seven o’clock he came in bearing his tools; with a perfectly rational air he quietly inspected the buildings, then set to work with an industry which continued until the premises were again in order.

Recovering from the 1799 Tornado

The men then rigged derricks and began the process of resetting the apple trees, she wrote.

The hurricane came Wednesday night; before sunset Saturday evening every tree had been replaced, and the buildings covered. Nothing remained undone, but the repairing of fences, and a general setting to rights of small things about the house and grounds. I believe that every one of those trees lived, some presenting rather a crooked and gnarled appearance, but year by year they bore a goodly burden, and several are still standing vigorous and fruitful.

This story about the 1799 tornado was updated in 2022.

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