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Salem witch trials

6 Fun Facts About Ezekiel Cheever, Puritan Schoolmaster

Ezekiel Cheever taught Latin, writing and arithmetic to the children of New England’s first Puritans for 70 years. He taught in New Haven, Boston, Charlestown and Ipswich, Mass., earning distinction as the ‘father of New England schoolmasters.’

When he arrived in the New World in 1637, New England was an isolated wilderness separated from the mother country by a vast ocean. For the Saints, or Puritans, to establish “Zion,” pious, educated men were needed, wrote Charles W. Allen. Ezekiel Cheever took his mission to heart, and taught many of the great men of their generation. His pupils included Judge Samuel Sewall, poet Michael Wigglesworth and Gov. Jonathan Belcher.

Cotton Mather

One pupil, Cotton Mather, delivered his funeral sermon, in which he called him “Master Socrates.”

“New England has never known a better,” Mather said.

Ezekiel Cheever

Born Jan. 25, 1614 in London, he came to Massachusetts toward the end of the great Puritan migration.

Soon after he arrived he went to New Haven Colony and taught for 12 years. He then moved to Ipswich, Mass., in 1650, where he taught for 11 years. Then on to Charlestown for nine years. He ended his career as the first master of the Boston Latin School, where he taught for 37 years.

Boston Latin School.

He married twice, first to Mary Culverwell for 11 years and then to Ellen Lathrop for 54. From 1639 to 1664, he had 12 children, but only nine survived to adulthood.

He taught in his home for most of 70 years. In the early years, he had a young and growing family. Historian Charles W. Allen concludes ‘the youngsters must have been confined to a small upper or adjacent chamber and kept entertained for the six to seven hours the house was used as a school.”

He never made much money, and more than once he had to beg local officials for back pay.

Ezekiel Cheever died Aug. 21, 1708 at the age of 93. Here are six fun facts about the old Puritan schoolmaster.

1. His Teaching Style—Not Progressive

He did not spare the rod. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Grandfather’s Chair, wrote,

It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils.

Ezekiel Cheever’s Latin textbook

He also wrote a textbook, probably the first in America. Called Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, American schools used it for at least a century. Hawthorne commented,

…the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys.”

2. He Hated Periwigs

The controversy over periwigs raged throughout New England during the 17^th century. The periwig was a highly styled wig, a fashion imported from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Samuel Sewall.

The early Puritans hated them, but they eventually won acceptance. Cotton Mather, for example, wore a long brown periwig.

Samuel Sewall, like Cheever, wore a black skullcap. He wrote a eulogy for Ezekiel Cheever that ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

3. He Helped the Puritan Project Succeed

During Cheever’s lifetime, colonial settlements grew into thriving towns along New England’s coast. Cheever gave hundreds of New England boys the tools to build those Puritan cities on hills. His best students entered Harvard and were ordained as ministers.

Map of New Haven in 1644, when Ezekiel Cheever lived there

Even those who didn’t do so well at Latin contributed to the success of the Puritan project.

Hawthorne described, as only Hawthorne could, what would happen to Ezekiel Cheever’s math students.

These boys are to be the merchants, shopkeepers, and mechanics of a future period. Hitherto they have traded only in marbles and apples. Hereafter some will send vessels to England for broadcloths and all sorts of manufactured wares, and to the West Indies for sugar, and rum, and coffee. Others will stand behind counters, and measure tape, and ribbon, and cambric by the yard. Others will upheave the blacksmith’s hammer, or drive the plane over the carpenter’s bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough sea-captains.

Sixty years after Ezekiel Cheever set foot in primitive Boston, the town contained 1,000 houses and 7,000 people dedicated to building schools and churches, wrote Henry Crocker in his A History of New England.

Boston Harbor around 1720

Toward the end of his career, Cheever earned 60 pounds a year at the Latin School, a handsome salary (when the town managed to pay it). He taught in a new schoolhouse, rather than his own house, and he even had an assistant – his grandson, Ezekiel Lewes.

4. He Was Extremely Pious

His pupil Cotton Mather described his ‘untiring abjuration of the Devil.’

Ezekiel Cheever believed the Puritans could grow spiritually and achieve perfection on earth in their new home. Mather struggled with that concept. He didn’t understand how saints could live among sinners on earth. When he brought the question to Cheever, the old schoolmaster replied,

What! The Spouse of CHRIST have the Foul Disease! Never tell me That!

5. His Beard Revealed His Mood

No images of Ezekiel Cheever exist, but an acquaintance, Samuel Maxwell, offered a description:

“He wore a long white beard terminating in a point; that when he stroked his beard to the point, it was a sign for the boys to stand clear.”

6. John Cheever Claimed Him as an Ancestor (But He Wasn’t)

The novelist John Cheever boasted of Ezekiel Cheever as his ancestor, but Ezekiel was just a cousin of his ancestor, Daniel Cheever. Nevertheless, John Cheever had a bit of obsession with Ezekiel. He wrote that he had nothing in his veins but ‘the blood of shipmasters and schoolteachers.’

John Cheever

Cheever talked about Ezekiel a lot in interviews, and named two main fictional characters after him: Ezekiel Farragut in Falconer and Ezekiel Cheever in his Wapshot books. He also named his Labrador retriever Ezekiel, and urged his son Ben (unsuccessfully) to give his son the name.

With thanks to Journey of Promise: West From Sempringham by Charles W. Allen.

Images: Boston Latin School plaque by By User:Swampyank / Swampyank at en.wikipedia – User:Swampyank, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17345900.

This story was updated in 2022.

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A Sad Condition: Wilmot Redd and the Salem Witch Trials

In 1692, Wilmot Redd died on the gallows because her neighbors didn’t like her.

Redd (or Reed/Read, by some accounts) was the only victim of the Salem witch trials who lived in Marblehead, Mass., Salem’s neighbor to the south. Townspeople singled her out for persecution because she had made a bad impression on many of them.

Wilmot Redd

Redd, born sometime in the early seventeenth century, lived in a modest house near the foot of Old Burial Hill in Marblehead with her husband, fisherman Samuel Redd. She lived next to a small pond that now bears her name (Redd’s Pond). Redd developed a reputation for being ornery and unlikeable.

Redd’s Pond

She sometimes sold butter to supplement her husband’s small income. Either her butter was of poor quality or she was wrongfully blamed for it turning sour after she sold it. Regardless, she fell out with some of her neighbors over the issue.

She was also known to be irritable and curt. She became the subject of superstitious tales that circulated around Marblehead and Salem. In some of them, people accused her of using curses to kill babies and curdle her neighbors’ milk. One rhyme survives that hints at her reputation:

Old Mammy Redd
Of Marblehead
Sweet milk could turn
To mold in churn.

Witchcraft Charges

Redd was first accused of witchcraft in 1687, but nothing came of that accusation.

A few years later, however, in 1692, witch hysteria swept the region. Redd’s reputation inspired some of the young Salem girls who instigated the Salem witch trials to name her as one of their tormenters.

Like other Salem witch trial victims (Bridget Bishop and Ann Pudeator, for example), Redd’s unpopularity made her an easy target. It probably did not help that Redd’s daughter married another accused witch, the Rev. George Burroughs. He was eventually hanged.

A local constable arrested Wilmot Redd on May 28, 1692. Two judges signed her arrest warrant: John Hathorne, the patrilineal ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jonathan Corwin. Three days after her arrest, authorities took Redd to Deacon Nathan Ingersoll’s house and tavern in Salem Village. Ingersoll had accused at least seven witchcraft defendants.

As soon as Redd arrived, four girls who had accused her of witchcraft (Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam and Mary Walcott) fell into fits. According to official records of this “examination,” Redd was asked what she thought was wrong with the girls. She responded, “I cannot tell.” Asked again to give her opinion, she said, “My opinion is they are in a sad condition.” When Redd touched the girls, their fits miraculously stopped.

The Trial of Wilmot Redd

Three Marbleheaders — Sarah Doddy, Ambrose Gale and Charity Pitman — testified against Redd at her trial four months later. Pitman claimed Redd had cursed a neighbor with “distemper of the dry bellyache” (constipation). The neighbor, a Mrs. Simse/Syms, had accused a girl staying with Redd (possibly a servant) of stealing some of Simse’s linen. Redd had supposedly met her at her door with a litany of curses.

The Salem girls present at Redd’s examination in Salem also formally accused her of choking and pinching them and causing other bodily harm. Mary Walcott testified that “…if [Redd] did but look upon me she would strike me down or almost choke me.” The girls gave nearly identical testimony, all painting Redd as their assailant.

The court indicted Wilmot Redd for “detestable arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries…practiced & exercised at the Towne of Salem.”

The Salem witch trials

Guilty

Redd had no defense counsel at her trial. The court found her guilty on Sept. 17, 1692, and sentenced her to death by hanging.

On Sept. 22, 1692, Redd belonged to the last group of victims executed during the Salem witchcraft trials. Authorities brought her and seven others to Gallows Hill. The cart carrying the condemned got stuck as it made its way up to the execution site. Some of the victims’ accusers, who had assembled to watch them die, then cried out the devil was trying to hold back the cart and save the witches.

With their last words, the victims proclaimed their innocence, just as they had done during their trials.

Redd was buried in an unmarked grave. Its location remains unknown. Today, markers memorialize Redd at Old Burial Hill in Marblehead and at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial. Then in 2016, archaeologists confirmed her execution site at Proctor’s Ledge below Gallows Hill in Salem. Markers now memorialize the victims there as well.

Wilmot Redd memorial

In the centuries following the witch trials, political figures pardoned the victims as a gesture of remorse for their wrongful deaths. On Halloween in 2001, Massachusetts Acting Gov. Jane Swift signed a bill that pardoned five witch trial victims, including Wilmot Redd.

This story last updated in 2023. The author of this story, Rebecca Del Giudice, is a writer and editor who lives in Massachusetts.

Sources

Brooks, Rebecca Beatris. “The Execution of Wilmot Redd.” History of Massachusetts Blog.
https://historyofmassachusetts.org/wilmot-redd-salem/ Last accessed September 21, 2019.

Bultrusis, Sam. Wicked Salem: Exploring Lingering Lore and Legends. Guildford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot, 2019.

Gamage, Virginia Clegg and Lord, Priscilla Sawyer. The Spirit of ’76 Lives Here: Marblehead. Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company, 1972. P. 52.

Ray, Benjamin. Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. University of Virginia. SWP 114.1-9 http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n114.html Last accessed September 25, 2019.

Roads, Samuel Jr. The History and Traditions of Marblehead. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880.

Images: Wilmot Redd Memorial: Keitei at the English Language Wikipedia; Redd’s Pond: By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51908871.

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New England Witchcraft Trials: It Wasn’t Just Salem

Plenty of people in early New England were persecuted for witchcraft, and not just in Salem, Mass.

Witches had troubled the European colonists from the get-go. In 1635, Plymouth Colony made it a crime to “form a solemn compact with the devil by way of witchcraft.” As late as the 19^th century, women were persecuted for cursing butter churns, making animals sick and causing people to die.

“Examination of a witch” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

Salem’s witchcraft hysteria was just the most spectacular (and certainly the most memorable) of the witch trials. Two hundred people faced charges, and 20 died at the executioner’s hand. But Hartford had its own mini-witch hysteria, as did many towns scattered throughout New England.

Connecticut Witchcraft Prosecutions

In Connecticut, witch hysteria took hold 45 years before Salem began its mass executions. The colony formally tried 43 people for witchcraft (Massachusetts tried 50.) Most were acquitted or escaped, but nine men and two women were executed as witches between 1647 and 1663. The first, a woman from Windsor named Alse Young, died, as the others would, on the basis of flimsy evidence. She went to the gallows on the site of the Old State House.

The witch hysteria peaked during the “Hartford Witch Panic.” It started in 1662 when a young Hartford girl died after claiming a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres, tormented her. In 1662, Goodwife Ayres and her husband sensibly skipped town.

More accusations followed for the next 50 years in the Connecticut River towns of Hartford, Windsor, Farmington and Wethersfield. Most, however, resulted in acquittals as Connecticut judges came to their senses.

By 1715, the law making witchcraft a capital offense was off the books, and the witchcraft hysteria died down. (Click here for more about the Hartford Witch Panic.)

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Disturbing Witches

Your chances of getting hauled into court for witchcraft got better if your neighbors didn’t like you. Often the people accused of dealing with the devil were shrewish or grouchy or arrogant. Sometimes they lived on a town’s margins, and took the blame for its misfortunes.

Eunice Cole of Hampton, N.H., was difficult, unlikeable and didn’t have much money. From 1656 to 1680 she went to court three times to face charges. She was in and out of prison for slanderous speech and familiarity with the devil. She did perform one near-magic feat: dying peacefully in her own bed at the age of 90. (Read more about Eunice Cole here.)

Just because a jury found you not guilty of witchcraft didn’t mean your persecution ended. A Boston jury exonerated Mary Webster of Hadley, Mass., but that didn’t stop her neighbors from disturbing her.

The Puritans believed ‘disturbing’ witches – beating or restraining them – prevented them from casting spells. Mary Webster’s neighbors dragged her from the house, hanged her from a tree until she nearly died, than buried her in the snow and left her. She survived, and spent the rest of her life known as ‘Half-Hanged Mary.’

Mary Webster was lucky compared to Susannah Martin of Amesbury, Mass. A neighbor first accused her of witchcraft in 1669. Susannah’s husband sued the neighbor for slander, and ultimately she was cleared of the charges. But the taint of the accusation lingered, and she was charged again during the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692. She died on the gallows at the age of 70 with three other accused witches. (Read about Susannah Martin here.)

Court of Oyer and Terminer

In Salem and nearby towns, officials began rounding up suspected witches even before Gov. William Phips ordered the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened.

William Phips

As the storm gathered, Philip English may have been a target because of his wealth. Essex County’s High Sheriff George Corwin had a nasty habit of seizing the property of accused witches and dividing the spoils with his deputies.

Corwin arrested Philip English’s wife Mary on April 18, 1692. Five weeks later, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was formed to investigate the disturbances in Salem. (Read more about it here.) The court quickly turned into a killing machine.

Philip English followed his wife to jail when a neighbor accused him of witchcraft. She said he pinched her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t touch his ‘Devil’s book.’ Philip and Mary English managed to flee to New York until the bloodshed ended.

Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. Nineteen died by hanging, one man was crushed to death and five people died in jail.

The Salem bloodlust

But then the Puritan leaders came to their senses and realized the witchcraft trials were a shocking case of government run amok — and an embarrassment. After the 20 alleged witches were executed in Salem, Mass., no one was indicted, convicted or executed for witchcraft in New England. One of the witch trial judges, Samuel Sewall, even apologized for his role in the witch hysteria. (Read about Judge Sewall here.)

Samuel Sewall.

Witchcraft After the Trials

That didn’t mean people stopped believing in witches. Rhoda Dustin was known as the Witch of Weare, N.H., but lived in an era when witchcraft prosecutions had died down. She was born in 1736, and with her husband ran an inn. The townspeople believed she could fly, inflict illness on people and curse butter churns so they wouldn’t make butter. Though they gossiped about her and tried to counteract her curses, she was never tried and died peacefully in Vermont in 1824.

Hannah Cranna, like Susannah Martin and Eunice Cole, was a shrew. But she was born nearly a century after the witch trials ended, in 1783. Hannah married Capt. Joseph Hovey, probably much older than she, and they lived in Monroe, Conn.

Hannah Cranna’s headstone.

No whisperings of witchcraft followed her until her husband died suspiciously. He went out for a walk one night and fell over a cliff in an area he knew well. People thought she’d cast a spell on him.

From then on, Hannah lived in poverty, and used her reputation for witchcraft to extort food and firewood from her neighbors. She never went to trial, though neighbors talked about her.

When she died, her neighbors ignored her wishes and buried her after sundown. When they returned to her house, it had gone up in flames, sealing the legend of Hannah Cranna, witch. (Read more about Hannah Cranna here.)

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great Puritan Periwig Controversy

Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall were close and lifelong friends. They moved in the same Boston social circles, shared companions, dined together and discussed politics. But on one important matter they parted company: the periwig.

Cotton Mather

Mather, the Puritan minister, wore a long, brown, curled periwig that emphasized his large nose. Sewall, the judge and printer, wore a black skullcap to hide his bald pate. Mather defended the periwig in a sermon, while Sewall denounced it whenever he got the chance.

The two Puritans weren’t alone. Across the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 17^th century, the controversy raged over the periwig, a new fashion from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Supporters called it a harmless fashion and accused the anti-periwig faction of hypocrisy.

The Periwig

During the English Civil Wars, the followers of the Stuart kings wore periwigs. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan supporters did not. When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his courtiers enthusiastically adopted the periwig.

Curly, shoulder-length hair had been fashionable among European men since the 1620s. The periwig mimicked that fashion with human hair, animal hair or even flax.

The first generation of Puritans who came to New England abhorred fashionable excess. In 1634, the Plymouth General Court banned such showy fashions as slashed sleeves, silver and gold lace, girdles and hatbands.

But the second generation of Puritans, to which Mather (born in 1663) belonged, began to embrace such degeneracy. Sewall, born a decade before Mather, couldn’t stand the sight of the periwig.

Samuel Sewall Rails

Sewall peppered his diary with disapproving observations of people who wore the periwig. In a eulogy for a schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, he ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

When Sewall learned Josiah Willard, the son of his minister, had taken to wearing a periwig, he marched over to the young man’s house and lectured him. Willard complained his hair was too straight, but he agreed to leave off his wig when his hair grew out. The gesture didn’t appease Sewall. He visited the sins of the son on the father and attended another church.

Sewall wasn’t alone. Massachusetts magistrates in 1649 had protested that long hair ‘after the manner of ruffians and barbarous Indians, hath begun to invade New England contrary to the rule of God’s word.’

In 1654, Thomas Hall wrote an essay called The Loathsomeness of Long Hair. He denounced elaborate hairstyles as ‘against the modest, civil, and commendable custom of our nation, til lately that we began to follow the French and Spaniards, who yet are known Papists and Idolaters.’

Another reason to detest the periwig: As a sign of wealth and status, it might allow poorer people to impersonate the gentry. “It removes a means of distinguishing one man from another,” wrote Nicholas Noyes, a minister who, like Sewall, presided over the Salem witch trials.

Such a toppling of the social hierarchy was profoundly disturbing to some Puritans.

Samuel Sewall, getting a little thin on top

The Pro-Periwig Faction

The Rev. Samuel Stoddard preached in favor of the periwig, arguing ‘God allowed man “by art to supply the defects of nature.”

Others said it kept their heads warm.

Cotton Mather himself delivered a sermon defending the wig. He defined hypocrisy as ‘to be zealous against an innocent fashion’ and yet to ignore ‘great immoralities.’

“I expected not to hear a vindication of periwigs in Boston Pulpit by Mr. Mather,” wrote Sewall.

Losing Battle

In 1679, however, the Massachusetts General Court passed a series of laws intended to turn the people back to the Lord ‘from whom we have departed with a great Backsliding.’

The lawmakers directed local grand juries to present men wearing long hair or periwigs to the court. They authorized the local magistrates to proceed against such delinquents either by ‘Admonition, Fine, or Correction, according to their good discretion.”

Times were changing, though, and as the colonies grew more prosperous and more cosmopolitan, the periwig didn’t go away.

Chief Ornament

And Samuel Sewall found himself on the defensive. In October 1720, one of Sewall’s colleagues on the Executive Council noted his balding head. He suggested Sewall get a wig. Sewall replied that his bald head was his ‘chief ornament.’

After Sewall’s first wife died, he tried, often without success, to woo a new one. One of his targets, Catherine Winthrop, told him he needed a wig. He declined the wig and she declined him.

The wearing of the periwig persisted until the last decades of the 18^th century. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of John Adams shows him in a periwig. But by the time his son became president in 1825, the periwig had finally disappeared.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Cemeteries in New England

As Halloween approaches, we thought it appropriate to look at some of the most historic cemeteries in New England.

Cemeteries are almost by definition historic, because they reflect the history of the deceased within their grounds.

We tried to pick a cross-section of graveyards, choosing some well-known to New Englanders and others that remain obscure. We chose six, one in each New England state.

Grove Street Cemetery

The Grove Street Cemetery has one of the most imposing gateways of all New England’s historic cemeteries.

The Yale University campus surrounds the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, and many Elis found their last home there. Such notables as Noah Webster, Eli Whitney, Walter Camp and Roger Sherman await their judgment under the turf of the historic cemetery.

Grove Street Cemetery started as the first nonprofit, private cemetery in the world in 1796. Previously, New Haven buried its dead on the New Haven Green. But the Green got too crowded during the yellow fever epidemic of 1794-95. So prominent New Haven families established the burial ground on farmland on the town’s border, just north of Grove Street. The first burial, of Martha Townsend, took place on Nov. 9, 1797.

It was an immediate hit, if that can be said of a cemetery.

The two men who designed the remarkable Egyptian Revival gateway — sculptor Hezekiah Augur and architect Henry Austin — are buried in the Grove Street Cemetery. The inscription on the stone gate reads, “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” A Yale president supposedly said, “They certainly will be, if Yale needs the property.”

Today, the 18-acre Grove Street Cemetery at provides a dignified resting place for many of New Haven’s elite as well as the indigent.

227 Grove St., New Haven, Conn.

Mount Hope Cemetery

Mount Hope in Bangor (above) and Mount Auburn in Massachusetts are two historic cemeteries that always doubled as tranquil parks.

Though Mount Auburn Cemetery in Greater Boston was the first cemetery designed as a park, Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor came a close second. Architect Charles Bryant designed it three years after Mount Auburn opened in 1831. The Bangor Horticultural Society formed to build the cemetery as a place where the dead and the living could contemplate nature peacefully.

Nearly 30,000 people re buried on its 264 acres, including Abe Lincoln’s Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and Public Enemy No. 1, Al Brady, shot to death on a Bangor street.

Two scenes from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary were filmed at Mount Hope. For one shot, the crew had to wait until 2 am to get the perfect moonlight.

The Bangor Historical Society offers a 90-minute tour of the cemetery on evenings before Halloween. They call it “The Darker Side of Mount Hope Cemetery: A visit to the graves of Bangorians who left this world before their time or under mysterious circumstances.” Click here for more information.

1048 State St., Bangor, Maine

Myles Standish Burying Ground

The gravesite of Myles Standish makes this burying ground one of Massachusetts’ most historic cemeteries.

Massachusetts makes it hard to choose among its historic cemeteries. The commonwealth has the old Granary Burying Ground and Mount Auburn, for starters. We looked for a cemetery for the victims of the Salem witch trials, but part of their punishment was to be buried in unmarked, unsanctified graves.

In the end, we couldn’t resist including the Myles Standish Burial Ground in Duxbury, Mass. Several Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower rest in the cemetery with the captain. John Alden, Priscilla Alden and George Soule repose in what is said to be the oldest maintained cemetery in the United States.

Originally, the cemetery belonged to Duxbury’s first meeting house. When a new meeting house replaced the old, three-quarters of a mile down the road, the Myles Standish Burial Ground fell into disuse. But in 1887, the Duxbury Rural Society went about reclaiming the burying ground and has maintained it as a historic site ever since.

Four years after the Duxbury Rural Society took charge, a small team exhumed the body of an elderly male. They identified him as Myles Standish, along with his daughter Lora, his daughter-in-law and one of his sons who died young. Myles Standish was reburied in a pine box and a memorial erected above his grave.

However, Myles Standish’s descendants didn’t like that. So in 1931 they had their ancestor re-exhumed and re-buried in a copper box, then placed in a cement vault beneath the marker. The previous year, the descendants of John and Priscilla Alden placed slate markers near the spot believed to be their final resting place.

Chestnut Street, Duxbury, Mass.

North Cemetery

Old North, one of the most overlooked historic cemeteries in New England.

Many residents of the historic city of Portsmouth, N.H., don’t even know about the famous people buried in tiny old North Cemetery.

The 1.5 acres of North Cemetery sitting on the banks of North Mill Pond get far less attention than some of the other historic cemeteries in New England. It has, however, a number of notable residents, including William Whipple, signer of the Declaration of Independence and Gov. John Langdon, signer of the U.S. Constitution.

Also buried in old North: Prince Whipple, who, according to legend, accompanied George Washington in his crossing of the Delaware. The cemetery also includes Portsmouth’s first known Catholic and Jewish residents, as well as Thomas L. Thompson. Thompson commanded the Raleigh, the first U.S. navy warship built at what is now the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (and depicted on the seal of the State of New Hampshire). Hall Jackson, a local doctor who attended the wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, also rests in peace at North Cemetery.

Maplewood Avenue, Portsmouth, N.H.

Newman Cemetery

This East Providence graveyard, one of Rhode Island’s most historic cemeteries.

There are probably more 17th-century grave markers in Newman Cemetery than in any other of Rhode Island’s historic cemeteries.

Newman Cemetery provides an encyclopedic history of style and fashion in funerary art. Part of Newman Congregational Church, it includes a remarkable number of 17th century gravestones.

The crude oldest stones often show only the deceased’s initials and year of death. Some, though, have decorative carvings.

The slate 18th-century markers include upright headstones with death heads and cherub heads. There are also portrait busts of the deceased and flat slabs decorated with coats-of-arms. Later markers include marble obelisks and slate stones with willow-and-urn motifs.

The 10.5-acre cemetery belongs to the Newman Congregational Church.

Corner of Newman St. and Pawtucket St. across from the Newman Congregational Church, 100 Newman Ave., Rumford, R.I.

Hope Cemetery

A grave marker modeled on Michelangelo’s Pieta in Hope Cemetery, one of Vermont’s most historic cemeteries.

Most of the people buried in Hope Cemetery carved their own memorials and tombstones. They were stonecutters who worked in the granite quarries of Barre, Vt., which calls itself the granite capital of the world.

During the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, skilled stonecutters flocked to Barre from Europe. Many brought their radical political views with them, dividing into socialists and anarchists.

The outdoor gallery of granite artistry attracts tourists with its beautifully carved and sometimes unusual granite memorials. They include a soldier smoking a cigarette, a race car, a bored angel, a soccer ball and an 18-wheel truck.

One master stonecutter, Louis Brusa, discovered he had silicosis and commissioned a memorial of himself dying in the arms of a woman. It caused a local scandal because the woman looked like his mistress rather than his wife.

The 65-acre cemetery has more than 10,000 tombstones and memorials, all made from Barre Grey granite.

6 North Main St., Barre, Vt.

Images of historic cemeteries: Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor, By Svetlana Miljkovic – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8042714. Myles Standish grave, By Swampyank me – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9030067. Old North Cemetery, By John Phelan – Own work, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15202464.; Mount Hope Cemetery By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7614869. Newman Cemetery, By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21551196. Newman Congregational Church, By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21551148.

This story last updated in 2023.

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Six Places Where A Gallows Once Stood

So many people died on the gallows in New England that you may well have walked over a spot where someone met his or her maker.

With hanging as the primary form of execution in the United States until the 1890s, more than 400 people in New England have been hanged by the neck until they were dead.

Hangings used to serve as public spectacles back when film and video weren’t around to provide violent entertainment.

The Gallows

Typically, crowds would gather to watch as the prisoner was taken to the gallows, usually in a horse-drawn wagon. The hangman bound the prisoner’s hands and feet, tied a blindfold around the head and placed a noose around the neck. Then a trap door would open, the prisoner would fall through and, theoretically at least, the weight of the prisoner’s body would snap his or her neck.

Often that didn’t happen, and the prisoner died a slow gruesome death. Sometimes the prisoner had strong neck muscles, sometimes the prisoner didn’t weigh enough, sometimes the rope was too short and sometimes the hangman put the noose in the wrong position. In that case, the prisoner would die of slow strangulation, eyes popping, tongue protruding, limbs thrashing violently and bowels loosening.

Massachusetts has hanged 198 people, Maine 21, Connecticut 108, New Hampshire 24, Rhode Island about 50 and Vermont 21.

Here are six places where people were hanged, one in each state. If you know of an interesting place where someone was hanged, please share it in the comments section.

New London, Conn.

A 12-year-old girl was once hanged on the gallows here in New London.

Connecticut authorities hanged Hannah Occuish in New London on Dec. 20, 1786, the last female executed in the state. She was only 12 years old.

Hannah had murdered six-year-old Eunice Bolles after Eunice accused her of stealing strawberries she’d picked in New London. The colonial court didn’t recognize extenuating circumstances. Hannah’s mother was a Pequot Indian, her father African-American. Both parents died, and she may have suffered a mental disability. Shuttled among foster homes as a child, she had been forced to work as an indentured servant by the age of 12.

On July 21, 1786, Eunice was walking to school when Hannah lured her into the woods with the promise of a piece of calico. Hannah then beat and strangled her to death, and tried to cover her body with large stones.

A passerby soon discovered Eunice’s body, and Hannah confessed to the crime. Officials charged her with murder and, after a swift trial, she was convicted and sentenced to hang.

She cried during much of the day of her hanging, which took place on a gallows built behind the old meeting house, near the corner of what is now Granite Street.

The Rev. Henry Channing from Yale College gave a long sermon before the hanging, at Hannah’s request. It was called “God Admonishing His People of Their Duty, As Parents and Masters.”

“She seemed greatly afraid when at the gallows, and said but little to anyone,” according to The Courant on Dec. 25, 1786. “She thanked the Sheriff for his kindness, and launched into the eternal world.”

Fort George, Castine, Maine

Where Ebenezer Ball died on the gallows at f Fort George in Castine, Maine

Maine has executed 21 people by hanging. Hanging, in fact, has been the only way Maine executed anyone.

In the summer of 1811, a Deer Isle counterfeiter named Ebenezer Ball met his maker before a crowd of people in the center of Fort George in Castine, Maine. Ball had shot to death a sheriff’s deputy, John Tileston Downes, who tried to arrest him.

After a jury found Ball guilty, he appealed the case, claiming he didn’t intend to shoot the sheriff’s deputy.

Nonetheless, Ebenezer Ball was executed on Oct. 31, 1811. A local minister, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, wrote two ballads on the hanging.

Officials erected the gallows in the center of Fort George. A large crowd followed the criminal as he was escorted from the jail to the gallows. Parson Fisher sold copies of his ballad to the crowd:

But oh! The sight — the shocking sight
This day our eyes did see,
A sinful and a harden’d wretch–
Launch’d in eternity.

Proctor’s Ledge, Salem, Mass.

Memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials at Proctor’s Ledge, site of the gallows where they were hanged.

You might think the 19 people hanged for witchcraft in the Salem witch hysteria of 1692-3 met their maker on Gallows Hill. But you’d be only partly right. They were hanged on Proctor’s Ledge, a city-owned wooded spot on Gallows Hill.

Sidney Perley identified the spot as the site of the hangings around the turn of the 20^th century. The scholars merely confirmed his research.

In 2016, a group of seven scholars who called themselves the Gallows Hill Project identified Proctor’s Ledge as the site of the hanging after five years of research. They used court records, maps, ground-penetrating radar and aerial photos. The city marked the spot with a memorial.

South Cemetery, Portsmouth, N.H.

Entrance to South Cemetery, where Ruth Blay once died on the gallows.

Ruth Blay died a slow painful death before a thousand spectators in Portsmouth, N.H. On Dec. 30, 1768, a horsecart took her to the highest point on South Street, now South Cemetery, and an executioner placed a noose around her neck.

She stood on the wagon under a newly built gallows, and the horse pulled the cart from under her feet. It probably took her several minutes to die of slow strangulation.

Ruth Blay was hanged because she concealed her illegitimate child. A 31-year-old schoolteacher, she ultimately admitted to wrapping her stillborn baby in a quilt and hiding it under the floorboards of a barn in South Hampton, N.H. Children playing in the barn discovered the baby’s body three days later.

Ruth received three reprieves before she finally lost her life on the gallows. She was the last of three New Hampshire women hanged for concealment. After the American Revolution, New Hampshire abolished the death penalty for concealment.

Gravelly Point, Newport, R.I.

26 pirates where once hanged on 26 gallows here.

Gravelly Point in Newport, R.I. is the place where Rhode Island hanged 26 pirates in a violent spectacle on July 19, 1723.

A British warship had captured 35 pirates under the command of the notoriously cruel Edward Low. The British took most of them to Newport, R.I., where 26 of them were sentenced to death by hanging.

Rhode Island authorities attached their captured pirate flag onto the gallows at Gravelly Point. A large crowd watched – and celebrated.

“Never was there a more doleful sight in all this land than while they were standing on the stage, waiting for the stopping of their breath and the flying of their souls into the eternal world,” wrote one witness. “And oh! How awful the noise of their dying moans!”

Catamount Tavern, Old Bennington, Vt.

Monument on the site of the Catamount Tavern.

On June 11, 1778, the Republic of Vermont hanged David Redding, but didn’t bury his bones properly for another 198 years.

During the American Revolution, David Redding made the mistake of choosing the Loyalist side. He joined the Queens Loyal Rangers, and while out of uniform tried to steal muskets stored in a barn. Locals caught him and put him in a temporary cell in the Catamount Tavern barn. Redding escaped, but got caught in Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

A jury found him guilty of treason.

He almost died on a temporary gallows in front of the Catamount Tavern, but won a week-long reprieve. Only six jurors had heard his case; under English law, there should have been 12.

The crowd gathered around the gallows was disappointed by Redding’s reprieve. A clamor arose and the crowd threatened violence.

But then Ethan Allen arrived, mounted a stump and spoke. “You shall see somebody hung at all events, for if Redding is not then hung, I will be hung myself.” The crowd, satisfied with Allen’s words if not his grammar, then dispersed.

A jury of 12 quickly re-convicted Redding, and he was hanged on June 11, 1778. A local doctor took possession of his body, which ended up as a teaching tool until the doctor died. The bones passed to his son, who stored them in his attic. Then the Vermont Historical Society got wind of the bones in the attic and took them, only to put them in a drawer. Finally in 1976, the people of Vermont gave David Redding a proper burial in the cemetery of Bennington’s Old First Church.

A statue of a catamount marks the site of the Catamount Tavern, which burned in 1871.

End Notes

Images: Fort George By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34096704; Gravelly Point, By The original uploader was Swampyank at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Kurpfalzbilder.de using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5872173; Catamount Tavern Monument by Doug Kerr via flickr. This story was updated in 2021.

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