Murdered by witchcraft

The history of colonial New England and witchcraft is certainly not limited to the infamous Salem Witch Trials. It was an area of concern strong enough to be codified in a number of laws, based in large part in scripture. While those accused of engaging in the dark arts and consorting with the Devil could be put to death, witchcraft was blamed for the death of my 10th great-grandmother.

Roughly 30 years before the hysteria of Salem was the case of an unscrupulous couple in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Local legend apparently claimed a cave, known as Mill Rock, was inhabited by witches. "Coach drivers feared passing the cave at night, because witches might throw burning wood on the carriage roofs," according to a 2012 haunting article in The Shore Line Times. "When the drivers saw the Cedar Sentinel [one large tree in a clearing], they knew they were near the witches' cave and whipped their horses to speed on by while there was still daylight. Since the witches vanished during the day and also disappeared during the summer, none were ever caught."

Mill Rock in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Though apparently unrelated to Mill Rock, there were a couple of supposed witches caught in Saybrook. Nicholas and Margaret Jennings had come to Saybrook after having previously lived in Hartford and New Haven. Nicholas fought in the Pequot War, serving under Captain John Mason, who led a horrific raid on a Pequot fort near the Mystic River, a gruesome event that became known as the Mystic Massacre. According to Damned Connecticut, it was after the war that Nicholas first met Margaret, an indentured servant.

"The young couple were smitten and soon ran off together, but didn't get too far before being apprehended," Damned Connecticut affirms. "On March 3, 1643, Nicholas was found guilty of 'fornication' and publicly whipped; a month later Margaret stood trial and was found guilty of the same crime in addition to theft. She was flogged, and then ordered by the court to marry Nicholas."

Damned Connecticut continues to note "a modest trail of troubles" followed the newlyweds, including Nicholas being prosecuted for striking a neighbor's cow in 1647. Witchcraft Trials of Connecticut informs Nicholas was punished in some form for this act of violence against the cow, which belonged to a man named Ralph Keeler. Ultimately, they would settle in Saybrook and produce three children together.

In 1659, things took a much darker turn for the star-crossed couple. That summer, according to The Shore Line Times, Nicholas had been suspected of witchcraft, resulting in the General Court sending a Mr. Willis to the town to aid the mayor in investigating Jennings.

In 1661, a neighbor of the Jennings family was embroiled in a heated land dispute. The neighbor, George Wood, ultimately accused Margaret of being possessed by Satan. Considering their past and generally unsavory social standing, such a charge would be a damning one for Mrs. Jennings. The presumption of innocence was not exactly afforded to many alleged witches. Damned Connecticut adds that Wood also accused Martha Jennings, one of the three Jennings children, of being pregnant out of wedlock — though, according to The Shore Line Times, Martha was proven not to be pregnant whatsoever.

Additionally, the Jennings witchcraft apparently was to blame for multiple deaths in the community. One of those whose passing was attributed to their witchcraft was Marie Marvin, the wife of Reinold Marvin. I've not yet uncovered Marie's age at the time of her death in 1661, but she was presumably around 60-years-old at the time of her death as Reinold had been born in 1594. The mother of eight children, including my 9th great-grandfather Lt. Reinold Marvin, was one of two individuals specifically mentioned in an indictment against Nicholas Jennings.

According to Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England, by David D. Hall, the couple was brought to court as follows:

Nicholas Jennings thou art here indicted by the name of Nicholas Jennings of Saybrook for not having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and by his help hast done works above the course of nature to the loss of the lives of several people and in particular the wife of Reinold Marvin with the child of Baalshassar de Wolfe with other sorceries for which according to the law of God and the established laws of this Commonwealth thou deservest to die.

There was a not guilty plea entered and the case was ultimately adjudicated in the fall of 1661, according to Damned Connecticut, after a jury of 10 men from neighboring colonies came back with what was essentially a hung jury.

"The major part of the jury found Nicholas guilty, but the rest only strongly suspected him, and as to Margaret, some found her guilty, and the others suspected her to be guilty," reads The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697). The Shore Line Times notes that while the jury did not convict Nicholas and Margaret, they were deemed unfit as parents and their three children were taken from them to be apprenticed to others.

Left for dead at Gaines' Mills

Your country has become embroiled in a civil war with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Your enlist, are mustered in as a private and your regiment goes on to fight in some pretty well known and important battles — Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville among them. A little more than one year into what was supposed to be a two-year hitch, you're part of what is, at that point, the second bloodiest battle in American history. There are roughly 15,500 casualties in the battle, including nearly 2,400 dead, and your brothers in arms leave you on the battlefield believing you're among the lives lost. You survive the war, you marry, your wife is pregnant with your first child, but before your little girl is born you're killed in a railroad accident at age 29.

This is the story of Grant S. Marvin, my 1st cousin 5x removed.

Grant is the sixth of eight children born to my 5th great-uncle Ransom Marvin and his wife Sophronia Hutchinson. He was born February 2, 1840 in New York, presumably in or near Camden, just north of Oneida Lake and some 30 miles southeast of Lake Ontario. Grant was raised in Camden and was 21-years-old when, in May 1861, he went to the nearby town of Rome and enlisted in Company G of the 14th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry. About one year later, in May 1862, the regiment was assigned to the famed Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by General George B. McClellan. The regiment took part in a series of fights known as Seven Days Battles in the area of Hanover County, Virginia.

On June 26, 1862, the regiment took part in the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, also known as Mechanicsville, on June 26, 1862. Slightly outnumbered, Fitz John Porter led Union troops against Confederate General Robert E. Lee and secured a Union victory, though one some concede to be a strategic victory for the South. Grant survived this first big fight, but there would be no rest for the weary.

On June 27, 1862, the regiment was right back at it in the next fight in the Seven Days Battles. This time around it was the Battle of Gaines' Mill, sometimes called the Battle of Chickahominy River. The number of combatants were nearly three times that of the prior day's battle as more than 91,000 troops — 57,000 of whom were Confederate soldiers — and there would be some 15,000 casualties by the end of the day. Grant was seriously wounded in the battle, though the nature of the wound has not yet been uncovered in my research, and left for dead on the battlefield. The Union lost the Battle of Gaines' Mill, a key early victory for Lee's time at the helm of rebellion's forces.

Though left for dead, Grant survived and was apparently able to avoid being taken prisoner. He would receive a pension for his military service, designated as an invalid as a result of the wound he suffered. The severity of the wound and its long-term impact is not currently known.

As the war raged on and 1863 was coming to a close, Grant was married on Christmas eve to Lovina D. Seymour. After several years as husband and wife, Lovina was pregnant, and the couple was apparently living in Illinois. Sadly, with Lovina several months pregnant, tragedy struck as Grant was killed in Secor, Illinois, a very small town 25-30 miles east of Peoria. Grant's death was the result of a railroad accident, though current research has not yet uncovered whether Grant was a passenger on the train, an employee of the railroad, or otherwise.

One month to the day of Grant's passing, new life was welcomed in Illinois with the birth of his daughter May L. Marvin on June 3, 1869.

I've not yet conducted much in the way of research on Grant's widow and child, though they do return to New York, settling first in Batavia and then Rochester.

America's12th President, My 5th Cousin: We're Related

Some time ago, I saw a friend on social media post about an app that indicated he was related to one historic figure or another. As a history nerd and genealogist, I was skeptical but intrigued enough to take a further look at Ancestry.com's app "We're Related."

Quite quickly, I began receiving notifications of possible relatives of note from yesterday and today. "Meghan Trainor is possibly your 9th Cousin," read one alert. "W.C. Fields is possible your 7th Cousin 4x Removed," said another. "Michael Jackson is possibly your 8th Cousin 1x Removed," suggested yet another notification. Ultimately, the list of figures potentially related to me, according to the app, included George Washington, Brad Paisley, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Kate Upton, Abraham Lincoln, Hillary Clinton, Dolly Parton, Walt Disney, Miley Cyrus, Marilyn Monroe, and both Presidents Bush — with my most closely-related possibilities being Franklin Pierce (4th Cousin 6x Removed), D. H. Lawrence (5th Cousin 4x Removed), Thomas Edison (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Edgar Allan Poe (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Johns Hopkins (5th Cousin 6x Removed), George Clinton (5th Cousin 7x Removed), Benjamin Franklin (5th Cousin 8x Removed), Thomas Jefferson (5th Cousin 8x Removed), and Jane Austen (5th Cousin 8x Removed).

The problem with these claims — which take your Ancestry.com family tree and compare it to other trees and data — is it makes links and leaps that are not easy to confirm. Each one would attempt to fill in gaps where I had not yet uncovered a direct ancestor's parents, and through those theoretical links came connections to these politicians, actors, writers, scientists, and musicians. In some cases, those efforts to fill gaps appear to be quite unlikely, sometimes with birthdates that seem to be before a mother's child-bearing age or when someone is quite elderly. All in all, I would try to investigate these leads and ultimately came up empty-handed each and every time. I was unable to independently verify with conviction that any of the data was correct.

Then, just a few days ago, came a new connection: Zachary Taylor. "We're Related" suggested Taylor, who went from hero during the Mexican-American War to President of the United States, is my 5th Cousin 7x Removed. The app laid out the connection, that we had mutual ancestors. I looked at the "Possible Common Ancestor," and I was excited to see it was someone already in my tree, my 12th great-grandmother, Mary Brewster. Mary, whose maiden name I do not currently know, was married to Mayflower passenger William Brewster. I am a direct descendant of theirs through their daughter Patience, a line I had been able to detail and verify previously.

Could it be? This app actually turned something up that is verifiable? It became time to investigate the lineage from Mary Brewster to Zachary Taylor, and I was pretty confident I'd be able to confirm or debunk the connection pretty quickly considering the amount of documentation out there for Mayflower descendants and, often times, for the genealogies surrounding our presidents.

According to "We're Related," Taylor was a descendant through William and Mary Brewster's daughter Fear, my 12th great aunt. The app said Mary's daughter Fear gave birth to Isaac Allerton in 1627, that he fathered Sarah Allerton in 1670, and she in turn gave birth to Elizabeth Lee in 1709, who then gave birth to Lt. Col. Richard Taylor, the father of Zachary Taylor.

I checked my family tree data and saw that I already had some of this information accounted for, reaching into a portion of the life of Sarah Allerton. I had an approximate date of birth for her, my 2nd Cousin 11x Removed. I also had a death date and that she married a man named Hancock Lee in 1690. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to trace Sarah to her purported great-grandson. I was able to find two published texts that each made the first confirmations. The first was George Norbury Mackenzie's "Colonial Families of the United States of America, Volume II," published in 1907 by The Grafton Press. The second was also published by The Grafton Press in 1907, part of its family histories series, and compiled by Emma C. Brewster Jones to detail the Brewster family line from 1566 to 1907. The latter text includes numerous references and citations, which proved to be helpful in further corroborating the information contained therein.

As previously noted, what was already known was that Sarah Allerton had wed Hancock Lee in 1690. I was able to confirm the Virginian couple had four children: Elizabeth, Hancock, John, and Isaac. Elizabeth Lee, my 3rd Cousin 10x Removed, was the next person to focus on as "We're Related" claimed she was Taylor's paternal grandmother. Using the previously mentioned published genealogies, as well as marriage and burial records, I was quickly able to piece together the basics on Elizabeth. She was born in Virginia in 1709, marrying a man named Zachary Taylor on February 23, 1738 in Northumberland County, Virginia, on the banks of Chesapeake Bay and about 75 miles east of Fredericksburg. The two had at least one child, the only one that mattered to me in this research effort, Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor, my 4th Cousin 9x Removed, was born in on April 3, 1744 in Orange County, Virginia, an area east of Shenandoah National Park and home to James Madison's Montpelier. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, he was able to rise to the rank of Colonel during the American Revolution. During the war, in 1779, 35-year-old Richard married 19-year-old Sarah Dabney Strother. Among their children was Zachary Taylor, the man who would go on to become the 12th President of the United States.

Success! It was official. The "We're Related" app was right in suggesting Zachary Taylor was indeed my 5th Cousin 8x Removed.

I already knew a little bit about Zachary Taylor, but he was one of those many largely obscure antebellum presidents that were a hazy bridge from the more memorable Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln. There was now a good reason to take a deep dive. While there is a load of interesting factoids surrounding Taylor, which may lead to a future post on the man's history and death, one stood out and was a bit of a kick to the gut. Taylor's daughter Sarah had married Jefferson Davis, the man who would one day be the President of the Confederate States of America. I loathe everything about Jefferson Davis and continue to be bothered by the fact that his statue stands in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., when he led an insurrection against the United States. Sarah Knox Taylor and Jefferson Davis were wed in Kentucky on June 17, 1835, some 15 years before the Civil War. I learned Zachary Taylor was not happy about his daughter marrying Taylor, though this was primarily said to be a result of the military hero's first-hand knowledge of how difficult military life is for a family, and Davis was a military man who served under Taylor.

Sarah Knox Taylor

In a bittersweet twist, I was both saddened and pleased to learn Sarah was never the First Lady of the Confederacy. She died just three months after the wedding. The newlyweds had gone to Louisiana to visit his sister when both contracted malaria. Jefferson Davis would recover, but Sarah would not. The illness claimed her life on September 15, 1835, at the tender age of 21. Her parents were devastated by her loss, and reportedly became quite angry and bitter toward Davis for taking their daughter to Louisiana during "fever season."

Counterfeiting a quarter-million in Colonial Massachusetts

As I put off a final shopping trip on the eve of Christmas Eve, I think about all the money we spend on the holidays and how I wish I could borrow a little cash from my cousin Mary. Problem is Mary has been dead more than 240 years now, and the cash she had turned out to be counterfeit bills she produced.

Mary (Peck) Butterworth was a colonial era counterfeiter, the first major counterfeiter in America's history. She is my 1st cousin 9x removed — her grandfather, Nicholas Peck (1630-1710), is my 9th great-grandfather through my maternal grandmother's line.

Mary was born on July 27, 1686, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, some 40 miles south of Boston. Her father, my 9th great-uncle, was Joseph Peck, born October 27, 1650. According to Kenneth Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Joseph was the innkeeper at the "Inn at the Sign of the Black Horse," a tavern in Rehoboth. In his book Early Rehoboth, local historian Richard LeBaron Bowen affirms that "Mary was the daughter of one of the most important and influential pioneer families in Rehoboth and was related to most of the other first families; all of the important town and colony officers were relatives." All in all, she was well-positioned to live a pretty comfortable life by colonial standards.

In 1710, 24-year-old Mary married John Butterworth, Jr., a pretty successful housewright — someone who built homes. John was well known and made good money as a housewright, resulting in the couple having "a better income than most people of the time," according to Bowen. Both Scott and Bowen note that despite his success and the societal norms of the day, John was generally known as "Mary's husband."

So what led Mary, who was quite financially secure and well-connected to the movers and shakers of the area, to the crime of counterfeiting as early as the summer of 1716? Her exact motivation is unknown, but it would seem that it was a matter of greed and convenience. "Mary was an ambitious and aggressive business woman, ruling her house and apparently everyone she met. She was passionately fond of money," Bowen notes in Early Rehoboth. "The taverns seemed to be easy places for passing counterfeit bills."

According to Scott, Mary "made and sold more than £1,000 of forged bills over a period of seven years." Accounting for inflation, that's in the neighborhood of $250,000 today. Bowen notes that she "was probably the biggest single counterfeiter in New England."

She didn't do this all on her own, however. Mary employed her brothers and a sister-in-law in the production of these phony bills. "Besides being an inventor, a skillfull workwoman and a clever saleswoman, she was also a superior organizer, developing a tight little kitchen printery employing her three brothers Nicholas, Israel, and Stephen, and the wife of Nicholas, Hannah Peck, who was also a cousin, all strictly a family affair ... over which Mary, the master craftswoman, ruled supreme," Bowen affirms. There is further evidence that Daniel Smith, Rehoboth's town clerk and a justice of the Bristol County Court of General Sessions, aided in disseminating the counterfeit bills. Smith's involvement ceased when a sheriff searched his home after tips from suspicious colleagues.

Many colonial era counterfeiters would be done in by their own operations as the copper printing plates commonly used were often the chief piece of evidence to arrest and punish these deviants. Mary's counterfeiting kitchen-based operation was simple and did not rely on the copper plates, thus different and more difficult to trace and prove. According to Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Mary's process began by "placing a damp starched muslin on top of the bill she intended to imitate and then lightly ran a hot flatiron over the cloth, causing the material to pick up the printing from the money; next she would iron the muslin hard to transfer the pattern to a blank piece of paper which was to be the counterfeit bill. The cloth, having served its purpose, was immediately thrown into the fireplace and consumed to ashes, so that no plate was left to be seized and used in court as damaging evidence ... As her next step, she would with a fine crow quill pen trace over the impression on her new bill and after that go over letters to reproduce the exact thickness of the letters on the true bill." 

The counterfeit bills produced, Scott writes, included Rhode Island bills of £5, £3, 20s., and 10s., Connecticut bills of £5, and Massachusetts bills of £5, £3, and 40s. Mary personally never passed the counterfeits, instead she used her familial network to do the dirty work, selling the fake money at half their face value.

The counterfeiting scheme began to unravel in 1722, about six years after it began. Bowen claims authorities became suspicious after Mary and John "purchased a large, expensive new home for the family." The following year, in Newport, Rhode Island, the first of Mary's associates was pinched by authorities. Arthur Noble was at an event in Newport when he came upon three young women from Rehoboth, and he wished to treat them for the evening. He passed along one of the counterfeit £5 bills, but it was quickly identified as suspect and Noble was arrested. Nicholas Peck, one of Mary's brothers and conspirators, would be arrested that summer, also in Newport, for passing a counterfeit £5 bill, and Nicholas Campe confessed what he knew to authorities. Campe's exact role in the operation isn't clear to this author, though he was likely among those used to simply pass along the counterfeit bills.

On August 15, 1723, a trio of deputy sheriffs came with warrants to apprehend John Butterworth, Jr., Mary (Peck) Butterworth, Israel Peck, Nicholas Peck, Hannah Peck, and two others. The suspects were placed in jail to await their day in court, but each was soon acquitted and released due to a lack of evidence — though a brother and Hannah did testify against Mary in court. Mary was fortunate to escape conviction, as punishment for counterfeiting could be quite severe. According to Rhode Island Historical Tracts, Rhode Island state law called for a counterfeiter to have their ears cropped (cut off), to be whipped, or fined, while being imprisoned "as the nature of the offense requires," and to also "pay double damage to the persons defrauded." If a counterfeiter could not uphold the fiscal reparations, Rhode Island law demanded "he should be set to work, or sold for any term of years which the discretion of the judges considered satisfactory."

Once acquitted of her crimes, all records and accounts suggest she gave up her counterfeiting ring and became a housewife, living the norms of a married woman in the colonial period. She and John would raise even children together before each died in old age. Mary was 88-years-old when she died in Bristol County on February 7, 1775.

The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah.

This weekend featured many genealogical discoveries, several of which I plan to write about in due time. One bit of information uncovered this evening, however, left me feeling a need to share quickly.

While working on the Ellis family line of my tree, I finally found a missing piece that unlocked an entire other surname branch that I never knew as a connection. The Freeman family of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The family is one I had some very cursory knowledge of as it is represented at one of my favorite haunts, Old Sturbridge Village — home of the Freeman Farm.

I reached out to a friend at OSV about my newly-uncovered connection to the Freeman family, and he in turn put me in touch with an OSV historian. In less than four hours on a Sunday afternoon, my initial e-mail to my contact resulted in a good deal of information from Tom Kelleher, whose official title is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts. Following up on Tom's information, tips, and leads, I came across a letter from Pliny Freeman — my 1st cousin 6x removed — to his son, Pliny Freeman Jr., dated 12 July 1835. The elder Pliny was still residing at his farm in Sturbridge, while his son had settled in Ohio. This letter carried with it the devestating news that Beulah, Pliny Jr.'s younger sister, had been tragically killed during a thunderstorm.

An excerpt from that letter:

On Sunday last, 5th instant, there were two deaths in Sutton and one in Oxford. Those in Sutton were Mr. and Mrs. King, ages 63 and 57. They were both killed at one flash and in the same room. The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah. She went upstairs to shut the windows, as was supposed, and a flash of lightening struck the chimney and threw the top mostly off. Lyman was not at the house. One of the neighbors saw the lightning strike the chimney [and] saw the bricks falling. He with one other of his neighbors immediately repaired to the house. On entering they found her [in the] up chamber dead on the floor, lying on her face and her clothes on fire. The skin on her neck and shoulders was some torn and her clothes behind were very much shattered. (If you have the opportunity you may communicate this sad intelligence to your Uncle Samuel. It seems he and family have been afflicted with a great deal of sickness but not to them like this.)

It seems the lightening passed from the top of the chimney to the bottom of the cellar. The body of the chimney is so badly shattered that it cannot be used until it repaired and every room in the house injured. Tore off plastering, chimney pieces, ceiling broke a hole through the chamber floor, shivered one cross-sill in the cellar, and shivered some posts. It shivered a board of the floor directly under the foot of the cradle that the baby was sleeping in. The scene throughout looks gloomy. Both cases occurred about four afternoon, both houses on high land and in sight of each other and about one-and-a-half miles apart. The news came to us about eight that night. The funerals at four the next day. The funerals were attended in a meetinghouse in the village nearby. Mr. Gray of Sutton and Mr. Clark of Sturbridge attended the funerals. It was a melancholy and heart-rending sight to see three coffins in the meetinghouse at the same time. There was a large collection of people. Our family and several of Lyman's cousins from Holland attended the funerals.

Grandma's final days in the almshouse

It's amazing what genealogical research can do to you. Individuals you never met, whose lives ended long before yours began, yet sometimes there can be an emotional connection or reaction to a nugget of information uncovered.

This was the case as I began looking into one of my great-great-great-grandparents recently. The end of her life was a sad time, residing in an almshouse, possibly suffering from significantly impaired cognitive abilities, and dying in a state hospital.

When it comes to the Ellis line of my maternal family tree, I've struggled to get too much definitive information beyond my 3rd great-grandfather George Ellis, and I've never delved into his wife, my 3rd great-grandmother, Caroline. All I ever knew about her was that George had married a woman named Caroline, and together they had several kids.

Turns out that she's really a Susan — Susan Caroline Marvin. Caroline, as she used her middle name throughout her life, was born on August, 19, 1830, to Seth and Susan Marvin in Alstead, New Hampshire, a very small town near the Vermont border. At this point, I know nothing of her parents, nor any siblings she may have had. Much of her youth remains an enigma for me, with no real records uncovered until 1855, when she was 25-years-old.

Caroline and George had already married, presumably before she turned 20-years-old, when she gave birth to their first child, Julia A. Ellis, in October 1850. The family would grow to eight known children born over a 15-year-period, 1850 to 1865. At least three of those eight would die young — George Henry Ellis of typhoid fever at age 21 in 1875, Willie M. Ellis of tuberculosis at age 19 in 1885, and Charles Albert Ellis at age 33 in 1884.

The Ellis family shows up as residents of Worcester, Massachusetts, in both the State and Federal Census. Caroline typically does not have an occupation listed on the Census forms, though she does appear as a dressmaker in the Massachusetts Census of 1865.

The big question marks begin as middle-age hits in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In the 1870 Census, the entire Ellis family (other than eldest child Julia, then 20-years-old) is residing in Worcester. However, by June 1880 it appears by Census data that George and Caroline have called it quits. George, who is identified as a married man, is residing on Pink Street in Worcester with the family of his son Frank. Caroline is identified as "widowed/divorced" and residing with the family of daughter Julia on Cambridge Street in Worcester.

It appears that Caroline likely remarried as death records for her son Charles shows his parents as Caroline and "George Smith." It is possible, however, that Smith was erroneously written in place of Ellis.

George Ellis would pass away in Worcester on January 1, 1892, at the age of 66. His cause of death is "Bronchitis La Grippe," indicating he suffered from both bronchitis and the flu.

In the 1910 Census, Caroline Ellis appears as a 79-year-old widow listed as an "inmate" at an almhouse known as the Worcester Home Farm. An almhouse is a poorhouse, typically a home for a city's poor to stay. In the case of the Worcester Home Farm, as noted in a 2014 Worcester Telegram & Gazette feature, "life was difficult." The article notes the almhouse's residents, or inmates, "were not permitted to be idle; or talk without permission; nor leave. It was considered shameful to be considered a pauper, and the location of the Poor Farm enabled the city to provide for their needs while ostricizing them from the community." Similarly, Michael D. Kane wrote about the property for MassLive in 2016, explaining it had been "Worcester's first foray into curing social ills ... It had been the place where Worcester housed its extremely poor, mentally ill and those suffering from communicable diseases."

A portion of the Worcester Home Farm properties.

The Worcester Home Farm is reported to have been a 599-acre farm, that featured a hospital, farming, animals raised for slaughter, and even for a hog-fueled garbage disposal system. From 1872 to 1932, which includes Caroline's time at the Worcester Home Farm, the city of Worcester employed a "piggery" to tackle local trash. Pigs would devour the trash while, the Telegram & Gazette reports, "helping to line the city's coffers." The smell from the piggery is said to have traveled for miles and was most certainly a problem for Shrewsbury residents next door.

Caroline spent the final years of her life at the Worcester Home Farm, passing away at the State Hospital on March 22, 1912, at the age of 81. The cause of death was cellulitis of the leg, a bacterial skin infection that is quite painful. Left untreated it can become lethal when it spreads to lymph nodes and the bloodstream. Caroline's death certificate notes she had been treated medically for the condition for just more than six weeks before her death.

In addition to the cellulitis, Dr. George A. McIver reports on Caroline's death certificate that she had been suffering from a "Senile paranoid condition" for 10 years.

How long Caroline had resided in Worcester's Home Farm is not yet clear, nor whether she was there as a destitute woman estranged from or widowed by her late husband, abandoned by her children, or housed on some sort of mental diagnosis. What is known, or at least pretty safely assumed, is that she had a pretty rough second half of her life — burying at least three of her children by the time she was 61-years-old, 10 years with a "Senile paranoid condition," and presumably a decade or more within the cold, restrictive, and uncaring walls of the Worcester Home Farm.

The Bloody Lane, Eye Patch, and a Medal of Honor

In my old history classroom, there once hung a meme that declared: “You may be cool, but you’ll never be Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose across a river cool.”

As it turns out, Samuel C. Wright might actually be that cool.

In recent weeks I was the beneficiary of a great deal of research and work done by a somewhat distant relative of my wife. This woman self-published a long family history of the Wright family, the maiden name of my wife's maternal grandmother. I've been working to independently confirm and verify the information provided in the couple hundred pages of names and dates, and it is certainly a long process.

Among those dryly entered into those pages, with little more than his vital information of birth, marriage, and death, was Samuel Cole Wright. He and my wife share a common ancestor, Adam Wright, who had been born in Plympton, Massachusetts, circa 1645. Adam is my wife’s 8^th great-grandfather, following along through Adam’s son Moses, all the way down to her maternal grandmother. Samuel was Adam’s 4^th great-grandson, through a line headed by Adam’s son John. In all, this makes Samuel her 5^th cousin 4x removed.

While the family history lists him the same as any other Tom, Dick, or Harry, Samuel was much more than that, as made evident by his valiant service to the Union during the American Civil War. While fighting with the 29^th Massachusetts Regiment, he was in more than two dozen battles, wounded numerous times, lost an eye and kept the bullet that claimed it as charm, was reported dead multiple times, and received the Medal of Honor.

Before we get to his Civil War service, however, we ought to start at the beginning. Samuel was born September 29, 1842 in Plympton, Massachusetts — a town that appears frequently in the first 200 or so years of Wrights after coming to Plymouth. Samuel was the eighth of ten born to Winslow Wright and Mary Cole, with Winslow being the great-grandson of Ezekiel Loring, a lieutenant during the American Revolution.

Samuel was raised in Plympton, working along with older brother William Henry Harrison Wright as a shoemaker, according to the 1860 U.S. Census. A couple months after the Census taker visited the Wright family, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, setting off a series of events that culminated in the Civil War beginning in April 1861. On May 18, 1861, 18-year-old Samuel decided to do his part to preserve the Union, formally enlisting as a private with the 29^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Little did Samuel know that he would spend the next four years in bitter battles waged in 15 states while traveling more than 4,200 miles, as reported by William Osborne’s 1877 The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, in the Late War of the Rebellion. He is said to have participated in 30 battles, wounded five times, and twice reported dead, according to U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865. He would twice be promoted for gallantry in action.

About one year into his service came a head wound as he was struck by a fragment of shell during the Battle of White Oak Swamp in Virginia on June 30, 1862.

About 16 months after enlisting, one of Samuel’s most harrowing experiences came about near Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, nearly proved to be the end of Samuel’s story — and as the fog of war raged on that day, some reported it had been his end. As Union General George B. McClellan sat poised for battle on September 16, only to, as he’s become infamous for, hedge his bets and delay to the next day. The day before the actual battle itself began, rounds of artillery between the two sides provided an ominous beginning, according to Samuel’s own recollections. “The shot from the first piece of artillery fired took off the leg of the color-bearer of my regiment,” he reported in U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865. The ensuing volley of artillery fire “was at times very lively,” he added.

As dawn broke on September 17, so too did the camps as “troops were sent out to engage the enemy in our front. The roar of cannon and small arms was deafening.” While Samuel could certainly hear the enemy, he was unable to see them as the battle began. “From where we lay we could only hear the cannonading, we could not see the enemy, as a growth of woods impaired our view. It was, perhaps, as well, that we could not see the carnage wrought.”

When Samuel and his compatriots, including the famed Irish Brigade, were dispatched to support other Union troops in the thick of battle, they “hurriedly” made their way to Antietam Creek and forded across it. “The stream was so deep, that in crossing, we only had to remove the stoppers of our canteens and they would fill themselves,” he recalled. “We held rifles and ammunition above our heads.”

Once they successfully crossed the creek — and “removed our shoes, wrung out our stockings” — the regiment was ordered forward, directly toward the Sunken Road. Prior to the war, the Sunken Road was a dirt farm lane used as a shortcut by locals and farmers. After the Battle of Antietam it had infamously earned the macabre nickname of the Bloody Lane.

“Going up the hill we could see the cause of our sudden call,” Samuel recalled. “The hill was strewn with dead and dying; yes, and with those unhurt, for to stand was to be instantly killed by the sharpshooters who filled the ‘Sunken Road.’”

As the bodies continued to pile up, historians estimate 5,600 from both sides, Union troops planned to tackle a fence along the Sunken Road. The initial attempts were disastrous, and now Samuel likely faced a similar fate.

An Alex Gardner photo taken of part of the Sunken Road, or the Bloody Lane, in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam.

“Some 200 yards in advance of our position, which we were holding at a terrible cost, was a fence built high and strong. The troops in advance had tried to scale the fence and reform under that hell of fire. They were actually torn to shreds and wedged into the fence,” Samuel vividly recalled.

Brigadier General Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish immigrant whose own personal history is quite fascinating, called for this fence to be removed. Samuel was among those who volunteered to risk it all to do so.

“The cry came to us for volunteers to pull down the fence. Instantly there sprang from the long line, fast being shortened as the ranks closed up over the dead, seventy-six volunteers. We ran straight for the fence amid a hail of iron and lead, the dead falling all about us, but to reach the fence was our only thought. A part of the force reached it, and, as one would grasp a rail it would be sent flying out of his hands by rifle-shots. The fence leveled, we made the attempt to return, and it was as hot for us on the retreat, as it had been on the advance. Few escaped death or wounds. I had almost regained my regiment, when I was hit.”

Samuel was hit in the left knee but refused to heed the calls of officers to retreat to the rear, instead receiving treatment by the regimental surgeon where he had been wounded.

Ultimately, his actions at Antietam would result in being awarded the Medal of Honor — the highest and most prestigious recognition a member of the military can receive in the United States.

The following year was a difficult one for Samuel. In June 1863, Samuel contracted typhus, a disease that was among the more lethal ailments Civil War soldiers faced. He would be hospitalized and treated for typhus in Tennessee, laid up for three-to-four months. An Army wagon being pulled by a team of six mules would run over Samuel in October 1863, crushing his foot and causing unspecified internal injuries, according to Congressional records.

The summer of 1864 saw even more damage done in battle, including the loss of his eye. On June 2, 1864, during the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia, Samuel was wounded by a gunshot to his left arm. He was fortunate in this instance as no amputation was necessary, and he not only survived but was able to return to the battlefield after some recuperation before what would prove to be his final battlefield action the ensuing month.

It was on July 30, 1864, at the Battle of the Crater, part of the Union Army’s siege on Petersburg, Virginia, when it appeared Samuel was surely dead. During the battle, a bullet took out his right eye upon striking his head. In U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865, it is asserted that Samuel “was shot directly in the right eye,” while Congressional records explain he had been hit by a “rifle ball, which destroyed his right eye, the ball passing to the back of his head, was left for dead, and was so reported.” His July 7, 1906 obituary in the pages of The Boston Evening Transcript reads “his head was penetrated by a bullet which entered at the back and put out one of his eyes; contrary to all expectations he recovered from the wounds, the bullet in his head was extracted, and he had carried it as a watch-charm ever since.” His retention of the unusual battle memento is reaffirmed in U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865, which notes Samuel “still keeps the bullet as an awful souvenir of his closeness to death.”

After the Battle of the Crater, Samuel was sent home and spent 18 months recovering from what had been assumed to be a mortal wound. He was mustered out of the Army as a sergeant on February 3, 1865, just a couple months before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. He would live on another 42 years after his final fight for the Union.

In his post-war life, Samuel remained primarily in Plympton, working as a farmer and then a trader or running a storefront, while also joining the Masons. He would later land a job in Boston at the Customs House, a position he would hold until the day he died. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, Samuel was “popular” among his co-workers and “his service was highly appreciated by the Government.”

On January 3, 1870, 27-year-old Samuel married Mary E. Nickerson, the 27-year-old daughter of William and Betsey Nickerson of Plymouth. Samuel and Mary had just one child, a daughter named Mary Dresser Wright, born on May 21, 1875 in Boston. Young Mary would go on to marry Augustus C. Sproul, a native of Bristol, Maine.

Samuel and Mary would split their time seasonally between Boston in the winter and Plympton in the summer. Records indicate his time as a resident of Boston was largely, if not entirely, in South Boston, first on K Street and, later on, Sixth Street.

As for his death, it was the old ticker that did him in unexpectedly. He had been recovering for several weeks from a bout of pneumonia, but had returned to work at the Customs House. In fact, Samuel was at work and “seemed in good health” when he left for home the evening of his death. According to The Boston Evening Transcript, upon arriving home, Samuel “ate a hearty dinner,” and then “started out from the house with a pail of ashes to dump behind the barn and his failure to return within a reasonable time caused the family members some apprehension.” Various relatives in the immediate area began searching for Samuel, ultimately finding his body just beyond the barn around 8 p.m. He was 63-years-old.