A Statue of Deacon Samuel Chapin

In 1881 a descendant, a congressman, commissioned master sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to produce a work memorializing Deacon Samuel Chapin. The piece "...emphasizes the piety, and perhaps the rigidity, of the country's religious founders..." Its eight feet of intimidating pride and assurance of divine approbation is location in Merrick Park, Springfield, MA. Photo courtesy of  http://farm5.statisflickr.com

Hannah and Benajah Stockwells’ son Ebenezer (1778) married a much older widow, Abi Holbrook Lee (1764). Abi was the great-great granddaughter of another Puritan superstar, Deacon Samuel Chapin. Born in Devon, England, he became a selectman and a commissioner (magistrate) in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also was a mainstay of the local church. These colonists had not yet realized that religion and government, like oil and water, should not even attempt to mix.

Around 1800 Ebenezer Stockwell bought a house in Highgate, Vermont and moved his family into this recently established enclave of Loyalists and Lutheran German immigrants. He became the “principal agent, or foreman” for Ira, a brother of Ethan Allen. 

Tried as a Witch

William and Sarah Stockwell’s son Ebenezer married Mary Singletary of the Singletary-Cooke clan. In 1735 they produced a son named Benajah (which was an eighteenth-century twist on a traditional name, like our present Josh or Liam) who married Hannah Gale.

Hannah had one vaguely distinguished line of heritage, being descended from a wheelwright grandly known as Lord Symond Fiske, Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh (in Suffolk, England). He inherited all this grandeur from his grandfather Daniel, who was Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V.  Lord Symond even awarded himself a coat of arms.

Unsurprisingly, the Fiske clan eventually became involved with the Dissenters and immigrated to New England.

Hannah had another line of heritage that was more than “vaguely distinguished:” it played a part in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s most horrific episode. Her great-great grandmother was Rebecka Towne Nurse, a Norfolk, England-born matriarch who raised eight children and was a devout member of the Salem Congregationalist church. She served as a midwife well-versed in using herbs to alleviate her patients’ sufferings, while her husband Francis was a successful craftsman and served as Salem Towne’s constable in 1672. They were both highly esteemed pillars of the community. But they made the mistake of indulging in a long series of property disputes with a powerful family, the Putnams, and they challenged the appointment of a local minister.

The pastor and the Putnam family took advantage of the prevalent witch hysteria and decided to make an example of the Nurses by destroying Rebecka and her sisters. They dragged them before the Court of Oyer and Terminar (Hear and Determine) and charged them with witchcraft. A group of teenage girls engaged in some hysterical trumpery to ensure the sisters were condemned.

This plaster statue depicts Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Esty, and Sarah Towne Cloyse. The statue, located in the Salem Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers, was a 1970 work of Yiannis Stefinarkis. The photo was taken by Benjamin C. Ray in 2001.

As Rebecka and her sister Mary went to the gallows on 19 July 1692, a minister urged her to admit her guilt. She snapped, “You are a liar! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard!”

She was buried in an extremely shallow grave to emphasize her unworthiness of a proper Christian burial, but in the dark of night her heartbroken family dug her up and reinterred her on their family homestead. John Greenleaf Whittier’s words now appear on her gravestone:

O Christian Martyr who for truth could die

When all around thee owned the hideous lie!

The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway

Is breathing freer for thy sake today

While composing this entry, the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots kept flashing through my brain: In my end is my beginning. Today Rebecka has a sea of descendants, and we must never embroider her memory into something quaintly grotesque, like the witches in the film Hocus Pocus. Our kinswoman was murdered by corrupt local authorities, and this sorry truth shouldn’t be forgotten.

A Scalping in the Family

Nathaniel Singletary was born in 1644, and evidently had a foot or leg ailment. His brothers were enlisted to fight in King Phillip’s War (King Phillip was an understandably rebellious Native American), but Nathaniel was “dismissed from training for Lameness in 1662”. He married Sarah Belknap, who had been born in the heavily wooded market town North Weald, Essex back in England.  They were farmers in Haverhill, Massachusetts Colony and had nine children.

The Indian massacre of colonists at Swansee, Phymouth Colony started King Philip's war.
Source:  http://muskegonpundit.blogspot.com

This is how Chase’s History of Haverhill describes Nathaniel’s demise: “On the 13^th of August [1689] a small party of Indians made their appearance in the northerly part of the town and killed Daniel Bradford. Then they went to the field of Nathaniel Singletary, near by, where he and his oldest son were at work. They approached in their slow and serpent-like manner until they came within a few rods, when they shot Singletary, who fell and died on the spot. His son attempted to escape, but was soon overtaken and made prisoner. The Indians then scalped Singletary and commenced a hasty retreat. The prisoner soon eluded their vigilance and returned home on the same day to make glad the hearts of his afflicted relatives.”

The widowed Sarah gave birth to her last child a few days later. In 1707 Nathaniel and Sarah’s son Richard also died at the hands of Native Americans.

The 14-year-old escapee was our ancestor John Singletary. He married Mary Greele (1678), whose family had originated in England and Wales, but settled in Massachusetts by 1660. Mary’s maiden name reminded me of a similar, more famous last name, so I investigated it further. Indeed Mary’s birth family was to eventually produce that famous politician and newspaperman Horace Greeley, who advised his countrymen to “go west”.

John and Mary were hard-working “planters” (a glorified term for farmers) who couldn’t afford to send their children off to school. But they educated their offspring at home in a manner befitting descendants of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall. One of their sons was a justice of the peace, served in a colonial general court, and was elected to sit in several legislatures. He had absolutely no Loyalist sympathies but spoke against the new United States constitution’s ratification; he simply feared the document might undermine true republican principles. A contemporary praised him as an “Earnest Christian”.

Escape to the Massachusetts Bay Colony

William Cooke and his wife Martha had seven children before he died in 1615. Martha White Cooke was only around 30 when widowhood struck her, and not about to resign herself to a life of single parenthood. Almost immediately she married Jonus Cooke, who must have been a relation of her late husband. He definitely shared his predecessor’s religious predilections so his stepchildren, and the three children his relationship with Martha produced, grew up steeped in the Puritan mindset. 

By this time, much of the extended Cooke clan was firmly in the Dissenter camp. The movement drew its support from two principal groups of lay adherents: a minority of nobles and gentry, and a much larger group of “middling sort of people” like merchants, yeomen and artisans. In other words, folks who actually worked for a living. They rejected the episcopacy---the established Church of England as an extension of the Crown itself---and espoused the formation of a Reformed Protestant Church offering simplified rituals and a more personal relationship with God.

Martha Cooke’s sons George and Joseph were part of an underground network that concealed non-conformist preachers from arrest, and possible execution, by officers of the Crown.

In 1621 Francis Cooke (born in Gidea Hall) and his son John left England on the Mayflower to found the Plymouth colony. You can be sure his relations followed his adventures with sharp interest.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cooke_(Mayflower_passenger)

In 1635, George and Joseph Cooke realized it was advisable for them to leave England. They disguised themselves as a wealthy Dissenter’s servants and sailed with him on the Defense to Massachusetts.

On 3 March 1636, George Cooke was admitted as a Massachusetts freeman (which gave him the right to vote), became a representative of the Assembly and, in 1645, its Speaker. In 1637 he was appointed Captain of the Artillery Company, and once returned to Boston with nine Indians captured during an “excursion.” That year he also established the first water-powered gristmill in the Cambridge area.

More family members quickly followed him to the New World. By 1638 at least Martha Cooke, her son Phillipe, and her daughter Susannah (our foremother) were also living in the Bay Colony.