April 1, 2024 • 41 mins
It’s 1673 in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Rebecca Briggs Cornell and her husband Thomas are the town’s founders and have already survived a raft of trauma. They’ve seen their closest friend murdered in New York and were banished from Boston for their religious beliefs. Now they’re concerned about the safety of their family. When Thomas dies, their son Thomas Junior takes over the family property.
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Written, researched and hosted by Kate Winkler Dawson
Producer Jason Wehling
Senior Producer Alexis Amorosi
Consulting Producer Kyle Ryan
Researcher Carrie Nolte
Sound Designer Eric Friend
Additional Sound Design by Nicholas Muniz
Composer Curtis Heath
Artwork by Nick Toga
Find my books: katewinklerdawson.com
Follow me on social: @tenfoldmorewicked (Facebook and Instagram)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Tell me the spelling of your person last night, my descendant.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I guess that is how you want to be titled.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Sure. My first name is Carrie C. A R R
I E. My last name is Nolty n Olte, and
I am a descendant of Rebecca Briggs murder victim. And
this is a ghost story.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's creepy.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
It is a ghost story.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Do you believe in ghosts? If you've heard my audio
book The Ghost Club, you know that I do. And
you know why. This season of tenfold More Wicked is
a ghost story set in sixteen hundreds, New England, and
it's about a real death where the star witness and
a murder trial was a spirit.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
He describes feeling some weight on his blanket, like some heaviness,
like something there, and it.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Woke him up. And when he woke up, he saw
what he thought was a spectral figure. He saw a
light and he said, what's you know?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Who's there?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Our story features a man who went on trial for
murder thanks to a ghost that hinted that it knew
who committed murder.
Speaker 6 (01:19):
I think you have the sort of the seeds or
the ground for people to run around saying I am
like the fire or whisperer right, or I can interpret
the dreams of people and help solve crimes based on
what people say happen in their dreams.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
This is the story about bad forensics, about a possible
miscarriage of justice, and some big misunderstandings about fire.
Speaker 5 (01:42):
Just because you've used an accelerate doesn't mean that it's
like the magic sauce to annihilate everything you're trying to burn.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This is the story of a family scarred by past trauma.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
You do get these kind of instances where families kind
of tune themselves and any men that can kill anyone else,
And you do get these relationships between mothers and sons
where it does spill over into violence.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It's about a family forced into a complicated situation where
maybe murder was the only way out.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
He's saying something like, I won't tell if you don't.
I won't bring up this if you don't bring up that.
So that was conspiratorial. There must be something that each
is trying to protect of the other.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Was this murder or was it something else?
Speaker 7 (02:33):
Even the nineteenth century, in case I looked at there's
been so many cases of individuals dying by being set
on fire, and you know it's always accidental. You know,
they've got too close to a candle, They've got too
close to the fire. They've been cooking, and a spark
has set fire to their clothing.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I think that she was stabbed. I think he set
her on fire to cover.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Up the wound. Rebecca Cornell is not portrayed as being
particularly stable either.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
She sounds like she's suffered from depression and suicidal thought.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Tur itself sad, It.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Is very sad.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Everyone has a different opinion. But we'll meet forensic experts
who think they have the answers and they might just
disagree with history.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So it is a story that you you could hear
the same information and still come away with a different idea.
And it's so far back that it's not like we're
going to go back and find the answers, but it's
you know, the questions are always there.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a crime historian and the author
of The Ghost Club, American Sherlock and All That Is Wicked.
And this is our eleventh season of tenfold More Wicked.
This is our oldest story yet. I know I said
that last season when we were in mid seventeen hundreds Virginia.
But this time we're traveling even further back to Rhode
(04:01):
Island in sixteen seventy three. Believe it or not, people
still care about this case. I call this season fire
and Brimstone. I know, sixteen seventy three already seems like
so long ago, but for historical context, we need to
(04:25):
travel back even further to England. Let's talk about the
origins of the famous Cornell family, as in the Cornell
University Cornells. The main character of this story is Rebecca Briggs. Cornell.
Women really play a big role here, and they might
be the heroes or they might be the villains. Carrie
(04:46):
Nolty is the family descendant who brought me this story.
I always need one of those to make tenfold, well tenfold.
Carrie's from Rebecca's line of the family, the Briggs, not
Rebecca's husband Thomas Cornell's side, Harry works at Brown University
and she's a longtime listener, and thankfully she accompanied me
when I visited all of the important locations in this story.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
I finally traced on my dad's side our lineage back
here to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and the Cornells and looking
at one of the websites, I think it was Genie
dot com. It had an entire just paragraphs and paragraphs
about the family.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Before this story became a historic Rhode Island murder case,
the Cornell family had already endured its share of trauma.
So let's start back in England where Rebecca and Thomas
Cornell first married. Well, let's start with what you know
about the Cornell family, because they were a pretty important
family in.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
The northeast, I mean all the way from the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
So the Cornells came from Essex, the Essex area, saffron
Walden in England. They came over in sixteen thirty eight
thirty nine, and they had plenty of kids by that time,
and they were still having kids. Actually, I believe that
Rebecca was pregnant and she gave birth to her son
(06:13):
John when she was here.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
So she is initially married to Thomas Cornell seniors.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Oh yes, okay, And they start out in England and
then they moved to they moved to Boston. And why
do you think they made the move or why did
anybody make them move?
Speaker 5 (06:29):
Then?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Well, first of all, I mean there was the religious separatists,
so a lot of people would call them Puritans, and
they do kind of fall into that sort of category,
but the Puritans were much more stringent. Like when we
think of Puritans, we think of the people that came
and settled at Plymouth, and that was not them.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Carrie says that the Cornells came from England to America
or what would become America during what is known as
the Great Migration. These were Puritans leaning separatist groups that
came over. They wanted to worship the way they wanted
to worship and live in communities that allowed that type
of worship. The Cornells wanted out of England, and so
(07:11):
they left and arrived in Boston.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And there's a lot of politics, a lot of money
going on, but it's also a real just family fight
between Anglicans, the Church of England, who had a lot
of what they call papist and papal influences, so you know,
fancy altars, fancy stained glass and all that kind of stuff,
(07:34):
and the Puritan people wanted all the fancy stuff to go.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Gloria Schmidt is a local historian who is an expert
in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which is where most of this
story takes place. She says that we need to talk
about religion a lot for context.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
It's all important, and it's a framework. And I think
you can't understand this story of what happens without understanding
the spiritual ramifications of what is going on.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And this is around the same time as the Salem
witch trials, right, it's.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
About fifty years before. That is certainly something that will influence,
like everything that's going on now becomes something that influences
the Salem witch trials later on. And how people sort
of reacted.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Gloria says that the Puritans were finicky about their religion
and other religions.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Well, that's interesting. They would say that they would want
freedom of religion, but what they wanted was freedom of
religion or their religion and not necessarily for anybody else.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So there are people that they wanted to practice their faith,
but they wanted their faith to be the dominant one.
I think that the Pilgrims were not as virulent about it.
They were separatists. They wanted to be apart. I think
that you had a lot of people that had no
(09:05):
real opportunities in England, and so they would see America
as a place where they might own land.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
After Rebecca and Thomas arrived in Boston, they needed to
support their family. They were both illiterate, but at least
one of their children had been educated in England. Carrie
Nolty says that they likely picked a profession that involved
working with their hands, as many Puritan families did in
the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
They were more likely people who worked with cloth, so
they were probably weavers, that kind of thing. They probably
had skill in that area. That's one of the reasons
that they ran into trouble when they came to Boston
because they didn't have sort of a mercantile experience.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Thomas had several ideas for work, and weaving was not
what he wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So when they got to Boston, one of the things
that they first tried to do was to run a tavern.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
But was this.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Unusual for people who were high us.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
So taverns were, you know, there were places, there were
meeting places. Kind of in terms of the social order,
they're primarily a meeting place and actually later on it
just had multifunction so and it was also for people
who were coming in didn't have places to stay and.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
A lot of the time you couldn't even trust drinking water.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
The amount of alcohol was much much less in the beers,
in the ciders, and the kinds of things that they
would drink. They would make things like grog, so that
you know, you'd put in some hard alcohol and it
would kind of kill whatever was lurking in there that
you just didn't know was there.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
So it was really a focal point of colonial life,
and actually a focal point of all life back in
Europe as well.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But Thomas Senior's efforts at being a tavern keeper only
lasted a year or two before he began and making
some mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
That didn't go very well. Apparently, Thomas Senior was fined
by the authorities for putting too much alcohol into his brew,
and he didn't know to not do that, and he
didn't know that you weren't supposed to do certain things.
And he actually went before the court and pleaded ignorance
(11:22):
of this, and so they reduced his fine, but they
said you cannot be a tavern keeper anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Thomas lost the tavern and he and Rebecca discussed it,
struggling to decide what to do next. It turns out
that around the same time as they had opened the tavern,
the Cornells had met a very special woman named Anne Hutchinson.
Have you heard of the Hutchinson Parkway in New York?
It was named after Anne and her family. Anne was
(11:57):
unusual because she was at educated in the sixteen hundreds
when women really.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
Weren't in England. She was a follower of one of
the ministers that went to Boston, and so she and
her husband and their family. She had quite a large family.
She had fifteen children altogether and they came over and
her husband was a was a merchant. She had a
(12:23):
big house. She would start gathering people to discuss the
sermons the day after Sunday.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
She basically has these meeting groups in her home where
they're discussing things, and you know, she was an electrifying speaker,
and a lot of her ideas she really starts running
a foul of the Puritan leaders at that time.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
The Puritan ministers didn't like that. There was a belief
that God sent his messages through the male ministers, and
in Anne's meetings in the beginning, they were all women.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
But then their husbands started coming to this and at
that particular point, the ministers were afraid, afraid that she
would send the wrong message. And in their culture, God
acts on the community as a whole, so if someone
was not following God's laws or God's way, the whole
(13:20):
community would be impacted with a hurricane or something like that.
So it was very important to keep everybody tightly under control.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But Anne was not one of those people you could
keep tightly under control. She believed that the Holy Spirit
talked to the individual, not through the minister. And this
is a very important concept, one that drew a lot
of people to her.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
And Rebecca Briggs Cornell and her husband twelve Yeah, no,
are going to these meetings and there.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
They're going to these meetings. There is a reference in
one of the books that I read to Thomas, you know,
kind of being told to stop talking about it in
public because they were really actually trying to control a
lot of the speech. And you could back then, we
didn't have, you know, freedom of speech the way that
you know is espoused in the Bill of Rights and.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
All that stuff. In the country.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
No, we weren't.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We were We were a colony and we were English,
and all of those practices and social norms and laws applied.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
The ministers in New England complained about Anne Hutchinson and
her meetings, but the Cornells found her intelligent and brazen
and spiritual, as did many others. Eventually, Anne was arrested.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
She had two trials. She had a trial in the
in the church, and she had a civil trial. And
you know, at that particular time, if you weren't a
church member, you you couldn't vote, you couldn't have a business,
you wouldn't own land. So being a member of the
church was all important. And those people that started following
(14:58):
her started to lose all those things. They lost their arms,
they lost their vote, they lost their positions.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
I mean, one of the things about this this time
period is that the religious and the political are almost
never separate. And the experience of creating new governments, new
settlements in these areas, and the marriage of politics and religion,
(15:27):
government and religion and the problems that they caused is
foundational to the United States.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Anne was convicted and then banished from Boston. From there,
she and her husband traveled sixty miles south to the
area known as Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and is considered one
of the founders of Portsmouth. Other people decided to follow
her there too, and after they lost the tavern that
had supported their family in Boston, Thomas and Rebecca Cornell
(15:56):
decided to join them.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
There was a band that got together and they wrote
what we call the Compact, and they were pledging their
lives to be under God, but not necessarily under the Church.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Anne and her group had the help of Roger Williams,
a Puritan minister who had also been banished. Williams is
credited with founding the colony of Rhode Island. They scouted
around the area and eventually negotiated for a Quidneck Island
where they planned to settle. But the Pilgrims and the
Puritans had no real control over the land because it
(16:34):
was occupied by a Native American group called the Narragansetts.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Now the Native Americans wouldn't have thought that they were selling.
They thought more in terms of sharing the land. Well,
we'll use it this time, and you know, maybe two
years from now we'll be using it. But there was
an actual transaction and actual signatures and not just going
(16:59):
in and taking the land. So, as I said, there
had been good relationships in general between the Narragansetts and
the people that came to Portsmouth.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
This will become important, but for now, the Hutchinson's and
the Cornells were neighbors in what would become Portsmouth.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
And Rebecca Cornell was a very good friend of Anne Hutchinson.
There were friends. They were about the same age, and
I think that that was close ties. The Cornell Land
and the Hutchinson Land grants some of them are close together.
So they were neighbors, and I think that they had
(17:40):
come that far that they were supportives of her, and
they would continue to support her.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It all seemed to be going well until the church
authorities in Boston changed the rules. They decided that they
could pursue people for breaking their laws about religion in
other colonies, not just the Massachusetts Bay colony.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
And so this entitlement to come and take people to
punish them for their own religious beliefs made Anne Hutchinson
very very nervous and made a number of people very
very nervous, and they wanted to move beyond what they
considered the reach of the Puritans, because at this point,
you know, the Civil War in England is raging full on.
(18:26):
Nobody knows who's really going to end up in control
of the government, and that has a huge impact on
how people are going to be treated. So what Anne
and a number of people decide to do is moved
to the New Netherland settlement, which is the area of
New York and New Jersey and part of Long Island.
Speaker 5 (18:50):
She went to the Bronx area, which was a Dutch colony,
and she set up her family. And some of her
family was older and they had stayed behind, but the
younger ones went with her. And Rebecca Cornell and her
husband left Portsmouth, left everything they had in Portsmouth and
went to the Bronx with.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Her and Anne Hutchinson and the Cornells. They really could
have picked a worse time to move.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
This is where the trauma for the Cornells really began.
The history books say that Anne Hutchinson and the others
from Boston got along well with the Native American tribes
in Rhode Island, but in the Dutch colony of New
York things were very different. The Dutch did not have
good relations with the Sewinois of New Netherland, but Anne
(19:41):
evidently thought it was worth the risk.
Speaker 5 (19:44):
Anne was so frightened of the Puritans coming in because
they kept harassing her, and I mean there's no Internet
or social media, but there certainly were letters and people
would hear about the threats, and without her husband. After
(20:06):
her husband died, she felt very vulnerable. So she felt
like she had to go someplace because the Plymouth Colony
is not that far, Boston is not that far, and
she was afraid that they would come and take her.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We aren't sure how long Anne Hutchinson and the Cornells
were in the Bronx.
Speaker 5 (20:27):
But it is time enough that they have a structure,
a building. They've started trying to farm, and I think
they're on a river and it might have been what
we call the Hutchinson River today.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
They couldn't have picked a worse time to move to
New Netherlands because they had just gotten a new governor,
Governor Keift, who decided to make the Native Americans essentially
pay tribute to him and that they weren't paying enough
in taxes. Even though he wasn't their leader, he was
basically a usurper. I don't want to go into too
(21:04):
much of their history, but there were a number of
massacres perpetrated by Dutch people on the Native Americans in
the area, and of course the Native Americans retaliated for sure.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
In the summer of sixteen forty three, Ann and the
Cornells were trying to live in the Dutch colony, fully
aware that the relations between the Dutch and the Native
Americans were really bad and they were getting worse.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The Cornells were at originally what is now Pelham Bay,
and they also had some land across the bay on
Long Island. And when they were starting to build their houses,
which of course you took a long time. There's a
lot of hewing of wood and using axes and no
(21:53):
nails nothing. You know, as long as it takes to
put up a house, now you can just add just
months and months on that.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Anne Hutchinson, whose husband by this time had died, was
also building a house.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
And they were surprised the Native Americans that people were
moving into the area given the state of the situation
with the Dutch settlement of unrest, a lot of unrest,
a lot of violence. And her hired workers reported that
(22:39):
Native Americans came over to them one day and took
their tools from them and put them on the ground
and took them by the shoulders and turned them around
and started marching them away. And this happened at least twice,
and one hired person quit.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Anne's workers took that as a warning from the Native
Americans it was time to leave, but when they told
Anne about it, she responded with little concern.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I'm pretty sure that they were like, here's your warning,
and she was like, I have always had wonderful relationships
with the Native Americans. I have nothing to fear from them.
They have nothing to fear from me. That was she
ris in the highest degree.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
The men went back to building Anne's home, and Anne
assumed it was all going to be fine. They had
been warned, But it wasn't until August of sixteen forty
three that Anne finally realized that she and her family,
as well as the Cornells, should have left the Dutch
colony much sooner, but by then it was too late.
(24:11):
In August of sixteen forty three, Anne Hutchinson and her
family worked inside their still incomplete home. A group of
Seawinoy men, led by their chief, raced into the settlement
and rushed inside the home, where they reportedly scalped the
entire family, including Anne and four of her young children.
(24:33):
One of the girl's nine year old Susannah, was out
picking blueberries when the Seawinoy tracked her down. They spared
her because of her red hair, which was considered unusual.
The story goes that she was eventually ransomed back to
her family members in Boston. Everyone else was dead, including
(24:54):
Anne and the Seawinoi set fire to the home.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
AND's entire family that moved with her were massacred save one.
And this happened at a place known as Split Rock.
The Native Americans came in and killed all the livestock,
the dogs, domestic animals scalped and killed AND's entire family,
except for one girl, Susannah, who was out picking blueberries
(25:25):
and ran and hid in Split Rock.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Rebecca Thomas Cornell and their sixteen year old son, Thomas
Junior were horrified when they saw the fire over Anne
Hutchinson's land.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Their settlement that they were building was about a mile away,
so they were working on that and at that time
they were across the bay, most of them working on
another house in the area, and they saw the smoke
rising from Anne Hutchinson's house, so they set out to
come and try and rescue any survivors.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
The men hopped into boats and rowed toward the Hutchinson house.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
So Thomas Cornell Senior was on the boat.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
I assume every able bodied man who was in the area.
The Cornells, and maybe some other male members of other
families went on that boat to try and rescue or
stop whatever was happening.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
But as they reached the shore, they realized what was happening,
and they frantically tried to retreat.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
They were intercepted by the Native Americans as they were
coming ashore, and luckily they escaped, but two people that
had tried to make the rescue mission were killed. Thomas
Cornell is one of the ones who survived, as is
his eldest son, Thomas Junior.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Thomas and Rebecca Cornell were devastated. Their closest friend and
her family had been massacred. They knew they couldn't stay
in the Dutch colony any longer. It was time to
return to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and to pray that the
church authorities in Boston left them alone.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
They escaped on a booked so they left everything they had.
They had daughters who had married in New York and
stayed in New York, so the Cornells went back, but
some of their family members still stayed.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
So my direct ancestor is Rebecca Cornell Junior, and she
ended up marrying someone in New Amsterdam and staying, and
that's where my line kind of branches off from them.
But Rebecca and Thomas, Rebecca senior and Thomas Senior went
(27:51):
back to Portsmouth. But there was a lot of back
and forth that he did, because he did apply for
a land grant in New Netherlands and ended up getting it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
So despite the massacre, Thomas Cornell still wanted to have
land in the Bronx.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Why would you go back, though, knowing about the tensions
between the Native Americans and the Dutch, why would you continue.
Speaker 7 (28:12):
To try to be there?
Speaker 3 (28:14):
I think money, I think a sense of righteousness. I
think he also he I mean, my ancestor wasn't the
only one who stayed in the area. He had another
son who stayed, and he had another daughter who married
and stayed. So he now had a family in that
area and had this land grant that was just sitting there.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
After the massacre, the Cornells with their eight children returned
to Portsmouth to start anew.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
So they go back to Portsmouth and they are they
petitioned for some land and they're granted about one hundred
acres in Portsmouth on the west side, going up to
near Against Bay.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Thomas Cornell Senior was granted land to establish another tavern
like the one he had owned before they left for
New York.
Speaker 5 (29:10):
There were some problems there because he was granted that
land on provision that he would create a cavern, and
taverns were very important in those days. They were the
meeting spot and there was a lot involved with that.
And you know the fact that he didn't follow through
with his thomis is not very helpful there.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
This irritated the local government, but they didn't take the
land away. Instead, Thomas Cornell built a house for his
wife and their family and they finally settled down.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So what did Thomas Cornell Senior do in Portsmith?
Speaker 3 (29:48):
I think he was just a farmer. He certainly wasn't
a tavern keeper. I think he gave that up. I
think that they were focused on livestock raising livestock. I
think that that was they were familiar with from the
area that they lived in in England, in Essex and
saffron Walden, it was known quite a bit for their
weaving ability, so the cloth that was manufactured there. So
(30:11):
I think that they probably did that.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
We think that weaving was Rebecca's department. She enjoyed using
her loom by the fire at night. The family included
a young man in his twenties named Thomas Cornell Junior.
He's one of the main characters in our story. Do
we know anything.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
About Thomas Cornell Junior when he's younger or kind of
at this point?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
So, there are some records in the New Amsterdam files
that indicate that there was a Thomas Cornell who was
in a militia, and of course that would be something
you know, they would go out and they would fight
the Native Americans and you know, defend in that kind
of thing. And there's a report that he and another
(30:59):
person were arrested for desertion and the other man was
shot and he had a warning shot fired over his head.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Carrie Nolty says she can't be sure about those records,
but the ages do match.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Now, Cornell is not an uncommon name. It could be
that this is an entirely different Thomas Cornell. However, I
think it stands to reason that if you wanted to
assume that it was Thomas Cornell Junior, a young man
who just watched neighbors that he had spent years with,
(31:36):
that he had tight ties with, yet murdered massacred. He
would be filled with some fury and want to go
out and do something, So joining a militia makes sense.
It also makes sense in the sense that we don't
see a record of Thomas Cornell Junior show up back
in Portsmouth until the sixteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Rebecca and Thomas continue to work on the house in
Portsmouth as Thomas Junior helped, So he would have.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
Been in his twenties, and would he have lived with
Thomas Senior and Rebecca at the homestead of this one
hundred acres you're talking.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
About absolutely As the eldest son, he would have been
expected to inherit the bulk of the farmstead. You know,
there is a lot of tension comes in these colonial
families from the divvying up of property once apparent dies,
and it actually is one of the factors that drove
(32:43):
westward expansion is the lack of resources once these areas
started getting settled, so they would move westward in search
of more land, more opportunity, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
It sounds like Thomas j staking his claim working his
father's land in anticipation of inheriting it all when he died.
And in sixteen fifty five, sixty year old Thomas Senior
became ill and then he died.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
Let me go back real quick.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So Thomas Cornell Senior dies.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Mm hm, you know, it's just kind of old age,
sort of for the time, let's say for the time.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Could have been, could have been a heart attack, could
have been anything.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Nothing weird about that.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
The Cornell family patriarch was gone, and the family buried
him right there on the property. The whole family was devastated,
especially his widow, Rebecca Briggs Cornell. They had been married
for more than thirty years. The now twenty eight year
old Thomas Junior comforted his siblings, and Rebecca decided to
(33:53):
stay in the home. What choice did she really have
at this point? We need to fast forward about ten years.
Sometime in his thirties, Thomas Junior married a woman in
New Amsterdam. We don't know anything about her except that
(34:14):
his mother, Rebecca adored her. She and Thomas had four
children before she suddenly passed away from natural causes sometime
before sixteen sixty eight. After losing his wife, Thomas Junior
and the kids moved into Rebecca's home in Portsmouth, staying
on the top floor of the house. Thomas Senior had
(34:35):
not just provided for Thomas Junior, his eldest, but for
all of his kids, and he had provided very well
for his devoted wife, Rebecca.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Rebecca Senior and Thomas Junior are living together as the
eldest son. Thomas Junior inherited most of the property from
Thomas Senior, but there is a provision in the will
that allow Rebecca Senior to stay in the home in
her traditional room, which was the best room of the
(35:06):
house as it was called, and Thomas Junior had to
pay her rent every year.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Thomas Junior needed his mother, but he was also indebted
to her and things didn't seem too easy for him.
More about that later, because it was a big problem. Then,
in sixteen sixty eight, Thomas married another woman named Sarah Earl,
who was from a very famous family. He was forty
(35:35):
one by this time and Sarah was twenty years younger.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
The Earl family is a well known and well respected
family in Portsmouth. At the time, they had children, They
had children. They had two daughters by that time, and
in sixteen seventy three, Sarah Earl was pregnant with her third.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sarah. Thomas and their six kids. Lif lived in the
large house, but on the top floor, while Rebecca had
the entire bottom floor all to herself.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
Do we have an idea of whether or not Thomas
was okay with this arrangement that he gets on the
land and everything, but that his mother has the circumount
of control.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
It sounds like, oh yeah, no, tensions were high.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Thomas Senior died back in sixteen fifty five, and now
we've finally caught up to the main thrust of our story,
which is what happened in February of sixteen seventy three.
Rebecca Cornell held the deed to the house and all
of the land, and even though Thomas Junior was set
to inherit most of it, he had to work the
(36:44):
land without being able to actually control it. Thomas Senior
had wanted security for his wife, and his will made
sure she had it.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
What he did in pointing his will together, That's why
he was trying to take care of her so she
couldn't be cast out, couldn't you know, Like she had
a place, a place of importance, but over time. Over
twenty years, this place of importance becomes just a nexus
point of resentment and anger between Thomas Junior and Rebecca.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
In seventeenth century New England, men ruled society, but in
Thomas Cornell's world, his mother controlled all of it.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
In a patriarchal society, he is supposed to be the man,
he is supposed to be in charge, but she holds
the purse strings and he has to go, for example,
to Rebecca and ask for one hundred pounds loan in
addition to paying her rent to be able to farm
and use the land. And this is set up. The
(37:47):
rent is set up as a part of the will,
so she's deeded the property to him in the future,
but there's a rent aspect to it.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Rebecca Cornell had numerous childrenss the Eastern Coast, but Thomas
was the one living with her.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
One of the things that became a bone of contention
is that Thomas Junior was withholding his rent from his
mother on the condition that she forgave this hundred pound debt,
and it had her in such an emotional uproar that
she actually spoke about it to her neighbors. And these
(38:25):
are very contained people. You know, you don't talk about money,
you don't, you know, say those things.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Rebecca was livid over her son's lack of reverence, and
she complained about it loudly.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
So he wouldn't pay this money back. He wanted it forgiven,
and she wouldn't get the rent from him, and she
needed that rent, that cash at hand, in order to
pay her taxes. So there was this strife going on.
And one of the reasons she didn't want to forgive
it is because, you know, get your money back it's alone.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Rebecca didn't want to drain the inheritance for her other children.
Thomas had to pay her back.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
She didn't want to make things unfair for her other children,
and so she was put between this rock and a
hard place.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
And remember that his second wife, Sarah Earle, was living
there too, and that was another very big problem. Rebecca
Cornell loved her son's first wife, but the second wife,
according to Rebecca, was awful.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
There was just tension up and down. It was an
unhappy home.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Just wait, someone in the Cornell family was going to
die and someone else would be accused of murder. But
who On this season of tenfold more wicked on exactly right.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
The reason is a bit more of ITD is there
were no such thing as funeral homes, so they all
had the front parlors for displaying of the deceased.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
So that most likely is where in Assyria.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah. At one point there's a report that she had
to intervene when Sarah Earl was chasing one of her
step children with an axe.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Oh and she was.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Seventy years old and she had to stop Sarah from
chasing this child with an axe.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
It's insanity.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
It is.
Speaker 7 (40:26):
You can't make the top.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
You really can't. I mean, you see it in so
many men who kill women that how dare you tell
me what to be, how to be? How are you
above me? You are not? And I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
If you love true crime, check out my books American
Sherlock and All that Is Wicked. I also have an
audio book called The Ghost Club. I can't wait to
tell you the real story about the world's most famous
ghost hunter, who was the head of the world's most
famous ghost club and how he investigated England's most famous
(41:11):
haunted house. This has been an exactly right tenfold more
Media production producer Jason Whaling, Senior Producer Alexis and Morosi.
Consulting producer Kyle Ryan, researcher Nicole Brown, sound designer Eric Friend.
Additional sound design by Nicholas Mooney's composer Curtis Heath, artwork
(41:34):
Nick Toga. Executive producers Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Danielle Kramer.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold More Wicked
Tell me the spelling of your person last night, my descendant.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I guess that is how you want to be titled.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Sure. My first name is Carrie C. A R R
I E. My last name is Nolty n Olte, and
I am a descendant of Rebecca Briggs murder victim. And
this is a ghost story.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's creepy.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
It is a ghost story.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Do you believe in ghosts? If you've heard my audio
book The Ghost Club, you know that I do. And
you know why. This season of tenfold More Wicked is
a ghost story set in sixteen hundreds, New England, and
it's about a real death where the star witness and
a murder trial was a spirit.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
He describes feeling some weight on his blanket, like some heaviness,
like something there, and it.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Woke him up. And when he woke up, he saw
what he thought was a spectral figure. He saw a
light and he said, what's you know?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Who's there?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Our story features a man who went on trial for
murder thanks to a ghost that hinted that it knew
who committed murder.
Speaker 6 (01:19):
I think you have the sort of the seeds or
the ground for people to run around saying I am
like the fire or whisperer right, or I can interpret
the dreams of people and help solve crimes based on
what people say happen in their dreams.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
This is the story about bad forensics, about a possible
miscarriage of justice, and some big misunderstandings about fire.
Speaker 5 (01:42):
Just because you've used an accelerate doesn't mean that it's
like the magic sauce to annihilate everything you're trying to burn.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This is the story of a family scarred by past trauma.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
You do get these kind of instances where families kind
of tune themselves and any men that can kill anyone else,
And you do get these relationships between mothers and sons
where it does spill over into violence.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It's about a family forced into a complicated situation where
maybe murder was the only way out.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
He's saying something like, I won't tell if you don't.
I won't bring up this if you don't bring up that.
So that was conspiratorial. There must be something that each
is trying to protect of the other.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Was this murder or was it something else?
Speaker 7 (02:33):
Even the nineteenth century, in case I looked at there's
been so many cases of individuals dying by being set
on fire, and you know it's always accidental. You know,
they've got too close to a candle, They've got too
close to the fire. They've been cooking, and a spark
has set fire to their clothing.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I think that she was stabbed. I think he set
her on fire to cover.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Up the wound. Rebecca Cornell is not portrayed as being
particularly stable either.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
She sounds like she's suffered from depression and suicidal thought.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Tur itself sad, It.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Is very sad.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Everyone has a different opinion. But we'll meet forensic experts
who think they have the answers and they might just
disagree with history.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So it is a story that you you could hear
the same information and still come away with a different idea.
And it's so far back that it's not like we're
going to go back and find the answers, but it's
you know, the questions are always there.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a crime historian and the author
of The Ghost Club, American Sherlock and All That Is Wicked.
And this is our eleventh season of tenfold More Wicked.
This is our oldest story yet. I know I said
that last season when we were in mid seventeen hundreds Virginia.
But this time we're traveling even further back to Rhode
(04:01):
Island in sixteen seventy three. Believe it or not, people
still care about this case. I call this season fire
and Brimstone. I know, sixteen seventy three already seems like
so long ago, but for historical context, we need to
(04:25):
travel back even further to England. Let's talk about the
origins of the famous Cornell family, as in the Cornell
University Cornells. The main character of this story is Rebecca Briggs. Cornell.
Women really play a big role here, and they might
be the heroes or they might be the villains. Carrie
(04:46):
Nolty is the family descendant who brought me this story.
I always need one of those to make tenfold, well tenfold.
Carrie's from Rebecca's line of the family, the Briggs, not
Rebecca's husband Thomas Cornell's side, Harry works at Brown University
and she's a longtime listener, and thankfully she accompanied me
when I visited all of the important locations in this story.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
I finally traced on my dad's side our lineage back
here to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and the Cornells and looking
at one of the websites, I think it was Genie
dot com. It had an entire just paragraphs and paragraphs
about the family.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Before this story became a historic Rhode Island murder case,
the Cornell family had already endured its share of trauma.
So let's start back in England where Rebecca and Thomas
Cornell first married. Well, let's start with what you know
about the Cornell family, because they were a pretty important
family in.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
The northeast, I mean all the way from the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
So the Cornells came from Essex, the Essex area, saffron
Walden in England. They came over in sixteen thirty eight
thirty nine, and they had plenty of kids by that time,
and they were still having kids. Actually, I believe that
Rebecca was pregnant and she gave birth to her son
(06:13):
John when she was here.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
So she is initially married to Thomas Cornell seniors.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Oh yes, okay, And they start out in England and
then they moved to they moved to Boston. And why
do you think they made the move or why did
anybody make them move?
Speaker 5 (06:29):
Then?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Well, first of all, I mean there was the religious separatists,
so a lot of people would call them Puritans, and
they do kind of fall into that sort of category,
but the Puritans were much more stringent. Like when we
think of Puritans, we think of the people that came
and settled at Plymouth, and that was not them.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Carrie says that the Cornells came from England to America
or what would become America during what is known as
the Great Migration. These were Puritans leaning separatist groups that
came over. They wanted to worship the way they wanted
to worship and live in communities that allowed that type
of worship. The Cornells wanted out of England, and so
(07:11):
they left and arrived in Boston.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And there's a lot of politics, a lot of money
going on, but it's also a real just family fight
between Anglicans, the Church of England, who had a lot
of what they call papist and papal influences, so you know,
fancy altars, fancy stained glass and all that kind of stuff,
(07:34):
and the Puritan people wanted all the fancy stuff to go.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Gloria Schmidt is a local historian who is an expert
in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which is where most of this
story takes place. She says that we need to talk
about religion a lot for context.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
It's all important, and it's a framework. And I think
you can't understand this story of what happens without understanding
the spiritual ramifications of what is going on.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And this is around the same time as the Salem
witch trials, right, it's.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
About fifty years before. That is certainly something that will influence,
like everything that's going on now becomes something that influences
the Salem witch trials later on. And how people sort
of reacted.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Gloria says that the Puritans were finicky about their religion
and other religions.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Well, that's interesting. They would say that they would want
freedom of religion, but what they wanted was freedom of
religion or their religion and not necessarily for anybody else.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So there are people that they wanted to practice their faith,
but they wanted their faith to be the dominant one.
I think that the Pilgrims were not as virulent about it.
They were separatists. They wanted to be apart. I think
that you had a lot of people that had no
(09:05):
real opportunities in England, and so they would see America
as a place where they might own land.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
After Rebecca and Thomas arrived in Boston, they needed to
support their family. They were both illiterate, but at least
one of their children had been educated in England. Carrie
Nolty says that they likely picked a profession that involved
working with their hands, as many Puritan families did in
the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
They were more likely people who worked with cloth, so
they were probably weavers, that kind of thing. They probably
had skill in that area. That's one of the reasons
that they ran into trouble when they came to Boston
because they didn't have sort of a mercantile experience.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Thomas had several ideas for work, and weaving was not
what he wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So when they got to Boston, one of the things
that they first tried to do was to run a tavern.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
But was this.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Unusual for people who were high us.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
So taverns were, you know, there were places, there were
meeting places. Kind of in terms of the social order,
they're primarily a meeting place and actually later on it
just had multifunction so and it was also for people
who were coming in didn't have places to stay and.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
A lot of the time you couldn't even trust drinking water.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
The amount of alcohol was much much less in the beers,
in the ciders, and the kinds of things that they
would drink. They would make things like grog, so that
you know, you'd put in some hard alcohol and it
would kind of kill whatever was lurking in there that
you just didn't know was there.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
So it was really a focal point of colonial life,
and actually a focal point of all life back in
Europe as well.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But Thomas Senior's efforts at being a tavern keeper only
lasted a year or two before he began and making
some mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
That didn't go very well. Apparently, Thomas Senior was fined
by the authorities for putting too much alcohol into his brew,
and he didn't know to not do that, and he
didn't know that you weren't supposed to do certain things.
And he actually went before the court and pleaded ignorance
(11:22):
of this, and so they reduced his fine, but they
said you cannot be a tavern keeper anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Thomas lost the tavern and he and Rebecca discussed it,
struggling to decide what to do next. It turns out
that around the same time as they had opened the tavern,
the Cornells had met a very special woman named Anne Hutchinson.
Have you heard of the Hutchinson Parkway in New York?
It was named after Anne and her family. Anne was
(11:57):
unusual because she was at educated in the sixteen hundreds
when women really.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
Weren't in England. She was a follower of one of
the ministers that went to Boston, and so she and
her husband and their family. She had quite a large family.
She had fifteen children altogether and they came over and
her husband was a was a merchant. She had a
(12:23):
big house. She would start gathering people to discuss the
sermons the day after Sunday.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
She basically has these meeting groups in her home where
they're discussing things, and you know, she was an electrifying speaker,
and a lot of her ideas she really starts running
a foul of the Puritan leaders at that time.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
The Puritan ministers didn't like that. There was a belief
that God sent his messages through the male ministers, and
in Anne's meetings in the beginning, they were all women.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
But then their husbands started coming to this and at
that particular point, the ministers were afraid, afraid that she
would send the wrong message. And in their culture, God
acts on the community as a whole, so if someone
was not following God's laws or God's way, the whole
(13:20):
community would be impacted with a hurricane or something like that.
So it was very important to keep everybody tightly under control.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But Anne was not one of those people you could
keep tightly under control. She believed that the Holy Spirit
talked to the individual, not through the minister. And this
is a very important concept, one that drew a lot
of people to her.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
And Rebecca Briggs Cornell and her husband twelve Yeah, no,
are going to these meetings and there.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
They're going to these meetings. There is a reference in
one of the books that I read to Thomas, you know,
kind of being told to stop talking about it in
public because they were really actually trying to control a
lot of the speech. And you could back then, we
didn't have, you know, freedom of speech the way that
you know is espoused in the Bill of Rights and.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
All that stuff. In the country.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
No, we weren't.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We were We were a colony and we were English,
and all of those practices and social norms and laws applied.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
The ministers in New England complained about Anne Hutchinson and
her meetings, but the Cornells found her intelligent and brazen
and spiritual, as did many others. Eventually, Anne was arrested.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
She had two trials. She had a trial in the
in the church, and she had a civil trial. And
you know, at that particular time, if you weren't a
church member, you you couldn't vote, you couldn't have a business,
you wouldn't own land. So being a member of the
church was all important. And those people that started following
(14:58):
her started to lose all those things. They lost their arms,
they lost their vote, they lost their positions.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
I mean, one of the things about this this time
period is that the religious and the political are almost
never separate. And the experience of creating new governments, new
settlements in these areas, and the marriage of politics and religion,
(15:27):
government and religion and the problems that they caused is
foundational to the United States.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Anne was convicted and then banished from Boston. From there,
she and her husband traveled sixty miles south to the
area known as Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and is considered one
of the founders of Portsmouth. Other people decided to follow
her there too, and after they lost the tavern that
had supported their family in Boston, Thomas and Rebecca Cornell
(15:56):
decided to join them.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
There was a band that got together and they wrote
what we call the Compact, and they were pledging their
lives to be under God, but not necessarily under the Church.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Anne and her group had the help of Roger Williams,
a Puritan minister who had also been banished. Williams is
credited with founding the colony of Rhode Island. They scouted
around the area and eventually negotiated for a Quidneck Island
where they planned to settle. But the Pilgrims and the
Puritans had no real control over the land because it
(16:34):
was occupied by a Native American group called the Narragansetts.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Now the Native Americans wouldn't have thought that they were selling.
They thought more in terms of sharing the land. Well,
we'll use it this time, and you know, maybe two
years from now we'll be using it. But there was
an actual transaction and actual signatures and not just going
(16:59):
in and taking the land. So, as I said, there
had been good relationships in general between the Narragansetts and
the people that came to Portsmouth.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
This will become important, but for now, the Hutchinson's and
the Cornells were neighbors in what would become Portsmouth.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
And Rebecca Cornell was a very good friend of Anne Hutchinson.
There were friends. They were about the same age, and
I think that that was close ties. The Cornell Land
and the Hutchinson Land grants some of them are close together.
So they were neighbors, and I think that they had
(17:40):
come that far that they were supportives of her, and
they would continue to support her.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It all seemed to be going well until the church
authorities in Boston changed the rules. They decided that they
could pursue people for breaking their laws about religion in
other colonies, not just the Massachusetts Bay colony.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
And so this entitlement to come and take people to
punish them for their own religious beliefs made Anne Hutchinson
very very nervous and made a number of people very
very nervous, and they wanted to move beyond what they
considered the reach of the Puritans, because at this point,
you know, the Civil War in England is raging full on.
(18:26):
Nobody knows who's really going to end up in control
of the government, and that has a huge impact on
how people are going to be treated. So what Anne
and a number of people decide to do is moved
to the New Netherland settlement, which is the area of
New York and New Jersey and part of Long Island.
Speaker 5 (18:50):
She went to the Bronx area, which was a Dutch colony,
and she set up her family. And some of her
family was older and they had stayed behind, but the
younger ones went with her. And Rebecca Cornell and her
husband left Portsmouth, left everything they had in Portsmouth and
went to the Bronx with.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Her and Anne Hutchinson and the Cornells. They really could
have picked a worse time to move.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
This is where the trauma for the Cornells really began.
The history books say that Anne Hutchinson and the others
from Boston got along well with the Native American tribes
in Rhode Island, but in the Dutch colony of New
York things were very different. The Dutch did not have
good relations with the Sewinois of New Netherland, but Anne
(19:41):
evidently thought it was worth the risk.
Speaker 5 (19:44):
Anne was so frightened of the Puritans coming in because
they kept harassing her, and I mean there's no Internet
or social media, but there certainly were letters and people
would hear about the threats, and without her husband. After
(20:06):
her husband died, she felt very vulnerable. So she felt
like she had to go someplace because the Plymouth Colony
is not that far, Boston is not that far, and
she was afraid that they would come and take her.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We aren't sure how long Anne Hutchinson and the Cornells
were in the Bronx.
Speaker 5 (20:27):
But it is time enough that they have a structure,
a building. They've started trying to farm, and I think
they're on a river and it might have been what
we call the Hutchinson River today.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
They couldn't have picked a worse time to move to
New Netherlands because they had just gotten a new governor,
Governor Keift, who decided to make the Native Americans essentially
pay tribute to him and that they weren't paying enough
in taxes. Even though he wasn't their leader, he was
basically a usurper. I don't want to go into too
(21:04):
much of their history, but there were a number of
massacres perpetrated by Dutch people on the Native Americans in
the area, and of course the Native Americans retaliated for sure.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
In the summer of sixteen forty three, Ann and the
Cornells were trying to live in the Dutch colony, fully
aware that the relations between the Dutch and the Native
Americans were really bad and they were getting worse.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The Cornells were at originally what is now Pelham Bay,
and they also had some land across the bay on
Long Island. And when they were starting to build their houses,
which of course you took a long time. There's a
lot of hewing of wood and using axes and no
(21:53):
nails nothing. You know, as long as it takes to
put up a house, now you can just add just
months and months on that.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Anne Hutchinson, whose husband by this time had died, was
also building a house.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
And they were surprised the Native Americans that people were
moving into the area given the state of the situation
with the Dutch settlement of unrest, a lot of unrest,
a lot of violence. And her hired workers reported that
(22:39):
Native Americans came over to them one day and took
their tools from them and put them on the ground
and took them by the shoulders and turned them around
and started marching them away. And this happened at least twice,
and one hired person quit.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Anne's workers took that as a warning from the Native
Americans it was time to leave, but when they told
Anne about it, she responded with little concern.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I'm pretty sure that they were like, here's your warning,
and she was like, I have always had wonderful relationships
with the Native Americans. I have nothing to fear from them.
They have nothing to fear from me. That was she
ris in the highest degree.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
The men went back to building Anne's home, and Anne
assumed it was all going to be fine. They had
been warned, But it wasn't until August of sixteen forty
three that Anne finally realized that she and her family,
as well as the Cornells, should have left the Dutch
colony much sooner, but by then it was too late.
(24:11):
In August of sixteen forty three, Anne Hutchinson and her
family worked inside their still incomplete home. A group of
Seawinoy men, led by their chief, raced into the settlement
and rushed inside the home, where they reportedly scalped the
entire family, including Anne and four of her young children.
(24:33):
One of the girl's nine year old Susannah, was out
picking blueberries when the Seawinoy tracked her down. They spared
her because of her red hair, which was considered unusual.
The story goes that she was eventually ransomed back to
her family members in Boston. Everyone else was dead, including
(24:54):
Anne and the Seawinoi set fire to the home.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
AND's entire family that moved with her were massacred save one.
And this happened at a place known as Split Rock.
The Native Americans came in and killed all the livestock,
the dogs, domestic animals scalped and killed AND's entire family,
except for one girl, Susannah, who was out picking blueberries
(25:25):
and ran and hid in Split Rock.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Rebecca Thomas Cornell and their sixteen year old son, Thomas
Junior were horrified when they saw the fire over Anne
Hutchinson's land.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Their settlement that they were building was about a mile away,
so they were working on that and at that time
they were across the bay, most of them working on
another house in the area, and they saw the smoke
rising from Anne Hutchinson's house, so they set out to
come and try and rescue any survivors.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
The men hopped into boats and rowed toward the Hutchinson house.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
So Thomas Cornell Senior was on the boat.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
I assume every able bodied man who was in the area.
The Cornells, and maybe some other male members of other
families went on that boat to try and rescue or
stop whatever was happening.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
But as they reached the shore, they realized what was happening,
and they frantically tried to retreat.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
They were intercepted by the Native Americans as they were
coming ashore, and luckily they escaped, but two people that
had tried to make the rescue mission were killed. Thomas
Cornell is one of the ones who survived, as is
his eldest son, Thomas Junior.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Thomas and Rebecca Cornell were devastated. Their closest friend and
her family had been massacred. They knew they couldn't stay
in the Dutch colony any longer. It was time to
return to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and to pray that the
church authorities in Boston left them alone.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
They escaped on a booked so they left everything they had.
They had daughters who had married in New York and
stayed in New York, so the Cornells went back, but
some of their family members still stayed.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
So my direct ancestor is Rebecca Cornell Junior, and she
ended up marrying someone in New Amsterdam and staying, and
that's where my line kind of branches off from them.
But Rebecca and Thomas, Rebecca senior and Thomas Senior went
(27:51):
back to Portsmouth. But there was a lot of back
and forth that he did, because he did apply for
a land grant in New Netherlands and ended up getting it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
So despite the massacre, Thomas Cornell still wanted to have
land in the Bronx.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Why would you go back, though, knowing about the tensions
between the Native Americans and the Dutch, why would you continue.
Speaker 7 (28:12):
To try to be there?
Speaker 3 (28:14):
I think money, I think a sense of righteousness. I
think he also he I mean, my ancestor wasn't the
only one who stayed in the area. He had another
son who stayed, and he had another daughter who married
and stayed. So he now had a family in that
area and had this land grant that was just sitting there.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
After the massacre, the Cornells with their eight children returned
to Portsmouth to start anew.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
So they go back to Portsmouth and they are they
petitioned for some land and they're granted about one hundred
acres in Portsmouth on the west side, going up to
near Against Bay.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Thomas Cornell Senior was granted land to establish another tavern
like the one he had owned before they left for
New York.
Speaker 5 (29:10):
There were some problems there because he was granted that
land on provision that he would create a cavern, and
taverns were very important in those days. They were the
meeting spot and there was a lot involved with that.
And you know the fact that he didn't follow through
with his thomis is not very helpful there.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
This irritated the local government, but they didn't take the
land away. Instead, Thomas Cornell built a house for his
wife and their family and they finally settled down.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So what did Thomas Cornell Senior do in Portsmith?
Speaker 3 (29:48):
I think he was just a farmer. He certainly wasn't
a tavern keeper. I think he gave that up. I
think that they were focused on livestock raising livestock. I
think that that was they were familiar with from the
area that they lived in in England, in Essex and
saffron Walden, it was known quite a bit for their
weaving ability, so the cloth that was manufactured there. So
(30:11):
I think that they probably did that.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
We think that weaving was Rebecca's department. She enjoyed using
her loom by the fire at night. The family included
a young man in his twenties named Thomas Cornell Junior.
He's one of the main characters in our story. Do
we know anything.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
About Thomas Cornell Junior when he's younger or kind of
at this point?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
So, there are some records in the New Amsterdam files
that indicate that there was a Thomas Cornell who was
in a militia, and of course that would be something
you know, they would go out and they would fight
the Native Americans and you know, defend in that kind
of thing. And there's a report that he and another
(30:59):
person were arrested for desertion and the other man was
shot and he had a warning shot fired over his head.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Carrie Nolty says she can't be sure about those records,
but the ages do match.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Now, Cornell is not an uncommon name. It could be
that this is an entirely different Thomas Cornell. However, I
think it stands to reason that if you wanted to
assume that it was Thomas Cornell Junior, a young man
who just watched neighbors that he had spent years with,
(31:36):
that he had tight ties with, yet murdered massacred. He
would be filled with some fury and want to go
out and do something, So joining a militia makes sense.
It also makes sense in the sense that we don't
see a record of Thomas Cornell Junior show up back
in Portsmouth until the sixteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Rebecca and Thomas continue to work on the house in
Portsmouth as Thomas Junior helped, So he would have.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
Been in his twenties, and would he have lived with
Thomas Senior and Rebecca at the homestead of this one
hundred acres you're talking.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
About absolutely As the eldest son, he would have been
expected to inherit the bulk of the farmstead. You know,
there is a lot of tension comes in these colonial
families from the divvying up of property once apparent dies,
and it actually is one of the factors that drove
(32:43):
westward expansion is the lack of resources once these areas
started getting settled, so they would move westward in search
of more land, more opportunity, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
It sounds like Thomas j staking his claim working his
father's land in anticipation of inheriting it all when he died.
And in sixteen fifty five, sixty year old Thomas Senior
became ill and then he died.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
Let me go back real quick.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So Thomas Cornell Senior dies.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Mm hm, you know, it's just kind of old age,
sort of for the time, let's say for the time.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Could have been, could have been a heart attack, could
have been anything.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Nothing weird about that.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
The Cornell family patriarch was gone, and the family buried
him right there on the property. The whole family was devastated,
especially his widow, Rebecca Briggs Cornell. They had been married
for more than thirty years. The now twenty eight year
old Thomas Junior comforted his siblings, and Rebecca decided to
(33:53):
stay in the home. What choice did she really have
at this point? We need to fast forward about ten years.
Sometime in his thirties, Thomas Junior married a woman in
New Amsterdam. We don't know anything about her except that
(34:14):
his mother, Rebecca adored her. She and Thomas had four
children before she suddenly passed away from natural causes sometime
before sixteen sixty eight. After losing his wife, Thomas Junior
and the kids moved into Rebecca's home in Portsmouth, staying
on the top floor of the house. Thomas Senior had
(34:35):
not just provided for Thomas Junior, his eldest, but for
all of his kids, and he had provided very well
for his devoted wife, Rebecca.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Rebecca Senior and Thomas Junior are living together as the
eldest son. Thomas Junior inherited most of the property from
Thomas Senior, but there is a provision in the will
that allow Rebecca Senior to stay in the home in
her traditional room, which was the best room of the
(35:06):
house as it was called, and Thomas Junior had to
pay her rent every year.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Thomas Junior needed his mother, but he was also indebted
to her and things didn't seem too easy for him.
More about that later, because it was a big problem. Then,
in sixteen sixty eight, Thomas married another woman named Sarah Earl,
who was from a very famous family. He was forty
(35:35):
one by this time and Sarah was twenty years younger.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
The Earl family is a well known and well respected
family in Portsmouth. At the time, they had children, They
had children. They had two daughters by that time, and
in sixteen seventy three, Sarah Earl was pregnant with her third.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sarah. Thomas and their six kids. Lif lived in the
large house, but on the top floor, while Rebecca had
the entire bottom floor all to herself.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
Do we have an idea of whether or not Thomas
was okay with this arrangement that he gets on the
land and everything, but that his mother has the circumount
of control.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
It sounds like, oh yeah, no, tensions were high.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Thomas Senior died back in sixteen fifty five, and now
we've finally caught up to the main thrust of our story,
which is what happened in February of sixteen seventy three.
Rebecca Cornell held the deed to the house and all
of the land, and even though Thomas Junior was set
to inherit most of it, he had to work the
(36:44):
land without being able to actually control it. Thomas Senior
had wanted security for his wife, and his will made
sure she had it.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
What he did in pointing his will together, That's why
he was trying to take care of her so she
couldn't be cast out, couldn't you know, Like she had
a place, a place of importance, but over time. Over
twenty years, this place of importance becomes just a nexus
point of resentment and anger between Thomas Junior and Rebecca.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
In seventeenth century New England, men ruled society, but in
Thomas Cornell's world, his mother controlled all of it.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
In a patriarchal society, he is supposed to be the man,
he is supposed to be in charge, but she holds
the purse strings and he has to go, for example,
to Rebecca and ask for one hundred pounds loan in
addition to paying her rent to be able to farm
and use the land. And this is set up. The
(37:47):
rent is set up as a part of the will,
so she's deeded the property to him in the future,
but there's a rent aspect to it.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Rebecca Cornell had numerous childrenss the Eastern Coast, but Thomas
was the one living with her.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
One of the things that became a bone of contention
is that Thomas Junior was withholding his rent from his
mother on the condition that she forgave this hundred pound debt,
and it had her in such an emotional uproar that
she actually spoke about it to her neighbors. And these
(38:25):
are very contained people. You know, you don't talk about money,
you don't, you know, say those things.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Rebecca was livid over her son's lack of reverence, and
she complained about it loudly.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
So he wouldn't pay this money back. He wanted it forgiven,
and she wouldn't get the rent from him, and she
needed that rent, that cash at hand, in order to
pay her taxes. So there was this strife going on.
And one of the reasons she didn't want to forgive
it is because, you know, get your money back it's alone.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Rebecca didn't want to drain the inheritance for her other children.
Thomas had to pay her back.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
She didn't want to make things unfair for her other children,
and so she was put between this rock and a
hard place.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
And remember that his second wife, Sarah Earle, was living
there too, and that was another very big problem. Rebecca
Cornell loved her son's first wife, but the second wife,
according to Rebecca, was awful.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
There was just tension up and down. It was an
unhappy home.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Just wait, someone in the Cornell family was going to
die and someone else would be accused of murder. But
who On this season of tenfold more wicked on exactly right.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
The reason is a bit more of ITD is there
were no such thing as funeral homes, so they all
had the front parlors for displaying of the deceased.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
So that most likely is where in Assyria.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah. At one point there's a report that she had
to intervene when Sarah Earl was chasing one of her
step children with an axe.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Oh and she was.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Seventy years old and she had to stop Sarah from
chasing this child with an axe.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
It's insanity.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
It is.
Speaker 7 (40:26):
You can't make the top.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
You really can't. I mean, you see it in so
many men who kill women that how dare you tell
me what to be, how to be? How are you
above me? You are not? And I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
If you love true crime, check out my books American
Sherlock and All that Is Wicked. I also have an
audio book called The Ghost Club. I can't wait to
tell you the real story about the world's most famous
ghost hunter, who was the head of the world's most
famous ghost club and how he investigated England's most famous
(41:11):
haunted house. This has been an exactly right tenfold more
Media production producer Jason Whaling, Senior Producer Alexis and Morosi.
Consulting producer Kyle Ryan, researcher Nicole Brown, sound designer Eric Friend.
Additional sound design by Nicholas Mooney's composer Curtis Heath, artwork
(41:34):
Nick Toga. Executive producers Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Danielle Kramer.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold More Wicked
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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