December 17, 2025 • 49 mins
Is The Witch of Blackbird Pond historical fact or beloved fiction? Museum educators Martha Smart and Gillie Johnson from the Wethersfield Historical Society pull back the curtain on Elizabeth George Speare's classic novel by revealing what she got right and what she invented. This episode demonstrates why Connecticut's real witch trials deserve more attention than they've gotten.
Discover the true story of Katherine Harrison, whose 1669 witch trial revealed the dangerous reality for independent women in Puritan Connecticut. Learn why Gershom Bulkeley, a real historical figure who appears in the novel helped end witch executions in Connecticut by declaring he'd seen no legally proven case of witchcraft.
From the Charter Oak legend to the history of slavery in colonial Connecticut, this conversation goes far beyond the novel to explore what life was really like in 1680s Wethersfield and whose stories have been left out of the history books.
The real Katherine Harrison witch trial and how it differed from the novel's dramatic courtroom scene
Why Connecticut's witch trials ended decades before Salem's panic began
How The Witch of Blackbird Pond has shaped—and sometimes distorted—Wethersfield's historical identity
What Elizabeth George Speare got wrong about Puritan social customs, trade, and the treatment of outsiders
The truth behind the Charter Oak legend and Connecticut's resistance to British rule
Martha Smart - Research and Reference Librarian, Wethersfield Historical Society
Gillie Johnson - Museum Educator, Wethersfield Historical Society
Learn more at wethersfieldhistory.org, where you can explore their database of people of color in Wethersfield's history.
Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Connecticut's colonial-era witch trials, including the 1669 case of Katherine Harrison in Wethersfield, form an important part of the state's historical narrative, though they remain less widely recognized than their Salem counterparts.
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Purchase the book: The Witch of Blackbird Pond from our nonprofit bookshop
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
In today's episode, we discuss the classic children's novel The
Witch of Blackbird Pond with Gilly Johnson and Martha Smart
of Connecticut's Wethersfield Historical Society.
Wethersfield, CT is the setting of this classic and enduringly
(00:20):
popular work of historical fiction, and also a community
where real witchcraft accusations were made during the
Connecticut witch trials. Author Elizabeth George Spears
beloved 1958 novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond has made 17th
century Wethersfield a lasting part of American literary
(00:41):
heritage, introducing generations of readers to
colonial Connecticut life. The town's actual history
includes the real 1669 witch trial of Catherine Harrison, a
widow whose case revealed the dangers faced by independent
women at that time. While Connecticut's witch trials
(01:01):
predate Salem's more famous persecution, they remain A
lesser known but significant chapter in the state's history.
Let's welcome Gilly and Martha to the show and hear what
they're doing to highlight the lesser known history of
Wethersfield. Welcome to the Thing about Witch
Hunts podcast. Gilly Johnson and Martha Smart,
(01:23):
please tell us about yourselves and what you do for the
Wethersfield Historical Society.Hello, I'm Gilly Johnson.
I am the museum educator here atWethersfield Historical Society.
So that means I'm in charge of field trips that happened here
in Wethersfield to our museum building.
We have a number of students every year from not only
(01:45):
Wethersfield but also other towns who come learn more about
colonial history, the American Revolution, or other aspects of
weather, scale history. And as you can imagine, the
Witch of Blackbird Pond is always popular.
Especially. Now, yes, around in the now in
the fall, yeah. We like to think of ourselves
(02:07):
and then we have become in some way Salem Light or Salem on the
cheap because a lot of people come here rather than going to
Salem. This is Jesus.
Because if you're in Connecticut, it's less costly to
have the bus drive to Salem thanto Wethersfield.
(02:28):
So I'm Martha Smart. I am the research librarian,
research and reference librarianhere, as well as doing library
duties. I answer a lot of questions
about Connecticut history and genealogy and my background is
not colonial American history, but European history of the 18th
(02:50):
century feeds him nicely to whatwe are doing here.
And we tried to answer all questions that we get.
We do answer all questions that we get and sometimes that deals
with going up to the town and searching land records and
(03:12):
genealogy records that we have here and hopefully we learned
something too in our research. What would you like for people
to know about Wethersfield and the Historical Society?
So Wethersfield is one of Connecticut's oldest town.
(03:33):
People in Wethersfield will tellyou that we are the oldest town
in Connecticut, but people in Windsor will disagree with that
statement. In our museum building, we have
a box from the 1930s that Windsor sent to Wethersfield,
and on the box that says to old Wethersfield from older Windsor.
(03:56):
So there's been. A long.
Rivalry between Wethersfield andWindsor over who's actually
older. The thing is, it's kind of a
ridiculous argument because within just a couple of years,
Hartford, Wethersfield and Windsor were established as the
Connecticut colony. And one of my chief concerns is
(04:22):
when people arrive or when they come in, they know nothing about
the religious background of the Puritans, who these people were
and what they believed in and how they came to be here.
I think that's based to understanding Wethersfield's
history, so we do as much education here and answering
(04:45):
research questions as we do spreading the word about
Wethersfield. So that's one of the big things
that Wethersfield Historical Society educating people.
And part of our mission is to serve and promote Wethersfield
history, to inspire people todayand tomorrow.
And we believe in sharing all ofWethersfield's history, not just
(05:10):
the history of white people lived here in Wethersfield,
everybody. So that's very important to us.
Yeah, the forgotten people, because there was quite a
history of slavery here, and there's quite a bit of Native
American history here that nobody seems to emphasize.
(05:31):
So we we try to do the whole history.
Yes, because that's complete. That's the true picture.
Not just that you had some man sister, it could have been a
Gentry in England who came over here and did marvelous things.
Not always true. The people that were here, not
(05:55):
because they were here. Rizwani and other people were
not here because they wanted to be here because they were seized
and brought here as slaves. History is complicated and we
try and share that with people, both the good and the bad.
Yeah, American history is especially complicated, and now
(06:18):
there seems to be a push back about burying it again.
So we try not to let that happen.
That's our mission. It's one of our missions.
And we have spent the last how many years gleaning from the
records the people who are slaves here, the people of color
(06:45):
and. You've spent decades.
Doing that research and an independent researcher started
the whole thing, Diane Cameron. Diane Cameron.
And we've built on that and now Gilly has put online what we
found. So there is a database, if
anybody wants to access it, about people of color that were
(07:08):
here in Wethersfield over the years.
Wethersfieldhistory.org is our website and that's where our
database is located. And that's an aspect of the
George Spears, the Witch of Blackbird Pond that she does not
go as much into the whole aspectthat there was slavery here in
Wethersfield. She alludes to it briefly, but
(07:28):
it's not something that she goesdeep into.
She just touches on it and the biggest fallacy is the back and
forth between Kit and Nate Nat, who is the son of the owner of
the ship that brings her to Wethersfield, about the horses,
the smell of horses in the holeswhile those horses and what he
(07:51):
was doing there. We had a very real connection to
slavery. The trade with the West Indies
from the northern colonies, including Connecticut and
Wethersfield was the seaport. They provisioned those slave
colonies, sugar colonies, because they raised nothing but
(08:12):
sugar, which was the cash crop for both the English Empire and
the French Empire and the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And that's a big right in the beginning.
That's a big, big fallacy, the attitude that people who were
(08:32):
trading with the West Indies andnot bringing back slaves were
free of that stigma of supporting slavery.
I just want to clarify and this is a piece of fictional
literature. I know a lot of people are
familiar with this book, but what do we need to know right
(08:55):
off the top about this fiction? Well, first of all that it is a
work of fiction, so it was is not trying to tell a 100%
factual story about the witch trials here in Wethersfield.
So a little background on her writing the novel The Witch of
Blackbird Pond. She published it after her first
(09:17):
novel, Calico Captain, and afterwriting Calico Captain,
Elizabeth George Speer decided that she wanted to write another
novel in her hometown of Wethersfield.
And she self admittedly was not a historian.
And so her research process she referred to as a greedy,
(09:37):
indiscriminate forage through novels, genealogies,
geographies, and a whole bunch of other different works.
So this was never meant to be a 100% historically accurate work.
It's a very good novel, but it is a work of fiction.
So that's what people need to know, right?
(09:58):
Yeah, that is that. Don't expect it to be 100%
accurate. And that's what we stressed when
we come here. It's a work of fiction.
It's not history. A lot of her facts don't jibe
and enjoy it as a work of fiction coming of age.
Yeah. She writes a good book that way.
(10:20):
It's a coming of age book. It's a theme of alienation,
growing tolerant both on her part and on her family's part
and maybe the town kit. She's the heroine of the book in
most respects. Well, as they say, there are a
(10:41):
lot of things in there that justare not historically correct.
And I think part of, in my personal opinion, part of the
novel, Strength is hit as a heroine.
I think she very much is a modern woman, not a 1600s woman.
But this being a children's book, I think that's a great way
(11:02):
to engage the kids with the history is if you have someone
who they can relate to, like kids, it helps them to
understand this world that she'sgoing through.
And I think that Elizabeth George Spear does a very good
job with that. Yes, I think Miss Young
teenagers have great recognitionof what she was going through.
(11:24):
Not that they have a family thatis Puritan, or maybe in some
cases at least they are. But yeah, how do you fit
yourself into this world that seems a little bit alienated
from where you are? And she was poster child for
(11:44):
that, a spoiled child coming from the West Indies, where it
was totally different to Wethersfield where the Puritans
were in control, Puritan mentality and beliefs.
And one of the things that kind of sticks in micro when she goes
(12:07):
to the church and she sees the whipping post and the stalks in
front of the church and she shudders.
I don't think a girl who grew upon a sugar plantation in
Barbados, which had the worst abuses of slavery in the Western
Hemisphere, would have even banned the eyelash at that.
(12:31):
But she's trying to set her apart from these people who are
up here and it time she does that, she recoils as something
they're doing up here. And she is definitely alienated
not only from the society at large around her, but in some
(12:54):
members of her family that she has chosen to run away from
Barbados and join them up here on and out.
Yeah. I mean, we, like Kit, are the
outsiders of this world. So we are coming, just like Kit
is coming to understand this world.
We as the reader are also comingto understand the world.
(13:16):
So I think Kit is a very helpfulheroine in helping us as modern
readers to understand this very different world from our own.
Yes, I think you're right and it's a gradual process of her
going into her own toleration and them also being tolerant of
(13:38):
her. So it's a growth in both
directions and that's one of thestrengths of the Red novel.
I think. It isn't all one sided at first
it is, but you see growth after a while.
You do, and we've heard from a lot of people that they've read
(14:04):
this with their classes. Why is The Witch of Blackbird
Pond so popular with teachers? Why is it such a staple in
classrooms? I think.
It's largely because it does paya good picture of that era or
attempts to paint a good picture, and it's a way of
(14:26):
getting people into young peopleinterested in history because it
touches on witchcraft, which wasa real thing here in
Wethersfield. It touches on Puritans who are
here and maybe some people will pick up some information about
the Puritans who they were, and also touches on the history of
(14:52):
not just Wethersfield, but the Connecticut colony.
When James the Second in Englanddecided to amalgamate New York
and the New England colonies, sent to one big colony and sent
Governor Andros here to get the charter.
(15:13):
Supposedly he didn't need to getthe charter.
Really all he needed was the submission of the government,
which he got. But then out of that grew that
legend about the charter being hidden in the charter row and
the candles being bone out, etcetera, etcetera and so forth
and the re establishment of government under that charter
(15:36):
after James was chased out of England and Andrew was arrested
up in Massachusetts. So it's a spoonful of sugar, if
you will, leading into the history, and it might lead
people to study young people to study more about that history.
(15:58):
Yeah. So I think you're right that
that's one of the reasons for its popularity amongst that good
window into this early history. I think also people are at least
the school groups we have had have mentioned how they really
love the ending of the novel with the witch file.
That's the very dramatic sectionof the book.
And that's something that appeals to both the teachers and
(16:21):
the students. They both.
Groups love that. Part of the novel.
Yeah, there's a good resolution,yeah.
It's always the worst when you're reading a book and then
you've gone so invested into it and then it has a terrible
ending. Like I I read The Mill on the
(16:42):
Floss by George Eliot and I was really enjoying it and then it
has this really bad ending. It's like, oh, feel like I just
wasted so much time on this bookbecause of the ending was not
great. And so having a strong ending
is, I think very important for anovel and the Witch of Blackbird
Pond has a strong ending. I think it part of it appeal and
(17:06):
I will. Say that was not a trial, it was
a hearing. The trials were in Hartford and
they were trying to gather enough evidence to turn it over
to the authorities. So it never was really a trial.
And one thing I always point outit's that the social morays of
(17:29):
the time were not. They were touched on somewhat,
but there was status. And I'm never quite sure in the
book just where Matthew Wood belongs in that state because
he's obviously not a rich man, but he's a selectman, which
meant he was the town official. That would have been a person on
(17:53):
someone standing. Also, he refers to the Reverend
Grisham Buckley as Grisham and to the magistrate Samuel Talcott
as Sam. They would not have done that.
He would have been Mr. Buckley and Mr. Talcott.
(18:15):
Even with somebody of his equal status.
There would not have been that chumming 20th century, a mode of
operating with each other. There were certain rules of
conduct. And the two people I mentioned,
Buckley and Talcott, were actually real people.
And Buckley's table stone is up in our cemetery here.
(18:40):
He was quite an interesting character in his own right, and
he was actually partially responsible for ending
executions of witches in Connecticut.
He said that he had not seen, because he was an expert on
English law, that he had not seen a single indictment that
(19:03):
was legally proved for witchcraft, and that he wished
to New England had not so much innocent blood to atone for.
But he also said if the devil were to be brought up on
charges, he'd give him his stay in court because he was very
(19:24):
much for actual conducting English law the way it was
written. And they weren't doing that in
Connecticut. It did.
Cross my mind, when we were talking about classes coming or
reaching out to you, do you hearfrom teachers nationally or
internationally or is it usuallyjust Connecticut?
(19:46):
Usually it's. It's mainly Connecticut's, but
we have had teachers from other states too.
I believe we've had a couple from Texas.
I could be wrong, but we if I'm remembering correctly, we had a
homeschool group. Well it was a homeschool
student, one kid who had read The Witch of Blackbird Pond and
(20:08):
he and his parents came to Connecticut for a visit.
So we did some witch. Of Blackbird Pond.
Activities they were. From Texas, yeah.
So. We did have that homeschool
student from Texas and we also had a teacher on a different
occasion who I think was also from Texas and they teach the
Witch of Blackbird Pond at her school and she was here in
(20:30):
Connecticut for a visit. So she came to us and the Wet
Dean Stevens Museum and we took her on tours as part of her
professional development. And so she was all excited to
bring back what she had learned to her school.
I also. Had on a barren ground tour
(20:51):
teacher from California and she taught what's a black work bomb.
So she was here I think on a visit again in Connecticut
getting information which she took note what she hoped to use
when she got home. So yeah, we have a far reach
(21:13):
than just state of Connecticut, yeah.
Mainly Connecticut, but if people from out of state come to
visit and they've read the novelor their teacher teaching the
novel, they may come to us to learn more so they can bring
that information back to their home state.
And we've had people, again fromCalifornia who were not
(21:36):
teachers, but they had read the novel and were interested in the
history of Withersfield. So yeah, it's a draw.
Yes, put the Wethersfield on themap, Taurus.
Why? How else has this novel shaped
the identity of Wethersfield so?Here in Wethersfield, there is
(21:58):
the so-called Butt off Williams House.
And that house, they called it that originally because they
thought a guy named David Bodallhad built the house in the
1680s. And that's what they thought at
the time when Elizabeth George Spear wrote the top.
And it's often been said that that house inspired The Witch of
(22:19):
Blackbird Pond. And so how that house's history
has been presented has very muchbeen influenced by the novel.
When I was in high school, I remember taking a tour there
where the still since we're talking about, oh, and Kit would
have been in this room here doing this.
Kit would have been over here doing that.
(22:40):
Yeah. They've changed their
interpretation since then, but that's how they presented it
through it out as a school. So how Wethersfield history has
been presented to the public hasvery much been shaped by the
novel, The which of Blackbird. How people understand
Wethersfield history is very much influenced by the novel.
(23:03):
Unfortunately, in some cases, asI say, they wouldn't have
allowed to equate her to say in Connecticut, they certainly the
witches that were tried here andin June, we're not outsiders.
They were part of the community.Fact.
They didn't allow outsiders here.
(23:25):
They didn't allow people to liveoff by themselves.
In fact, there was a law here inthe beginning.
The young men could not live by themselves because the young men
were trouble. You know, they had to be in a
family situation, either their own family, a cousin, aunt and
uncle, or they had to be a pregnancy to somebody.
(23:53):
People living off by themselves know that's the reason they had
homesteads in the village and they had outlying farm lands
around in the meadows in the village because they had to
attend church. They had to be a member of the
(24:13):
body of believers in some respect.
How deeply that went, well, thatvaried with person to person,
but outwardly they had to conform to what was here.
Going back to the shaping of Wethersfield's identity by the
novel, for many years, school kids here in town read the novel
(24:37):
in 3rd grade. And we had as one of our
volunteers a woman, Mary Beth Jordan, who used to teach at
Wethersfield High School. And she would have the students
in her class read the novel again, and they'd say to her,
oh, but we. Already read it as third
graders. And she would say, well, you're
a whole lot older now, you're going to get a whole lot more
(24:58):
out of it. And so they would reread it if
they eventually have to. You were right.
We did get more out of it this time around.
So you've had a whole generationgrow up reading that novel and
it part of infiltrated popular culture here in Wethersfield.
(25:19):
A few years ago, we had a Witch of Blackbird on both here at
Wethersfield's Historical Society.
And part of the reason for that was because the novel was is so
beloved locally. And as far as witchcraft went,
there were no trials in Withersfield after Catherine
(25:43):
Harrison. Nobody was executed after
Grisham Buckley's committee saidthere were problems with these
trials and therefore there wouldhave been no witch trials going
on at the time the book was written.
And she does kind of A Wrinkle in Time with the time frame of
(26:06):
this also. Yeah, that's why she has them
saying, oh, it's been a good long while since we've had a
witch trial here, because it hadbenefits in the 1680s.
The other thing is a Blackbird pond, which was really, I give
her credit, she says. They're Red Wing blackbirds,
(26:26):
which they would have been around ponds like that.
That was a vertical pond, meaning it was there in the
spring, but it dried up. So we're putting that pond there
all year long was artistic license, I guess.
And the fact that the thing thatthe hearing swung on was Luke
(26:48):
Pruden's Croft because she taught her to read and write and
therefore her mother said she's Big Witch Journal, she's stupid,
this child is stupid. And they weren't clocking this
child. And according to the law Code of
1650, if any parent or master committed the barbarity of not
(27:16):
teaching these children so much English language that they could
understand the Bible in the laws, they would have been in
trouble, the parents. So that's one of the whole thing
that just wasn't so in Connecticut law.
(27:39):
Her parents would have been theywould have taken the child
Louis, frankly, because they didthat and put them with an
apprentice situation. And I've seen we have some of
those contracts and it says thatthey are to be taught to read,
and boys are to be taught to read and write in a certain
(27:59):
amount of arithmetic because they were usually being trained
for a occupation where they would need to keep books.
But yeah, it would have been theparents that were in trouble,
and they were obviously in the gunfire.
And that was the other reason itcould take a child away.
(28:19):
The town could do that. So it makes a good story.
I've admit it. It's very dramatic.
And the fact that she can read the Bible, it's a big
revelation. And as Buckley says, well, if
this is witchcraft, teaching them to read the Bible, the
(28:42):
devil must be all mixed up or something to that effect,
meaning it's not witchcraft. But I do say it makes it very,
very dramatic. I mean, when a small child comes
in and proves that she's been learning how to read and write
and she can read the Bible. I love the story between Kit
(29:08):
going to visit Hannah and then Prudence going and Kit teaching
Prudence. It's just, it's such a good,
like, warm feeling story. You know, that's in the middle.
You know, something bad is goingto happen in the novel.
Yeah, just. By the title, it's kind of a
well, it's her safe place, and in the safe place she can meet
(29:35):
with Matt and a little prudence.She can do some help for her.
And of course, her aunt knows about this.
Yeah. And so getting back to her
meeting with Hannah, when Elizabeth George Spear was
talking about why she chose Wethersfield as the place to set
(29:58):
her novel, one reason was that it was her hometown, but another
reason was she could imagine herheroine finding a home in the
Meadows. And that's very much what you
were describing there. With her meeting with Prudence
and Hannah, it becomes like a home, a real home to her.
Yeah, and it's to say it's her safe place and she can show
(30:22):
another side of herself, but shecan't show to her family.
Yeah. So the Great Meadows is a real
place in Wethersfield, so that aplace that Elizabeth George
Spear was familiar with. And as I said, that's why one of
the reasons why she chose to setthe novel in Wethersfield.
And I think in a way, it remindsher of the ocean, the grasses.
(30:48):
And that's a very real thing because I remember when my
daughter was looking at colleges, we went to Purdue and
we stopped at a gas station to get some gas.
And out on the Prairie, there's a very real sense of the light
that you see over the ocean. And I was sitting there and I
(31:10):
said, well, look at that. You could almost imagine the
ocean oats over the hill and my two children looked at each
other and they said the heat hasgotten.
I can relate to that. Yeah, it probably did.
Reminder somewhat over island over near the ocean, which is a
(31:33):
nice touch we touched. On there being other witchcraft
accusations in real life in Wethersfield, we've touched on
Catherine Harrison a few times. What were the other witchcraft
accusations? Who was accused well out of
weather in 16? 48 There was a woman, Mary
(31:58):
Johnson, the servant who confessed to being a witch, and
I think there was something seriously wrong with that woman.
If you confess in Connecticut, you were executed.
So she was the first one. There was a previous one in
(32:19):
Connecticut, in Windsor. She was the first one in
Connecticut that was accused of witchcraft.
In 1647, before all this happened, there was a terrible
sickness that went through the Connecticut colony and
Massachusetts, and a lot of people died and it sounded
(32:40):
something like the Spanish flu of World War One.
And not only that, but leaders here in Wethersfield were killed
or died off Thomas Hooker, who was the leader of the colony,
the minister in Harvard also died.
So church and bullies, when bad things were happening, God had
(33:02):
allowed the devil loose on his people because they were sinning
and the human agent of the devilwas a witch.
So they started looking around for somebody that might be doing
witchcraft. And the second and third that
were executed in Wethersfield in1651 were the Carringtons, a
(33:30):
husband and wife. So it wasn't just women were
executed, mainly it was, but there were men as there were in
in Salem. And the biggest witchcraft panic
in this area was one in Hartford, which involved
Wethersfield and Farmington. And there were three people that
(33:55):
fled Wethersfield as a result ofthat, James Wakeley and husband
and wife Palmer, all three of them fled to Rhode Island where
they were Saints. And there were again, a husband
and wife, the Greensmiths that lived on the South side of
(34:15):
Hartford, but both had Wethersfield connections.
She had lived in Wethersfield for a time.
He owned land in Wethersfield. So there was that.
The South side of Hartford is very close to, but there was
that connection. And of course, Catherine was the
last person tried, Catherine Harrison, and that grew out of
(34:38):
that panic in Harford. And she was tried twice.
First time was a hung jury. The second time she was
convicted. And that's when John Winter
Junior, the governor of Connecticut, accepted.
He tried to ameliorate these trials.
(35:00):
And he had actually gotten, in anumber of these trials, a
reconciliation between the accused and the community.
While it was no goal with Catherine Harrison, the tongue
was determined that she was a witch.
And so that's when he formed that committee of clergymen, of
(35:22):
which Buckley was the head, Gresham Buckley.
And I'm sure he was probably keyin the decision they made in
that committee, which was it wasnot according to English law and
the spectral visions, that was questionable too.
(35:42):
So the two things on which had hung with the law and the
evidence. So that was the end of
executions in Connecticut for witchcraft.
There's Gershwin. Bulkley And then there's Samuel
Talcott, who were real historical figures that are
(36:04):
included in the novel. There's also Governor Edmund
Andrus in there. Yeah, he was.
He was real. Did he really come to
Wethersfield? He landed, greeted him in
Wethersfield and took him on to Harvard, to the government.
(36:25):
So he was the governor of that big colony of the Dominion of
New England, appointed by James the Second.
Elizabeth George Spear could notresist the legend of the Charter
Row because she thought it was agreat example of colonial
resistant to England before the American Revolution.
(36:46):
So she loved that story, just like I love that story and.
And most historians think it wasjust that, a myth that never
really happened. As I said, it didn't matter
where they handed over the charter, the actual thing, they
handed over the cover to Andros and the clerk in charge of
(37:10):
keeping the notes and everything, wrote Finesse after
his visit. I mean, it's done.
It's in. Can you?
Just give us a really like briefversion of the legend or the
story of the charter. Yes, well, there.
Are like many elements to the story, but the basic story is
(37:32):
Edmund Andrew shows up in Hartford, demands the charter,
and the governor at the time stalls him.
And then there are two variations of what happens in
that either the governor falls on the table and all the lights
go out, or someone opens a window and all the lights go
out. But in the darkness, however it
happened, the charter is taken from the table and given to
(37:57):
Captain Joseph Wadsworth, who's waiting on his horse, and she
goes and hides the charter in anoak tree and thereby protect
Connecticut's charter from evil at Menandra.
And depending on who's telling the story, you may get some
embellishments. So like one of my favorite
there's like 1 version the Willis's daughter ties a dog
(38:22):
around the Charter Oak tree named Lion to protect the
charter from British. I hadn't heard.
That one. Yeah, so why the great decayed
eyed hero protecting the Charter, of course.
The Charter Oak then became an icon.
Yes, and it was a white oak. The white oak is a tree of
(38:44):
Connecticut. So if.
You've seen the Connecticut State quarter, our state quarter
has the Charter Oak on it. So if you've ever wondered what
the tree is on the Connecticut State order that the Charter Oak
so long after the event may or may not have happened after the
revolution, people remember that.
(39:06):
Oh, we stood up to the British. We hid our charter.
We did not give it to them. It's been like a myth in
Connecticut history that has made people feel good about
Connecticut. Yeah.
And when the tree came down in the 19th century, were all kinds
of artifacts that were made fromthat What was?
(39:28):
It that Mark Plain said about the.
If they put all the things that were made from the charter,
supposedly made from the CharterOak, it would circle the equator
several times. So that was his take on the
Charter Oak? Yeah, there are so many.
Things that are supposedly made of wood for the Charter Oak.
(39:49):
It's a bit like the True Cross here in Connecticut.
You have a fragment of the True Cross or you have a fragment of
the Charterro. Yeah, we've seen a chair made
out of the charter. And at the state Capitol, yeah,
the. State Capitol, Yeah, the.
Lieutenant governor sits in there.
That's supposed to be made from the Charterro Tree.
(40:11):
At the last time I took a Capitol tour.
They say, oh, the Lieutenant governor sits in the chair, and
it's a wishing chair, wishing that they were governor.
I think Samuel Cole also had a cradle made out of it would fill
the charter room. So it was definitely an icon of
(40:33):
Connecticut history. Whether it was true story or
not, that's up for grabs. But it made people feel better
about giving up their authority over their own destiny for a
time. They didn't really do that.
And as they say with the glorious Revolution in England
(40:56):
where they chased James out, they had the wisdom not to
execute him as they had done hisfather.
They just chased him back to Europe.
And then that great dominion of New England fell apart and
Andrew says they said was arrested and shipped back to
(41:17):
England when we. Open today, you told us how
important the full story of history is.
Is there anything else you want to tell us about the programming
around that for visitors, what they can expect to experience
actually? Next week we have a new exhibit
(41:37):
called Forgotten Patriots, and this exhibit will share these
stories of black people, women and Native Americans who
participated in the American Revolution.
So America 50 is coming up, and we wanted to share these stories
that are so often ignored. And we were very lucky to get a
(41:58):
museum makeover grant from Connecticut's Humanities and
Conservation Connection, which made it possible for us to put
together. And I think our mission has been
for some time to get this history in front of people
because it's been ignored in many cases.
(42:19):
You don't even know for sure whothe soldiers were.
And even David Dwight's book on black soldiers in the Revolution
does not cover the whole story for Wethersfield.
So it's been extremely importantto us to get this history back
where it belongs, to share. The stories that we do now,
(42:40):
right? Right.
And there's nothing, there's a lot of markers up in their
barrier of ground for soldiers dating back to the colonial
wars. You know, King William's War, of
Queen Anne's war. Today, people don't even know
what those are. But there's nothing up there to
mark. There are at least three
(43:03):
veterans of the revolution. Black people were buried up
there in that burying ground. Nothing.
And we hope to get a marker there that says something about
that. Yes, we're.
Hoping the town will partner with us to do that.
That's wonderful. So.
Are happy to answer people's questions that they phone in or
(43:25):
e-mail to us. Today Martha got an e-mail from
a lady who is a descendant of Sonny Anderson, a black man
worked here in Wethersfield for a while and lived in
Glastonbury. We're going to help that
descendant find out more information about her ancestor,
and we've done that for other people as well.
(43:47):
This is really encouraging that we're starting to get these
queries because it's usually as the white people that want to
know about their families. But I think there is a movement
within the black communities to find out their history through
genealogy, and sometimes that's the only way they can find it,
(44:10):
especially in the South. So, yeah, there's a real
concrete attempt on many black organizations to find out the
history, the individual history of people, just like the old
Wethersfield ancestry of that guy who came from Europe.
(44:33):
And he may have been Gentry. And well, fact that he took a
job as a cohort says to me that he wasn't Gentry.
But yeah, there is a perception.And what's great that Martha
said before is like when we're helping other people learn about
their ancestors, sometimes we learn, too.
(44:54):
So we had a gentleman who was related to Benjamin Lattimore, a
black Revolutionary War soldier,and Martha was corresponding
with him for years, sharing the information that we had here.
And then he would write back to us with information that he had.
And we learned so much about Benjamin Lattimore things,
(45:15):
actually. His the sticking point was his
name was not really Benjamin. Benoni.
It was Benoni, but he was calledBen, therefore he was Benjamin.
So once we learn that the whole field opened up, we found the
records, you know. Yeah, 'cause here in
(45:35):
Wethersfield that's what they called the Benoni.
But later on in New York, he wascalled Benjamin, I'm sure
because. He was Ben, probably a black
Ben. Yeah.
And that is one of the sticking points for researching Black
history. It's the names.
(45:59):
Yes. But especially for black people,
because many cases they don't even mention what their names
were. The death records say Negro
servant of whoever. Do they say what his name is?
No. And you have to learn, read
(46:20):
between the lines kind of when you're coming to names.
Now, you say, well, could that possibly have been a slave name,
somebody's name, Prince, Prince Freeman, That says to me right
away, he was a slave at one time.
So you have to be cognizant of the way they named people,
(46:43):
they're slaves, and what that name became when they got their
freedom. And sometimes it changed.
Many of them adopted the name Freeman because they didn't want
to be the name of their master. And there are very few cases
where the name actually reflected African history,
(47:07):
African ancestry. So that can be a problem.
Yeah, names change over. And we're learning this girl and
hopefully I, I consider a day where I don't learn something, a
day wasted. But I'm glad to see other sons
(47:28):
of slaves. Blacks in Connecticut are
starting to try to find information about their
ancestors. Yeah, that's fantastic.
It's so important to share the under told stories, the untold
stories and learn about and humanize people who've come
(47:49):
before us. It helps you to feel the
emotions, things that they wouldhave been through, and just to
realize that that history was real, that happened to real
people. And I think that's something the
Witch of Blackbirds on does verywell.
It humanizes a period that can feel very alien to modern
(48:10):
readers. The people in the story are very
human. Yeah, it breaks it down to the
personal level. That's, I think the main
valuable of that book, experiences of people of that
time. And even though it's fiction,
(48:32):
probably mirrors some of what was going on in these witchcraft
accusations. And as Buckley said, he didn't
think any of them were proven legally.
Connecticut witch trials deserveto be remembered and discussed
(48:52):
alongside the literature it inspired.
Thank you, Weathers. Field Historical Society for
your efforts to honor the heritage that enriches your
community and for telling these powerful stories.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
In today's episode, we discuss the classic children's novel The
Witch of Blackbird Pond with Gilly Johnson and Martha Smart
of Connecticut's Wethersfield Historical Society.
Wethersfield, CT is the setting of this classic and enduringly
(00:20):
popular work of historical fiction, and also a community
where real witchcraft accusations were made during the
Connecticut witch trials. Author Elizabeth George Spears
beloved 1958 novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond has made 17th
century Wethersfield a lasting part of American literary
(00:41):
heritage, introducing generations of readers to
colonial Connecticut life. The town's actual history
includes the real 1669 witch trial of Catherine Harrison, a
widow whose case revealed the dangers faced by independent
women at that time. While Connecticut's witch trials
(01:01):
predate Salem's more famous persecution, they remain A
lesser known but significant chapter in the state's history.
Let's welcome Gilly and Martha to the show and hear what
they're doing to highlight the lesser known history of
Wethersfield. Welcome to the Thing about Witch
Hunts podcast. Gilly Johnson and Martha Smart,
(01:23):
please tell us about yourselves and what you do for the
Wethersfield Historical Society.Hello, I'm Gilly Johnson.
I am the museum educator here atWethersfield Historical Society.
So that means I'm in charge of field trips that happened here
in Wethersfield to our museum building.
We have a number of students every year from not only
(01:45):
Wethersfield but also other towns who come learn more about
colonial history, the American Revolution, or other aspects of
weather, scale history. And as you can imagine, the
Witch of Blackbird Pond is always popular.
Especially. Now, yes, around in the now in
the fall, yeah. We like to think of ourselves
(02:07):
and then we have become in some way Salem Light or Salem on the
cheap because a lot of people come here rather than going to
Salem. This is Jesus.
Because if you're in Connecticut, it's less costly to
have the bus drive to Salem thanto Wethersfield.
(02:28):
So I'm Martha Smart. I am the research librarian,
research and reference librarianhere, as well as doing library
duties. I answer a lot of questions
about Connecticut history and genealogy and my background is
not colonial American history, but European history of the 18th
(02:50):
century feeds him nicely to whatwe are doing here.
And we tried to answer all questions that we get.
We do answer all questions that we get and sometimes that deals
with going up to the town and searching land records and
(03:12):
genealogy records that we have here and hopefully we learned
something too in our research. What would you like for people
to know about Wethersfield and the Historical Society?
So Wethersfield is one of Connecticut's oldest town.
(03:33):
People in Wethersfield will tellyou that we are the oldest town
in Connecticut, but people in Windsor will disagree with that
statement. In our museum building, we have
a box from the 1930s that Windsor sent to Wethersfield,
and on the box that says to old Wethersfield from older Windsor.
(03:56):
So there's been. A long.
Rivalry between Wethersfield andWindsor over who's actually
older. The thing is, it's kind of a
ridiculous argument because within just a couple of years,
Hartford, Wethersfield and Windsor were established as the
Connecticut colony. And one of my chief concerns is
(04:22):
when people arrive or when they come in, they know nothing about
the religious background of the Puritans, who these people were
and what they believed in and how they came to be here.
I think that's based to understanding Wethersfield's
history, so we do as much education here and answering
(04:45):
research questions as we do spreading the word about
Wethersfield. So that's one of the big things
that Wethersfield Historical Society educating people.
And part of our mission is to serve and promote Wethersfield
history, to inspire people todayand tomorrow.
And we believe in sharing all ofWethersfield's history, not just
(05:10):
the history of white people lived here in Wethersfield,
everybody. So that's very important to us.
Yeah, the forgotten people, because there was quite a
history of slavery here, and there's quite a bit of Native
American history here that nobody seems to emphasize.
(05:31):
So we we try to do the whole history.
Yes, because that's complete. That's the true picture.
Not just that you had some man sister, it could have been a
Gentry in England who came over here and did marvelous things.
Not always true. The people that were here, not
(05:55):
because they were here. Rizwani and other people were
not here because they wanted to be here because they were seized
and brought here as slaves. History is complicated and we
try and share that with people, both the good and the bad.
Yeah, American history is especially complicated, and now
(06:18):
there seems to be a push back about burying it again.
So we try not to let that happen.
That's our mission. It's one of our missions.
And we have spent the last how many years gleaning from the
records the people who are slaves here, the people of color
(06:45):
and. You've spent decades.
Doing that research and an independent researcher started
the whole thing, Diane Cameron. Diane Cameron.
And we've built on that and now Gilly has put online what we
found. So there is a database, if
anybody wants to access it, about people of color that were
(07:08):
here in Wethersfield over the years.
Wethersfieldhistory.org is our website and that's where our
database is located. And that's an aspect of the
George Spears, the Witch of Blackbird Pond that she does not
go as much into the whole aspectthat there was slavery here in
Wethersfield. She alludes to it briefly, but
(07:28):
it's not something that she goesdeep into.
She just touches on it and the biggest fallacy is the back and
forth between Kit and Nate Nat, who is the son of the owner of
the ship that brings her to Wethersfield, about the horses,
the smell of horses in the holeswhile those horses and what he
(07:51):
was doing there. We had a very real connection to
slavery. The trade with the West Indies
from the northern colonies, including Connecticut and
Wethersfield was the seaport. They provisioned those slave
colonies, sugar colonies, because they raised nothing but
(08:12):
sugar, which was the cash crop for both the English Empire and
the French Empire and the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And that's a big right in the beginning.
That's a big, big fallacy, the attitude that people who were
(08:32):
trading with the West Indies andnot bringing back slaves were
free of that stigma of supporting slavery.
I just want to clarify and this is a piece of fictional
literature. I know a lot of people are
familiar with this book, but what do we need to know right
(08:55):
off the top about this fiction? Well, first of all that it is a
work of fiction, so it was is not trying to tell a 100%
factual story about the witch trials here in Wethersfield.
So a little background on her writing the novel The Witch of
Blackbird Pond. She published it after her first
(09:17):
novel, Calico Captain, and afterwriting Calico Captain,
Elizabeth George Speer decided that she wanted to write another
novel in her hometown of Wethersfield.
And she self admittedly was not a historian.
And so her research process she referred to as a greedy,
(09:37):
indiscriminate forage through novels, genealogies,
geographies, and a whole bunch of other different works.
So this was never meant to be a 100% historically accurate work.
It's a very good novel, but it is a work of fiction.
So that's what people need to know, right?
(09:58):
Yeah, that is that. Don't expect it to be 100%
accurate. And that's what we stressed when
we come here. It's a work of fiction.
It's not history. A lot of her facts don't jibe
and enjoy it as a work of fiction coming of age.
Yeah. She writes a good book that way.
(10:20):
It's a coming of age book. It's a theme of alienation,
growing tolerant both on her part and on her family's part
and maybe the town kit. She's the heroine of the book in
most respects. Well, as they say, there are a
(10:41):
lot of things in there that justare not historically correct.
And I think part of, in my personal opinion, part of the
novel, Strength is hit as a heroine.
I think she very much is a modern woman, not a 1600s woman.
But this being a children's book, I think that's a great way
(11:02):
to engage the kids with the history is if you have someone
who they can relate to, like kids, it helps them to
understand this world that she'sgoing through.
And I think that Elizabeth George Spear does a very good
job with that. Yes, I think Miss Young
teenagers have great recognitionof what she was going through.
(11:24):
Not that they have a family thatis Puritan, or maybe in some
cases at least they are. But yeah, how do you fit
yourself into this world that seems a little bit alienated
from where you are? And she was poster child for
(11:44):
that, a spoiled child coming from the West Indies, where it
was totally different to Wethersfield where the Puritans
were in control, Puritan mentality and beliefs.
And one of the things that kind of sticks in micro when she goes
(12:07):
to the church and she sees the whipping post and the stalks in
front of the church and she shudders.
I don't think a girl who grew upon a sugar plantation in
Barbados, which had the worst abuses of slavery in the Western
Hemisphere, would have even banned the eyelash at that.
(12:31):
But she's trying to set her apart from these people who are
up here and it time she does that, she recoils as something
they're doing up here. And she is definitely alienated
not only from the society at large around her, but in some
(12:54):
members of her family that she has chosen to run away from
Barbados and join them up here on and out.
Yeah. I mean, we, like Kit, are the
outsiders of this world. So we are coming, just like Kit
is coming to understand this world.
We as the reader are also comingto understand the world.
(13:16):
So I think Kit is a very helpfulheroine in helping us as modern
readers to understand this very different world from our own.
Yes, I think you're right and it's a gradual process of her
going into her own toleration and them also being tolerant of
(13:38):
her. So it's a growth in both
directions and that's one of thestrengths of the Red novel.
I think. It isn't all one sided at first
it is, but you see growth after a while.
You do, and we've heard from a lot of people that they've read
(14:04):
this with their classes. Why is The Witch of Blackbird
Pond so popular with teachers? Why is it such a staple in
classrooms? I think.
It's largely because it does paya good picture of that era or
attempts to paint a good picture, and it's a way of
(14:26):
getting people into young peopleinterested in history because it
touches on witchcraft, which wasa real thing here in
Wethersfield. It touches on Puritans who are
here and maybe some people will pick up some information about
the Puritans who they were, and also touches on the history of
(14:52):
not just Wethersfield, but the Connecticut colony.
When James the Second in Englanddecided to amalgamate New York
and the New England colonies, sent to one big colony and sent
Governor Andros here to get the charter.
(15:13):
Supposedly he didn't need to getthe charter.
Really all he needed was the submission of the government,
which he got. But then out of that grew that
legend about the charter being hidden in the charter row and
the candles being bone out, etcetera, etcetera and so forth
and the re establishment of government under that charter
(15:36):
after James was chased out of England and Andrew was arrested
up in Massachusetts. So it's a spoonful of sugar, if
you will, leading into the history, and it might lead
people to study young people to study more about that history.
(15:58):
Yeah. So I think you're right that
that's one of the reasons for its popularity amongst that good
window into this early history. I think also people are at least
the school groups we have had have mentioned how they really
love the ending of the novel with the witch file.
That's the very dramatic sectionof the book.
And that's something that appeals to both the teachers and
(16:21):
the students. They both.
Groups love that. Part of the novel.
Yeah, there's a good resolution,yeah.
It's always the worst when you're reading a book and then
you've gone so invested into it and then it has a terrible
ending. Like I I read The Mill on the
(16:42):
Floss by George Eliot and I was really enjoying it and then it
has this really bad ending. It's like, oh, feel like I just
wasted so much time on this bookbecause of the ending was not
great. And so having a strong ending
is, I think very important for anovel and the Witch of Blackbird
Pond has a strong ending. I think it part of it appeal and
(17:06):
I will. Say that was not a trial, it was
a hearing. The trials were in Hartford and
they were trying to gather enough evidence to turn it over
to the authorities. So it never was really a trial.
And one thing I always point outit's that the social morays of
(17:29):
the time were not. They were touched on somewhat,
but there was status. And I'm never quite sure in the
book just where Matthew Wood belongs in that state because
he's obviously not a rich man, but he's a selectman, which
meant he was the town official. That would have been a person on
(17:53):
someone standing. Also, he refers to the Reverend
Grisham Buckley as Grisham and to the magistrate Samuel Talcott
as Sam. They would not have done that.
He would have been Mr. Buckley and Mr. Talcott.
(18:15):
Even with somebody of his equal status.
There would not have been that chumming 20th century, a mode of
operating with each other. There were certain rules of
conduct. And the two people I mentioned,
Buckley and Talcott, were actually real people.
And Buckley's table stone is up in our cemetery here.
(18:40):
He was quite an interesting character in his own right, and
he was actually partially responsible for ending
executions of witches in Connecticut.
He said that he had not seen, because he was an expert on
English law, that he had not seen a single indictment that
(19:03):
was legally proved for witchcraft, and that he wished
to New England had not so much innocent blood to atone for.
But he also said if the devil were to be brought up on
charges, he'd give him his stay in court because he was very
(19:24):
much for actual conducting English law the way it was
written. And they weren't doing that in
Connecticut. It did.
Cross my mind, when we were talking about classes coming or
reaching out to you, do you hearfrom teachers nationally or
internationally or is it usuallyjust Connecticut?
(19:46):
Usually it's. It's mainly Connecticut's, but
we have had teachers from other states too.
I believe we've had a couple from Texas.
I could be wrong, but we if I'm remembering correctly, we had a
homeschool group. Well it was a homeschool
student, one kid who had read The Witch of Blackbird Pond and
(20:08):
he and his parents came to Connecticut for a visit.
So we did some witch. Of Blackbird Pond.
Activities they were. From Texas, yeah.
So. We did have that homeschool
student from Texas and we also had a teacher on a different
occasion who I think was also from Texas and they teach the
Witch of Blackbird Pond at her school and she was here in
(20:30):
Connecticut for a visit. So she came to us and the Wet
Dean Stevens Museum and we took her on tours as part of her
professional development. And so she was all excited to
bring back what she had learned to her school.
I also. Had on a barren ground tour
(20:51):
teacher from California and she taught what's a black work bomb.
So she was here I think on a visit again in Connecticut
getting information which she took note what she hoped to use
when she got home. So yeah, we have a far reach
(21:13):
than just state of Connecticut, yeah.
Mainly Connecticut, but if people from out of state come to
visit and they've read the novelor their teacher teaching the
novel, they may come to us to learn more so they can bring
that information back to their home state.
And we've had people, again fromCalifornia who were not
(21:36):
teachers, but they had read the novel and were interested in the
history of Withersfield. So yeah, it's a draw.
Yes, put the Wethersfield on themap, Taurus.
Why? How else has this novel shaped
the identity of Wethersfield so?Here in Wethersfield, there is
(21:58):
the so-called Butt off Williams House.
And that house, they called it that originally because they
thought a guy named David Bodallhad built the house in the
1680s. And that's what they thought at
the time when Elizabeth George Spear wrote the top.
And it's often been said that that house inspired The Witch of
(22:19):
Blackbird Pond. And so how that house's history
has been presented has very muchbeen influenced by the novel.
When I was in high school, I remember taking a tour there
where the still since we're talking about, oh, and Kit would
have been in this room here doing this.
Kit would have been over here doing that.
(22:40):
Yeah. They've changed their
interpretation since then, but that's how they presented it
through it out as a school. So how Wethersfield history has
been presented to the public hasvery much been shaped by the
novel, The which of Blackbird. How people understand
Wethersfield history is very much influenced by the novel.
(23:03):
Unfortunately, in some cases, asI say, they wouldn't have
allowed to equate her to say in Connecticut, they certainly the
witches that were tried here andin June, we're not outsiders.
They were part of the community.Fact.
They didn't allow outsiders here.
(23:25):
They didn't allow people to liveoff by themselves.
In fact, there was a law here inthe beginning.
The young men could not live by themselves because the young men
were trouble. You know, they had to be in a
family situation, either their own family, a cousin, aunt and
uncle, or they had to be a pregnancy to somebody.
(23:53):
People living off by themselves know that's the reason they had
homesteads in the village and they had outlying farm lands
around in the meadows in the village because they had to
attend church. They had to be a member of the
(24:13):
body of believers in some respect.
How deeply that went, well, thatvaried with person to person,
but outwardly they had to conform to what was here.
Going back to the shaping of Wethersfield's identity by the
novel, for many years, school kids here in town read the novel
(24:37):
in 3rd grade. And we had as one of our
volunteers a woman, Mary Beth Jordan, who used to teach at
Wethersfield High School. And she would have the students
in her class read the novel again, and they'd say to her,
oh, but we. Already read it as third
graders. And she would say, well, you're
a whole lot older now, you're going to get a whole lot more
(24:58):
out of it. And so they would reread it if
they eventually have to. You were right.
We did get more out of it this time around.
So you've had a whole generationgrow up reading that novel and
it part of infiltrated popular culture here in Wethersfield.
(25:19):
A few years ago, we had a Witch of Blackbird on both here at
Wethersfield's Historical Society.
And part of the reason for that was because the novel was is so
beloved locally. And as far as witchcraft went,
there were no trials in Withersfield after Catherine
(25:43):
Harrison. Nobody was executed after
Grisham Buckley's committee saidthere were problems with these
trials and therefore there wouldhave been no witch trials going
on at the time the book was written.
And she does kind of A Wrinkle in Time with the time frame of
(26:06):
this also. Yeah, that's why she has them
saying, oh, it's been a good long while since we've had a
witch trial here, because it hadbenefits in the 1680s.
The other thing is a Blackbird pond, which was really, I give
her credit, she says. They're Red Wing blackbirds,
(26:26):
which they would have been around ponds like that.
That was a vertical pond, meaning it was there in the
spring, but it dried up. So we're putting that pond there
all year long was artistic license, I guess.
And the fact that the thing thatthe hearing swung on was Luke
(26:48):
Pruden's Croft because she taught her to read and write and
therefore her mother said she's Big Witch Journal, she's stupid,
this child is stupid. And they weren't clocking this
child. And according to the law Code of
1650, if any parent or master committed the barbarity of not
(27:16):
teaching these children so much English language that they could
understand the Bible in the laws, they would have been in
trouble, the parents. So that's one of the whole thing
that just wasn't so in Connecticut law.
(27:39):
Her parents would have been theywould have taken the child
Louis, frankly, because they didthat and put them with an
apprentice situation. And I've seen we have some of
those contracts and it says thatthey are to be taught to read,
and boys are to be taught to read and write in a certain
(27:59):
amount of arithmetic because they were usually being trained
for a occupation where they would need to keep books.
But yeah, it would have been theparents that were in trouble,
and they were obviously in the gunfire.
And that was the other reason itcould take a child away.
(28:19):
The town could do that. So it makes a good story.
I've admit it. It's very dramatic.
And the fact that she can read the Bible, it's a big
revelation. And as Buckley says, well, if
this is witchcraft, teaching them to read the Bible, the
(28:42):
devil must be all mixed up or something to that effect,
meaning it's not witchcraft. But I do say it makes it very,
very dramatic. I mean, when a small child comes
in and proves that she's been learning how to read and write
and she can read the Bible. I love the story between Kit
(29:08):
going to visit Hannah and then Prudence going and Kit teaching
Prudence. It's just, it's such a good,
like, warm feeling story. You know, that's in the middle.
You know, something bad is goingto happen in the novel.
Yeah, just. By the title, it's kind of a
well, it's her safe place, and in the safe place she can meet
(29:35):
with Matt and a little prudence.She can do some help for her.
And of course, her aunt knows about this.
Yeah. And so getting back to her
meeting with Hannah, when Elizabeth George Spear was
talking about why she chose Wethersfield as the place to set
(29:58):
her novel, one reason was that it was her hometown, but another
reason was she could imagine herheroine finding a home in the
Meadows. And that's very much what you
were describing there. With her meeting with Prudence
and Hannah, it becomes like a home, a real home to her.
Yeah, and it's to say it's her safe place and she can show
(30:22):
another side of herself, but shecan't show to her family.
Yeah. So the Great Meadows is a real
place in Wethersfield, so that aplace that Elizabeth George
Spear was familiar with. And as I said, that's why one of
the reasons why she chose to setthe novel in Wethersfield.
And I think in a way, it remindsher of the ocean, the grasses.
(30:48):
And that's a very real thing because I remember when my
daughter was looking at colleges, we went to Purdue and
we stopped at a gas station to get some gas.
And out on the Prairie, there's a very real sense of the light
that you see over the ocean. And I was sitting there and I
(31:10):
said, well, look at that. You could almost imagine the
ocean oats over the hill and my two children looked at each
other and they said the heat hasgotten.
I can relate to that. Yeah, it probably did.
Reminder somewhat over island over near the ocean, which is a
(31:33):
nice touch we touched. On there being other witchcraft
accusations in real life in Wethersfield, we've touched on
Catherine Harrison a few times. What were the other witchcraft
accusations? Who was accused well out of
weather in 16? 48 There was a woman, Mary
(31:58):
Johnson, the servant who confessed to being a witch, and
I think there was something seriously wrong with that woman.
If you confess in Connecticut, you were executed.
So she was the first one. There was a previous one in
(32:19):
Connecticut, in Windsor. She was the first one in
Connecticut that was accused of witchcraft.
In 1647, before all this happened, there was a terrible
sickness that went through the Connecticut colony and
Massachusetts, and a lot of people died and it sounded
(32:40):
something like the Spanish flu of World War One.
And not only that, but leaders here in Wethersfield were killed
or died off Thomas Hooker, who was the leader of the colony,
the minister in Harvard also died.
So church and bullies, when bad things were happening, God had
(33:02):
allowed the devil loose on his people because they were sinning
and the human agent of the devilwas a witch.
So they started looking around for somebody that might be doing
witchcraft. And the second and third that
were executed in Wethersfield in1651 were the Carringtons, a
(33:30):
husband and wife. So it wasn't just women were
executed, mainly it was, but there were men as there were in
in Salem. And the biggest witchcraft panic
in this area was one in Hartford, which involved
Wethersfield and Farmington. And there were three people that
(33:55):
fled Wethersfield as a result ofthat, James Wakeley and husband
and wife Palmer, all three of them fled to Rhode Island where
they were Saints. And there were again, a husband
and wife, the Greensmiths that lived on the South side of
(34:15):
Hartford, but both had Wethersfield connections.
She had lived in Wethersfield for a time.
He owned land in Wethersfield. So there was that.
The South side of Hartford is very close to, but there was
that connection. And of course, Catherine was the
last person tried, Catherine Harrison, and that grew out of
(34:38):
that panic in Harford. And she was tried twice.
First time was a hung jury. The second time she was
convicted. And that's when John Winter
Junior, the governor of Connecticut, accepted.
He tried to ameliorate these trials.
(35:00):
And he had actually gotten, in anumber of these trials, a
reconciliation between the accused and the community.
While it was no goal with Catherine Harrison, the tongue
was determined that she was a witch.
And so that's when he formed that committee of clergymen, of
(35:22):
which Buckley was the head, Gresham Buckley.
And I'm sure he was probably keyin the decision they made in
that committee, which was it wasnot according to English law and
the spectral visions, that was questionable too.
(35:42):
So the two things on which had hung with the law and the
evidence. So that was the end of
executions in Connecticut for witchcraft.
There's Gershwin. Bulkley And then there's Samuel
Talcott, who were real historical figures that are
(36:04):
included in the novel. There's also Governor Edmund
Andrus in there. Yeah, he was.
He was real. Did he really come to
Wethersfield? He landed, greeted him in
Wethersfield and took him on to Harvard, to the government.
(36:25):
So he was the governor of that big colony of the Dominion of
New England, appointed by James the Second.
Elizabeth George Spear could notresist the legend of the Charter
Row because she thought it was agreat example of colonial
resistant to England before the American Revolution.
(36:46):
So she loved that story, just like I love that story and.
And most historians think it wasjust that, a myth that never
really happened. As I said, it didn't matter
where they handed over the charter, the actual thing, they
handed over the cover to Andros and the clerk in charge of
(37:10):
keeping the notes and everything, wrote Finesse after
his visit. I mean, it's done.
It's in. Can you?
Just give us a really like briefversion of the legend or the
story of the charter. Yes, well, there.
Are like many elements to the story, but the basic story is
(37:32):
Edmund Andrew shows up in Hartford, demands the charter,
and the governor at the time stalls him.
And then there are two variations of what happens in
that either the governor falls on the table and all the lights
go out, or someone opens a window and all the lights go
out. But in the darkness, however it
happened, the charter is taken from the table and given to
(37:57):
Captain Joseph Wadsworth, who's waiting on his horse, and she
goes and hides the charter in anoak tree and thereby protect
Connecticut's charter from evil at Menandra.
And depending on who's telling the story, you may get some
embellishments. So like one of my favorite
there's like 1 version the Willis's daughter ties a dog
(38:22):
around the Charter Oak tree named Lion to protect the
charter from British. I hadn't heard.
That one. Yeah, so why the great decayed
eyed hero protecting the Charter, of course.
The Charter Oak then became an icon.
Yes, and it was a white oak. The white oak is a tree of
(38:44):
Connecticut. So if.
You've seen the Connecticut State quarter, our state quarter
has the Charter Oak on it. So if you've ever wondered what
the tree is on the Connecticut State order that the Charter Oak
so long after the event may or may not have happened after the
revolution, people remember that.
(39:06):
Oh, we stood up to the British. We hid our charter.
We did not give it to them. It's been like a myth in
Connecticut history that has made people feel good about
Connecticut. Yeah.
And when the tree came down in the 19th century, were all kinds
of artifacts that were made fromthat What was?
(39:28):
It that Mark Plain said about the.
If they put all the things that were made from the charter,
supposedly made from the CharterOak, it would circle the equator
several times. So that was his take on the
Charter Oak? Yeah, there are so many.
Things that are supposedly made of wood for the Charter Oak.
(39:49):
It's a bit like the True Cross here in Connecticut.
You have a fragment of the True Cross or you have a fragment of
the Charterro. Yeah, we've seen a chair made
out of the charter. And at the state Capitol, yeah,
the. State Capitol, Yeah, the.
Lieutenant governor sits in there.
That's supposed to be made from the Charterro Tree.
(40:11):
At the last time I took a Capitol tour.
They say, oh, the Lieutenant governor sits in the chair, and
it's a wishing chair, wishing that they were governor.
I think Samuel Cole also had a cradle made out of it would fill
the charter room. So it was definitely an icon of
(40:33):
Connecticut history. Whether it was true story or
not, that's up for grabs. But it made people feel better
about giving up their authority over their own destiny for a
time. They didn't really do that.
And as they say with the glorious Revolution in England
(40:56):
where they chased James out, they had the wisdom not to
execute him as they had done hisfather.
They just chased him back to Europe.
And then that great dominion of New England fell apart and
Andrew says they said was arrested and shipped back to
(41:17):
England when we. Open today, you told us how
important the full story of history is.
Is there anything else you want to tell us about the programming
around that for visitors, what they can expect to experience
actually? Next week we have a new exhibit
(41:37):
called Forgotten Patriots, and this exhibit will share these
stories of black people, women and Native Americans who
participated in the American Revolution.
So America 50 is coming up, and we wanted to share these stories
that are so often ignored. And we were very lucky to get a
(41:58):
museum makeover grant from Connecticut's Humanities and
Conservation Connection, which made it possible for us to put
together. And I think our mission has been
for some time to get this history in front of people
because it's been ignored in many cases.
(42:19):
You don't even know for sure whothe soldiers were.
And even David Dwight's book on black soldiers in the Revolution
does not cover the whole story for Wethersfield.
So it's been extremely importantto us to get this history back
where it belongs, to share. The stories that we do now,
(42:40):
right? Right.
And there's nothing, there's a lot of markers up in their
barrier of ground for soldiers dating back to the colonial
wars. You know, King William's War, of
Queen Anne's war. Today, people don't even know
what those are. But there's nothing up there to
mark. There are at least three
(43:03):
veterans of the revolution. Black people were buried up
there in that burying ground. Nothing.
And we hope to get a marker there that says something about
that. Yes, we're.
Hoping the town will partner with us to do that.
That's wonderful. So.
Are happy to answer people's questions that they phone in or
(43:25):
e-mail to us. Today Martha got an e-mail from
a lady who is a descendant of Sonny Anderson, a black man
worked here in Wethersfield for a while and lived in
Glastonbury. We're going to help that
descendant find out more information about her ancestor,
and we've done that for other people as well.
(43:47):
This is really encouraging that we're starting to get these
queries because it's usually as the white people that want to
know about their families. But I think there is a movement
within the black communities to find out their history through
genealogy, and sometimes that's the only way they can find it,
(44:10):
especially in the South. So, yeah, there's a real
concrete attempt on many black organizations to find out the
history, the individual history of people, just like the old
Wethersfield ancestry of that guy who came from Europe.
(44:33):
And he may have been Gentry. And well, fact that he took a
job as a cohort says to me that he wasn't Gentry.
But yeah, there is a perception.And what's great that Martha
said before is like when we're helping other people learn about
their ancestors, sometimes we learn, too.
(44:54):
So we had a gentleman who was related to Benjamin Lattimore, a
black Revolutionary War soldier,and Martha was corresponding
with him for years, sharing the information that we had here.
And then he would write back to us with information that he had.
And we learned so much about Benjamin Lattimore things,
(45:15):
actually. His the sticking point was his
name was not really Benjamin. Benoni.
It was Benoni, but he was calledBen, therefore he was Benjamin.
So once we learn that the whole field opened up, we found the
records, you know. Yeah, 'cause here in
(45:35):
Wethersfield that's what they called the Benoni.
But later on in New York, he wascalled Benjamin, I'm sure
because. He was Ben, probably a black
Ben. Yeah.
And that is one of the sticking points for researching Black
history. It's the names.
(45:59):
Yes. But especially for black people,
because many cases they don't even mention what their names
were. The death records say Negro
servant of whoever. Do they say what his name is?
No. And you have to learn, read
(46:20):
between the lines kind of when you're coming to names.
Now, you say, well, could that possibly have been a slave name,
somebody's name, Prince, Prince Freeman, That says to me right
away, he was a slave at one time.
So you have to be cognizant of the way they named people,
(46:43):
they're slaves, and what that name became when they got their
freedom. And sometimes it changed.
Many of them adopted the name Freeman because they didn't want
to be the name of their master. And there are very few cases
where the name actually reflected African history,
(47:07):
African ancestry. So that can be a problem.
Yeah, names change over. And we're learning this girl and
hopefully I, I consider a day where I don't learn something, a
day wasted. But I'm glad to see other sons
(47:28):
of slaves. Blacks in Connecticut are
starting to try to find information about their
ancestors. Yeah, that's fantastic.
It's so important to share the under told stories, the untold
stories and learn about and humanize people who've come
(47:49):
before us. It helps you to feel the
emotions, things that they wouldhave been through, and just to
realize that that history was real, that happened to real
people. And I think that's something the
Witch of Blackbirds on does verywell.
It humanizes a period that can feel very alien to modern
(48:10):
readers. The people in the story are very
human. Yeah, it breaks it down to the
personal level. That's, I think the main
valuable of that book, experiences of people of that
time. And even though it's fiction,
(48:32):
probably mirrors some of what was going on in these witchcraft
accusations. And as Buckley said, he didn't
think any of them were proven legally.
Connecticut witch trials deserveto be remembered and discussed
(48:52):
alongside the literature it inspired.
Thank you, Weathers. Field Historical Society for
your efforts to honor the heritage that enriches your
community and for telling these powerful stories.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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