Colonial Women

Rebecca Nurse

• Maggie

Salem Witch Trials Image: The Towne Sisters This plaster statue depicts sisters Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Easty, and Sarah Towne Cloyce wearing shackles. Nurse and Easty were hanged, but Cloyce was later released. The statue is located in the Salem Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers. Rebecca Towne was baptized at Yarmouth, England, on February 21, 1621. She came to Salem, Massachusetts with her family in 1640. In about 1645, she married Francis Nurse, who was described as a tray maker. The making of trays and similar articles of domestic use was important employment in the remote countryside. In 1692, the “black cloud of the witchcraft delusion descended upon Salem Village.” Rebecca Nurse was a 71-year-old invalid who had…

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Native American History

Native Americans of New Hampshire

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Abenaki and Pennacook Native American Territories The native peoples who lived in northern New England – whose canoes cut the waters of the Connecticut, the St. Lawrence, Massachusetts Bay, and Cape Cod Sound – were called by many names, but the most common name is Abenaki, or People of the Dawn. The Abenaki occupied the greatest part of what would become New Hampshire, while a smaller tribe called the Pennacook lived in the southern part of the state. The Eastern Abenaki were concentrated in Maine east of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, while the Western Abenaki lived west of the mountains across Vermont and New Hampshire to the eastern shores of Lake Champlain. The southern boundaries of the Abenaki homeland were…

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Colonial Women

Susannah Martin

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Salem Witch Trials Susannah North Martin Reading her Bible in Salem Jail Susannah North was baptized at Olney, Buckinghamshire, England, September 30, 1621. Her mother died when she was a child, and her stepmother was named Ursula. She came to America with her father, stepmother, and at least one sister. Her family moved to Salisbury, Massachusetts, around 1639. On August 11, 1646, Susannah became the second wife of George Martin, a blacksmith with whom she had eight children. First Accusation In 1669, Susannah was first formally accused of witchcraft by William Sargent. Susannah was required to post 100 pounds bond to appear in court on a charge of witchcraft, a capital offense. George Martin sued Sargent for slander against Susannah…

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Civil War Women, Female Soldiers

The Nancy Harts

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Female Militia in Georgia Near the beginning of the Civil War, almost all of the men of LaGrange, Georgia, enlisted in the Confederate Army, leaving the small town unprotected. Two upper-class ladies and some graduates of the LaGrange Female College decided that they should gather the women and form a female militia to help protect their community. They called themselves the Nancy Harts in honor of Georgia’s Revolutionary War heroine, who single-handedly defended her home against a group of invading British soldiers. Nancy Colquitt Hill Morgan had been married for only 6 months, and was only 21 years of age when her husband left for war. Mary Cade Alford Heard was 27 when her husband left, leaving her in charge…

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Thirteen Colonies

South Carolina Colony

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The Year:1670 Districts of South Carolina Colony The first English settlement was made in 1670, when William Sayle sailed up the Ashley River with three shiploads of English emigrants from the Barbados. They pitched their tents on river banks and built a town, which has since wholly disappeared. In 1671, Sir John Yeamans joined the colony, bringing with him about two hundred African slaves, and before the year was over, two ships bearing Dutch emigrants arrived from New York. In 1680, the colonists sought a more favorable site for their town, and chose a point between the Cooper and Ashley Rivers, and there they founded Charleston. Government Scarcely had the first immigrants landed when a popular assembly began to frame…

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Thirteen Colonies

North Carolina Colony

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The Year: 1653 By 1729, there were settlements on each of North Carolina’s major river systems, but the largest settlements were on the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. North Carolina almost became the first of the permanent English colonies in America. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth I, granted a charter to Sir Walter Raleigh for land in present-day North Carolina (then Virginia). Five voyages were made under the Raleigh charter with the view of planting a permanent colony on the soil that became North Carolina. Raleigh established two colonies on the coast in the late 1580s, both ending in failure.
Civil War Spies, Civil War Women, Women in Theater

Belle Boyd

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Confederate Spy in the Civil War One of the most famous of Confederate spies, Belle Boyd served the Southern forces in the Shenandoah Valley, running her spying operations from her father’s hotel in Front Royal, Virginia. Betrayed by her lover, Boyd was arrested on July 29, 1862, and again in June 1863. Finally released but suffering from typhoid, she went to Europe to regain her health. Childhood and Early Years She was born Maria Isabelle Boyd in Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), on May 9, 1844. Her father, a hotelier and storekeeper, was prosperous enough to send his spirited daughter to Mount Washington Female College in Baltimore, where she studied from 1856 to 1860. She learned to speak French fluently…

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Thirteen Colonies

Virginia Colony

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Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg Thirteen Original Colonies At the beginning of the seventeenth century all the eastern portion of North America, which afterward became the thirteen original states, was known as Virginia. On May 14, 1607, the Virginia Company explorers landed on Jamestown Island, and established the Virginia colony on the banks of the James River, sixty miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Early Virginia was a death trap. Of the first 3,000 immigrants, all but 600 were dead within a few years of arrival. Virginia was a society in which life was short, diseases ran rampant, and parentless children and multiple marriages were the norm.
Colonial Women

Sarah Wildes

• Maggie

Salem Witch Trials In 1692 the Puritans had governmental control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and only members of the Puritan church were allowed to vote. Well-to-do merchants were complaining, and King Charles I was considering changing the charter for Massachusetts to allow all property owners to vote. This would mean loss of power for the Puritans. All the upper echelons of the church were enraged at the prospect. John Wildes’ first wife Priscilla died in 1662, and he remarried in 1663 to Sarah Averill. By this time, John was very prominent in Topsfield politics (at the time of his death he was known in Topsfield as “Old Father Wildes.” He was responsible for surveying the land to establish the…

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Colonial Women

Elizabeth Howe

• Maggie

New England Witch Trials Topsfield, Massachusetts New England was organized into townships roughly six miles square with a village surrounding the “commons”, which was a central community grazing ground, with the church and community meeting house facing the commons. Town meetings elected town officers and the sheriff, raised taxes, and tried to resolve any problems present in the community. Many communities set up different rules than those pronounced by the General Court in Boston. The people of such communities were very dependent upon each other. Individuals interacted by means of the sale of goods or labor or by barter for other goods or labor. One’s ability to generate trades was economically necessary, but generosity was needed as well since all…

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