The Struggle for American Values

The Homesteaders

Ida May Dawley and Charles (“Charlie”) Harry Leonardson

Ida May Dawley in her old age stands in front of the homestead she and Charlie built decades before.  Now in her 70s, she looks frail.  But see what you can catch from the detail.  There is nothing old or weak about her gaze. (photo taken about 1930)

In about 1900, Charlie went back to visit his family in Waterloo, Wisconsin.  They took a family portrait.  He is sitting on the far left of the center row, his mother Esther Forsyth sitting next to him.  In the photo, he looks every part the Renaissance-man rancher his family later depicted him to be.

Dr. John Greene

Dr. John Greene was born in Bowridge Hall in 1595, not far from Salisbury, England.  The family was prominent, but he was the 4th son, not to inherit the family estate, and he studied to be a surgeon.  Today, the “Bowridge Farm” sits on the spot of the Bowridge Hall.  The old farmhouse has “1722” marked on its outside wall.  But it is new in this story.  John migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony nearly a hundred years before, and his family left the old Hall not too long after.

A few months after Dr. John and Joane Greene’s family arrived in Salem, the Puritan court banished Salem’s pastor, Roger Williams, for his lack of orthodoxy.  He survived the winter by staying with the Wapanoags and in the spring and summer of 1636 he established Providence (Rhode Island) as a bastion of religious tolerance.  Within a year, the Greene family had joined him and his other followers.  These early families were given homelots to build their homes and start small farms.  Dr. John’s homelot was four lots north of Roger Williams’s.   Alice Daniels, whom John wed following his wife Joane’s death, was three lots south of the Williams family.

An artist’s depiction of how the early homes with their steep roofs and garden plots looked.

(Courtesy of the Roger Williams National Memorial visitors’ center)

The Greene cemetery that today lies behind the Narragansett Bay Baptist Church in Warwick, Rhode Island.  The spot perfectly symbolizes Dr. John Greene’s migration from a wealthy Anglican childhood as part of the English gentry class to a struggling but successful pioneer settler in a new land where he became one of the first members of the Baptist Church in America.

Source:  Thomas William Bicknell, “Early Land Allotments,” History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, (New York: American Historical Society, 1920.X).

Samuel Gorton

Samuel Gorton was born into a comfortable merchant family near Manchester, England.  He and his wife, Mary Mayplet, arrived in the Bay Colony in March, 1837 and within two months moved some miles south to Plymouth.  It was in Plymouth where he first comes to life in a cantankerous quarrel in a Plymouth trial of his maid.  It all eventually ended with his being expelled from the Plymouth Colony, but by that time he was known as a vocal intelligent firebrand with no patience for fools.  Gorton hotly believed in religious and political freedom and gender equality.  He opposed slavery.  And for all this, Puritan authorities probably hated him more than any other man in the New England colonies.

Plymouth Plantation is a living history museum that reproduces daily life in the Plymouth Colony.  It offers excellent insight into the lives of the people who settled there.

Imprisoned and nearly hanged by the Puritans, Gorton eventually made his way to London with John Greene and William Holden to convince Parliament to intervene in stopping Massachusetts’ oppression of its non-Puritan neighbors in Rhode Island.  He published a book while in England that chronicled the Puritans’ tyranny.  The three men were successful.  The Earl of Warwick issued an order to Massachusetts to cease and desist.  The Gortons and neighbors got their homes back, and an ugly chapter in New England history began to close.  The Greene and Gorton families were close friends and neighbors.  Their offspring intermingled to become some of Ida May Dawley’s ancestors.

I was delighted when googling the book to find that a replica was available print-on-demand.  Within two weeks, there, in his own words, was Samuel Gorton’s family story during those troubled times.

Expelled by his Puritan neighbors, Samuel and his family initially joined Anne Hutchinson and her followers whom Puritan courts had also thrown out of the Bay Colony.  The group founded Portsmouth, Rhode Island.  Anne was probably the greatest female intellectual in early American history.  In her exile, she and her family eventually moved to Long Island where she and all but one of her children died in a Native American massacre.  Boston clergy delighted when they heard the news, but Massachusetts has since repented, placing a statue of Anne Hutchinson and the one surviving daughter in front of the new State House.

The Rev. Obadiah Holmes

Obadiah Holmes was the second pastor of the second (or first, depending on who you talk to) Baptist congregation in North America.  Like Samuel Gorton, his family migrated from the British Midlands to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then moved to Plymouth Colony.  Also, like Gorton, he got into difficulties with Puritan authorities and was banished.  He ended up in Newport, Rhode Island, where he officiated at the Baptist Church.

Obadiah was an early American martyr whom the Puritan court tied to a stake in front of the Old State House (across the square from the site of the Boston Massacre that happened a century later) and gave 30 lashes with a 3-prong whip.   As a Baptist, he was a heretic in Puritan Society, and an especially egregious one who would not submit to either the court or his executioner.  He survived, but his back was so torn, he slept on his stomach for months.

The spot where the Puritans’ whipping post brought non-conformists into submission was just across from what’s now the Old State House.

Obadiah claimed that through his faith in Jesus Christ he never felt the lashes, that to him fell as strokes of a rose.  His faith remained strong to the end, and as death drew near decades later, he wrote to his children and wife to express his faith.  I found printed versions of his letters that, to me, were a source of inspiration.

John Greene of Quidnessett

John Greene (of Quidnessett) is said to be a distant cousin to Dr. John Greene who lived in Warwick, Rhode Island, a few miles north, although I haven’t yet been able to prove that.  He managed the Blockhouse for Richard Smith who earned a small fortune trading with the Narragansett tribe for beaver pelts.  In addition to managing the trading post, John Greene of Quidnessett was a land speculator and got into trouble more than once with Rhode Island and Connecticut authorities as they vied for jurisdiction for frontage on Narragansett Bay.  Not a lot of detail is known about this John, but his children and theirs married into important Rhode Island families.

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The Blockhouse was built at a beautiful spot on Narragansett Bay where the Narragansett tribe summered, near today’s historic Wickford .  Roger Williams built his own trading post, not too far away.  No one knows the Blockhouse’s exact appearance, but researchers have done renderings giving a good impression.

When the King Philip’s War between the British colonists and Native Americans began in 1675, the Blockhouse soon became a staging point for Plymouth and Connecticut troops as they pursued their infamous attack on the neutral Narragansett tribe in the Swamp Battle.

The troops, wounded and dead, who fought in the Swamp Battle were carried through the snow to the Blockhouse for care and burying.   The Narragansetts never forgave the colonials for the atrocity, and in their response ravaged Rhode Island, burning every building, including the Blockhouse, south of Providence, except one.   Today, flowers grow above the mass graves, and a lonely plaque reminds us of America’s most costly war (in per capita terms).

After King Philip’s War ended, Richard Smith’s son, Richard Jr., returned to rebuild the Blockhouse into a large home that came to be known as “Smith’s Castle.”  It is doubtful that John Greene was associated with the new building.  By then, he was already old.  He died in 1695.

Smith’s Castle, today, is designated a National Historic Landmark, and, with all its history, is a fascinating visit.