Infamous America - SALEM Ep. 8 | Interview: Elizabeth Peterson

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Elizabeth Peterson is the Director of the Witch House and Pioneer Village in Salem. The Witch House is the home of judge Jonathan Corwin and has been preserved as a museum to give visitors a rare glimpse into the life of a judge of the Salem witch trials. We met Elizabeth in the house to hear about the lives of Puritans, the perspective of the judges during the trials, and much more. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the final episode of infamous America Season 1, Salem. For this interview, I met with Elizabeth Peterson, the director of the witch house and pioneer village in Salem. The witch house is a great piece of living history that has been preserved and restored to give us insight into numerous facets of the Salem witch trials. The house was the home of magistrate and judge Jonathan Corwin, and it's full of exhibits that illuminate life in Salem in 1692, and also give us a glimpse. behind the curtain of the witch trials. I talked to Elizabeth about Judge Corwin in his home, the trials from a judge's point of view, and, since it's in a city famous for hauntings,

had she ever experienced anything strange or ghostly in the old house? Elizabeth was kind enough to meet me right before the house opened to the public, so near the end of the interview, you'll hear some sounds of the staff getting ready to open the doors to the throngs of visitors. Here's Elizabeth Peterson. All right, Elizabeth, thank you for being on the show. we very much appreciated, especially at this incredibly busy time of year. We know that October is almost here when people start hearing this. It will have, October will have passed. So your busy season

is just about to strike. People from all over the world are going to descend on Salem and Judge Corwin's house. And so you guys are very busy. Thank you very much for being on the show. Absolutely. And so that's where we want to start, obviously. We want to start with the place that we're sitting in. Specifically, what is the house that we're sitting in and what room are we sitting in right now? This is the 17th century home of witchcraft trials judge Jonathan Corwin. He's very, very wealthy merchant, firstly, inherits one of the largest Puritan fortunes in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So he's very much a son of privilege. He becomes magistrate and then becomes judge on the special court appointed for the witchcraft cases in Salem, Oyer and Terminer.

As magistrate, he is receiving the accusations for the trials or for the witchcraft cases. And he would have received any sort of accusations. If someone in the community felt they had been criminally wronged, this is where you would go. You would seek out your magistrate. He's that first authority for anything to move forward. And so either him or his brother-in-law, Hawthorne, who lived right down the street, would be the two men that you would go to if you felt. You had witnessed witchcraft, had been affected by witchcraft in some way,

you would seek them out and make your complaint official. From there, he would call a constable. From there, we do have a paper trail that we can sort of matrix together how these procedures went forward. And so what we think happened here in the house, in this parlor, in the first lower chamber, we think that at the most, those conversations, those early conversations, For years, they had said, oh, this is where the trials happened.

They sort of gave the idea that it was one hanging judge. And that's wonderful for storytelling. It's very cinematic and it captures the imagination. But it's just not the case. There are nine judges appointed. Four judges would have to be seated with the Chief Justice Stoughton in order for anything to move forward. So that's happening at the courthouse. We've lost that building.

We've lost all those buildings. So it's easy to say, oh, it all happened here. But with research over the decades, we've realized what is happening here is at the most, those accusations, people coming to him saying, here's my issue, here's my complaint. He might call other authorities of the court together. They might have informal meetings or conversations, but nothing official, no examinations are happening here. No trials happening here. But this is, you just kind of mentioned it.

As we've been around Salem, we have heard that very few actual artifacts still remain from that time period. And it, you know, it might seem somewhat obvious that people wanted to get rid of anything that was associated with witchcraft from the, from the 1692 era. This is one of probably the biggest artifact that still stands. I'm sure it's been heavily renovated to get it back to kind of where it was, to make it look like it did at the time that Judge Corwin lived here. But how important is it to have this piece for people to come and see as the biggest living relic that still exists? I think it's vital. I think it's absolutely vital to have this physical, massive artifact as a reminder and as an opportunity to interpret a very tragic episode

and very misunderstood episode of our past. I think, sadly, I would have to say it's even more relevant, more important in today's world than it has been for quite some time. Sure. How our authority comes together and makes mistakes or, you know, responds to threats and fears erroneously or, you know, or even in positive. ways, it's all very critical, I think, to understand this portion of our past. And to not sugarcoat it, to understand, you know, the ugliness behind all of these decisions, as best we can understand, as best we can sort of, you know, investigate and bring scholarship to those beliefs and superstitions and reasons they made the decisions that they did.

Right, the old classic quote of those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it type of thing. We have to, you have to study, you have to learn from it, so that you can hopefully not make the same mistakes in the future. Absolutely, even because it's one of the panels that we have in the house, and I can show you that before you guys leave today, is, you know, where do we see this happening in our world today? Where do we have a group perceiving another group as a threat? How do we marginalize?

How do we push that threat away? And you can say that we see this symbolically in many ways. It's human nature to, you know, protect those you love and push those you fear. But it's also even happening literally. you know, in certain third world countries, in Africa especially, children are being accused of witchcraft, being tortured, being killed. It's absolutely devastating and hard to believe that all these centuries later we're still dealing with this in parts of the world and we're still ignoring it as well. And I think that's just as telling. Right, right. And just as a kind of

a quick fun one for you, as we've been walking through here, this is a fantastic house. The bits of it we've seen thus far, you can hear the floorboards creek. you were talking earlier before we turn on the microphones about doors upstairs that have wonderful creaking sounds to what's it like to actually come in to work here every day and experience this it's amazing I'll tell you I often walk in and your head is full of course your day to days you've got payroll you've got issues you've got emails to to answer you know as Mandy can attest more than probably anyone but it's very it's sobering to to come into here into these rooms and to realize how many lives

were affected by conversations that took place in this house or between the adults in this home. Just lives changed within moments. Right. Or even the family, Jonathan and Elizabeth, as a couple, as parents, as authorities in this community, watching their neighbors turn and shift and change and relationships that have been developed over years and decades suddenly switching. You know, for example, the contract there on the wall, that's between Jonathan and a local Mason, Daniel Andrews. And Daniel will later be accused of witchcraft. Really?

We think he does escape a bit. Some say to Europe for a short time to sort of escape the pandemonium and comes back when it's safe. But it just shows, you know, at one time he's being welcomed and he's being hired. and then suddenly things shift and change in relationships that you trusted are no longer. I was about to say, yes, he was a trusted person to one of the more prominent figures in town. They were busing up the house. He's asking him to put on Dutch tiling and do the chimneys. Yeah, well, and speaking of chimneys, right behind you,

obviously the listeners can't see it. Hopefully they will come and visit here at some point, but there is an enormous hearth that must be four feet high and, I don't know, six or seven feet wide. It's incredible to see these things. The hallmark of 17th century homes. Yeah. This is a monster at the center of the house and it will open up into each of the rooms. Sure.

That's sort of how we're building. It's funny to say, but chimneys are actually a newer technology. We don't think of it in those terms today. But, I mean, even in this time period, there are still Elizabethan-era homes in England, a bit more out, you know, farmland, that would still have only an open smoke hole. They'd have an open fire. Wow. Right?

Cooking over that open fire. Smoke hole. So very tribal. Like what you and I might think of as very tribal existence, they're still living that way. And it's lovely. It's efficient for cooking, for heating, and everything. But you are inundated with smoke. You breathe it, you smell it, your clothing, your hair, right?

Everything is. And so tuning comes along as a way to sort of pull that smoke away. But we still have that concept of the hearth as being central. That's life, that's heat, that's warmth, that's food. Without it, we might perish. And so we try to keep it in the center of the house. It isn't until, like, as you walk around these houses around Salem, you'll see within the next, like, 30, 40 years are like, okay, we've got it.

We understand chimneys. We're going to move it around. Yeah, we're going to have one on each side of the house. He's like, let's flank the house and push the heat in, you know, just for fun. Let's see how that works. So, yeah, but it is a newer, it's still, we're still sort of adhering to the old way. the old beliefs and with that, you know, superstitions and fears as well. Well, just for the fun of it, since this whole area is this is known as which city,

there's all kinds of haunted aspects to it. Do you, when you turn the lights off here at night, do you ever get any little feelings or premonitions when you're walking through the place? A lot of us have had little things. I will be honest. A lot of us have had little things happen, but I would have to say with everything I've had happen, it's never been predicated by a feeling of, foreboding or anything spooky.

It will usually be that I've misinterpreted a sound or a site as a co-worker. I think someone's down here working. I think someone just came into the back door, something like that, and then I'll realize, there's nobody there. But it's not scary. It's more like, all right, you got me. Yeah, gotcha. Well, let's jump into the heart of it then.

So if we can, let's kind of step back. I want to hear certainly much more about the magistrate side of things. I think that's a fascinating side of the story. But let's try to set up for the audience a little bit more. They will have heard all the narrative by the time we get to this interview. So they kind of understand a little bit about what Puritan life was like, what Puritan life would have been like for adolescent girls. But can you explain a little bit more about the daily tasks and the grind and the monotony

that would have existed for the girls who ended up starting this whole thing? Okay. No, it's a, I'll tell you from the perspective of the house, because it's a little bit of a mixed bag here for us at this house, because we have the unusual opportunity to interpret wealthy children, wealthy women, wealthy men's lives. And that isn't the usual, you know, Salem Village. That isn't really what we're discussing early on. Farming, poor, farm and community. And they're doing, they're doing well, Rebecca Nurse. You know, all those people are doing are doing well, but not wealthy.

Yeah. Like Horwin's here. So when we look at just overall, you know, the prospects of a young woman in early Puritan America, it's fairly grim. I mean, overall. Right. I mean, you had, for Elizabeth here, her daughter, her first daughter being born, the only daughter who survives to adulthood. Right, which was a very common thing.

Right. To go off and Mary is Elizabeth, and she sadly passes very quickly after childbirth. So she loses, Elizabeth, the senior, loses all of her children before her except for Henry. But the prospects are fairly grim. It's a fairly oppressive lifestyle, even if you have privilege. With privilege, you might get more of an opportunity to sort of push back on social expectation.

You might be, well, all girls are taught to read, expected to be taught to read, in at a dame school. and that's like one of the bright, fuzzy things you can say about early Puritanism is that, you know, our literacy rate was off the charts. It was huge. You had to read the Bible. Yeah. Not that it was like the warm, fuzzy, right thing to do, but it was just because we can't have a weak length in the community. You need to understand the word. So girls are generally taught to read. Boys are taught to read, but that's where it sort of splits off.

And then boys are expected to go off and write if they choose or to apprentice in their trade. and then girls are not expected to write, just expected to sort of do decorative arts, keep to the home, keep within their lane, so to speak, or their arena. But with wealthier women, their daughters, you find a deviation from that. Elizabeth, Sr. writes lovely.

She's very well-spoken. She communicates in her diaries and journals. So she's very well-educated. I would imagine Elizabeth that her daughter is as well. We don't have a record of, you know, where she's going to school. But so that's a bit of a difference from the girls at Salem Village. Okay. And the lifestyle of many of those girls is they're taking part in a practice that we call sending out.

And it's young girls, young children being sort of placed in other homes with other families about the age of 12 so that they aren't coddled so that they learn to be respectful and productive. And so you have many of the girls who are accusing are occupying those roles, those spaces in those households. They aren't with their parents. Right. One thing that I could add certainly to sort of help understand the mindset of a young Puritan girl is women aren't owning their own property by and large in this period.

in this period. Now again, that's a bit of an anomaly here at the house where Elizabeth inherits from her mother. She inherits property from a mother who inherited property straight from her father. So that's unusual. So I get to see sort of two sides of it here. But by and large, the young girl growing up in this colony is quick to identify herself with a suitor, the safety of a man's family, so that she can have a roof over her head and be a part of, you know, that household. We have lost a number of men to the King Phillips War, the Indian skirmishes. We don't, I think, teach enough about that.

I don't think as a whole we understand truly how impactful that was, but the population being so declined that these young women wouldn't necessarily think marriage as an automatic. Right. They, you know, they might have some trouble aligning themselves with a family. And this is where the fortune telling. Right. The kind of tradition comes in that they were, this whole thing started because they were trying to see maybe who might be potential suitors down the road. Right.

Doing the egg in the glass where you take the white of the egg and you let it sit, which we've actually. actually done. Okay. I tested it, we're like, that's that work. You know, let it sit in the sun and see what shape it takes. And, you know, Reverend Hale talks about that in his book. But as we've discussed, he doesn't say, though, this is how it all begins, this is what starts at all, or mention who is doing it. But he's saying, this is happening.

And there are, Sarah Cole is actually one of the young women. She was just down the street. She's not one of the accusers from the Village, but she's one who says, yes, of course we're doing it. I'm paraphrasing. Sure, sure. It's slightly cheeky.

Yes, we're doing it. Everybody does it, you know. And the more I researched, I realized, oh, this is going on for centuries. Right. This is English, you know, folk magic. This is English. Very sort of harmless.

There's a book called Mother Bunch that's published early on in England where she's teaching young women and young men how to do these little things. And you can actually find that online. Oh, really? Yeah. So she's, I mean, down from, it gets spookier than the egg in the glass, but she actually even teaches you to do like a little witch cake with the flour and a bit of your own water, so urine, right? Right. But you bake it and you can't speak while you bake it,

and then you break it apart and you sleep with a portion of it under your pillow and you're supposed to dream of the person you're going to marry. That's how it's going to work. Okay, yeah. And this is like, the witch cake is one of the early traditions when it comes to, is one of the first things you read when you start to really research the Salem witch trials. Was it a witch cake was used in the early days to try to identify the witch? And I know that in the very first, my very first readings, when I were very scattered and I was trying to figure out what was happening, I read the basic idea behind the witch cake. And I thought, well, how in the world does that identify a witch? And it takes a little bit to kind of figure out the process. But there's so many steps that you have to go through.

and then somehow the witch will be magically revealed. And all these things had several steps. And then eventually you would figure out how to interpret it. And I thought they're all so complicated, yet somehow they're supposed to reveal this stuff. The witch kick I thought was going to be the largest fallacy. When I first started researching, I thought, okay, this is made up. This is silly.

But it actually ends up being like the best documented piece of English folk magic. You know, everything about it down to Paris, Reverend Paris. discovering it's been done. Yes. Being furious about it being done. Yes. His response and making Mary Sivoli get in front of the congregation and publicly apologize, which she tearfully does.

All of it recorded. And it's in a lovely little vault over in Denver's right now in Richard Trask's collection. And I just find that amazing. And so that really spurred me on to take a look at the folklore and the superstition. and give it validity. Just assume a level of validity to it because these people were, you know, to not dismiss it. And I think that's something that a lot of American historians and scholars do is they sort of dismiss the magical side of it because coming from a modern perspective, well, we're far beyond

that now. But I try to approach it with a sense of, well, these are the most educated people in our community. These are Harvard graduates. Some are Cambridge, Oxford graduates, and they don't question it. So that led me to some really amazing discoveries about, you know, our educational system in the colonial period and that were alchemists, many of us in this time period, and it just completely turned my concepts of, you know, colonial Puritanism right on its ear. Yeah, as the listeners will know, when we spoke to Professor Emerson Baker, he mentioned the same thing, that there was no questioning witchcraft at the time because everyone believed it the most educated, the most prominent citizens,

believed it and they to become an ordained minister you had to go through so many years of study there were so much ministers who delivered a single sermon would put hours or even a day into doing so this was very serious activity so if these guys believed it then it just trickled down and everybody else absolutely because you also have to you know put it in its historic context it's not been so very long that we even had the Bible in the common man's language language in English right right so I mean just in the in the century

to this we have royalty and authorities of the church literally hunting people down people can be you know tortured and murdered for simply saying the Lord's prayer in English like seemingly the most Christian right yeah loving thing to do and you could be persecuted for it because you were speaking from the Bible in in a language other than the Roman Catholic right so right is Isn't that just amazing? It's incredible. And so that also helped me understand the Puritans a little bit better.

It's like this sort of, you know, fervor, this fierce loyalty to it. They're appreciating this sense of we've received a gift. You have this in your own language. You don't need, you know, an authority of the church to stand between you and your relationship with God, with your creator. You're expected to cultivate that relationship for yourself. Come to your, you know, religious leader for God. guidance, but you're expected to make those connections and to question those connections

and make sure you aren't being deceived because it gets tricky. But I think that's just fascinating. And so, yes, they're not in a position where they're reinterpreting the Bible. They're not saying, here's what I think God means about this or this or this. If it says how to respond to witchcraft, what a witch is, then these are things that we don't question just as of yet. We believe them. Let's transition here real quick because I do want to get to the magistrate side of things.

I want to talk a little bit more about Judge Corwin and the kind of magistrate side of things. So first of all, when people come to Judge Corwin's house here, what's the most popular question you get asked? Truthfully, it's more about Giles Corey and what's pressed to death and what was wrong with the girls. That's what we get more often than anything. How did this happen? What was wrong with the girls? Yeah. What was wrong with the girls?

Ergot. Sure. That's been very popular. But what I will tell you is sort of the best takeaway that I try to give people, if they're trying to understand Corwin and his contemporaries and their mindset, you know, by and large. And I've done a transition in my views on him. You know, it's sort of difficult to interpret a museum in a home of a man who's involved in the way that he is with such a very dark history. I have a love and respect and affinity for the home.

And so at first, when I was trying to learn about everything, I separated the two so that I could love the structure, care for the structure, and then try to understand him and his role a little bit better. And over the years, I've come to sort of a comfortable place with it. I've searched everything that he ever wrote, that any Corwin ever set to paper, trying to get some insight. Did he ever talk about? you know, his involvement.

Did he ever talk about how he felt? And he hadn't, unfortunately. Okay. He's all business. He just, right? You know, keeping records and whatnot. But I do learn a few things, or did learn a few things on the way. We find that his mother-in-law is accused of witchcraft as she comes under suspicion.

So that's his wife's mother. During this time period? Yes. Yes. Right at the onset. So much so that, you know, we find instructions for the maid who is accusing his mother-in-law, to be transported separately from Tituba, so that there's very much

using privilege, using influence to keep her out of the fray a bit. And he manages to. She never officially is accused. She's never arrested, but it's murmured about so much so that others are saying, well, why aren't we seeing your mother-in-law here? So he's a man that if you understand this timeframe,

if a woman is accused, then they will also seek her family. members, they will especially look to her female family members, her daughters, her granddaughters. So for his mother law to be accused, he could not have not realized that, you know, he was under threat, his family was under threat as well. What I, what I sort of try and impart to those who are confused about, you know, who he was and his role and was he a bad man, was, you know, that sort of thing. And I absolutely understand trying to place him and trying to understand him as you, you know,

walk through the homes that he lived in with his family. And what I find is this, though I don't have his own words, I don't have his own perspective, sadly. I have Sewells and I have others who are communicating to each other about it. And by and large, what we have is we have men of authority responding to a community threat as real to them then as say terrorism would be to you and I today. So it's, sounds outrageous, but they give as much validity to witches as we do to these acts of terrorism. So their first response isn't, I don't know if I believe in it, or I don't know how true this might be.

They respond to it as if it's a given. Right. And such a threat as it must be dealt with quickly before it spreads, before their apathy is perceived by God as a strike. Yeah. Right? Because anything could be. And then he visits more, you know, misfortune upon them.

They feel that they are their brother's keeper. If you have 12 households living in a community, and 11 of those are God-fearing and attending Sabbath and doing everything by the book, and one family is not, and those 11 let that family languish, God holds all 12 accountable. So that's really sort of that mindset is like, all right, we need to all of us pull together.

and do right by God and find out why he's visiting this fortune upon us so that we can make sure this community thrives the way it's supposed to. So these men are responding and behaving with a sense of they have a responsibility to those who have complained. And I know that sounds outrageous because we're talking about witchcraft. Yeah. For the individual who would have heard about the philosopher's stone and studied alchemical philosophy,

at Harvard, who believes in the doctrine of a fluvia, as drawn out by René Descartes, who's considered the father of modern philosophy, that gives validity to the magic that's going on. And so they set all of that aside and simply try and find the source of it. They make huge mistakes in the process, and they act in ways that are unforgivable. But I think at the heart of it, most of them felt they were doing the right thing. You see deviations in that. You see monsters. Stoughton, the sheriff, his nephew here, terrifying people.

Hawthorne, if you look at his communications with Titaba, he's far too in earnest. He's far too enthusiastic. And that's terrifying. So they commit egregious acts against the community in their fervor. But I think at the start of it at the onset, they are, they are, responding to what they feel is a real threat, and it's their responsibility to. Right. And they honestly would feel that the community would hold them accountable for.

You know, if someone made a report to Corwin, he didn't take it seriously, that person is going to feel that they've been slighted and not been dealt with correctly, and they will seek to, you know, to find an alternate authority to report it to. Sure, sure. There's a sense of, you know, of that obligation in his office. Does that help a little? It does. It does.

Thank you very much for your time. I very much appreciate it. We know that you guys have a lot of work to do. Things have to get opened up and everyone has to come and see the house. So thank you very much. We appreciate our time at the witch house here. I encourage everyone who is interested in this. Please stop by and see this house is fantastic. And we'll see you down the road. Thank you very much. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to Infamous America Season 1, Salem. We hope you join us soon for season two, where we'll dive into our first story of the Gangsters of the 1930s with Public Enemies, Volume 1, Pretty Boy Floyd. As always, if you enjoyed the show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. You can find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on social media. Our Facebook page is Blackbarrel Media, our Twitter handle is at B-Barrel Media, and our Instagram handle is at BlackBarrel Media.

Thanks again. We'll see you soon.