Framingham Legends & Lore (5 page)

T
HOMAS
D
ANFORTH
, F
ATHER OF
F
RAMINGHAM

Thomas Danforth was baptized at Framlingham, England, on November 20, 1623, the fourth of seven children of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. Elizabeth died in 1629, and in 1634 Nicholas sailed with his children to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They settled in Cambridge and he bought out the holdings of several neighbors who were departing to found Hartford, Connecticut. Almost as soon as he had arrived, Nicholas became one of the proprietors of the town and a member of the colony's general court. Nicholas only lived a few short years in New England, dying in April 1638, age forty-nine years.

He had been wealthy enough that all his orphaned children were well provided for. Thomas, the eldest son, naturally took over his father's business interests. He became a freeman (voter) of Cambridge when he was still only nineteen years old and married Mary Withington on February 23, 1644. He quickly achieved prominence, serving as treasurer of Harvard College from 1650 to 1669 and steward of the college until 1682. Like his father, he became a representative to the general court in 1657 and then became one of the governor's assistants and magistrate from 1659 to 1679, at which point he became deputy governor of the colony, a position he held, with a brief interruption, until 1692.

Shortly after he became an assistant, Danforth acquired a grant of 250 acres of land in Framingham. How he first became interested in the area is unknown. His younger brother Samuel had been a member of the second graduating class at Harvard College in 1643 and had followed the wish of their late mother that he enter the ministry. He was ordained an assistant to the Reverend John Eliot at Roxbury in 1650 and remained at that post until he died in 1674. Through his brother Samuel, Thomas Danforth would have known all about Eliot's work with the Indian converts at Natick, so perhaps that is what drew his interest.

Two years later, in 1662, an additional two hundred acres were laid out. At the same time, Danforth exercised his right to purchase an additional ten pounds' worth of land. Ten pounds was not a huge sum, even in 1662, but in this case it was enough to purchase virtually the entirety of what is now Framingham that lies west of the Sudbury River, plus a portion of northern Ashland. In all, it amounted to some fourteen thousand acres. Shortly afterward, he bought out Richard Wayte, adding an additional three hundred acres, including Mount Wayte, and Richard Russell's five hundred acres as well.

Soon after his acquisition of the properties, the area became known as Danforth's Farms, and that name and the year 1662 remain emblazoned on the town seal to this day. Perhaps in an act of modesty, by the 1670s Danforth had begun to refer to the settlement as “Framlingham,” named after the town of his birth in England. (Almost immediately the “l” was dropped from the spelling, following the common American practice of changing the spelling to represent more accurately how a word was pronounced.) If the earlier grantees had received plots of land roughly the proportions of a good-sized farm, Danforth's holdings now virtually added up to an entire township. And that is precisely what he had in mind.

J
OSEPH
B
RADISH
, F
RAMINGHAM
P
IRATE

Danforth's dream of the town of Framingham was remarkably slow in arriving—ten years after his land purchases, only two additional families had moved to the area. One was the Eames family, whom we met in the previous chapter; the second was the Bradish family. Joseph and Mary Bradish had moved from Sudbury to the north side of Nobscot Mountain, not far from the home of the Indian Old Jethro, by 1672. The outbreak of King Philip's War three years later was probably what prompted the family to move to the safer confines of Cambridge, although they eventually returned to live in Sudbury. They inhabited Framingham long enough for a son, Joseph Jr., to be born here in December 1672. (Incidentally, the document reporting his birth to Middlesex County, along with those of several of the Eames children, is the only known official use of the British “Framlingham” spelling.)

Not much is known of the younger Joseph's youth except that he went to sea. He was a boatswain's mate on the four-hundred-ton, twenty-one-gun, armed merchant ship
Adventure
that left London, England, bound for Borneo in March 1698. Six months later, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship stopped for water at an island in the Indian Ocean. While most of the officers were ashore, the crew mutinied and set sail, choosing Bradish (not yet twenty-six years old) as captain. They decided to split among themselves all the money, jewels and goods the ship carried for trade, and headed for Bradish's home waters of New England. In March 1699, they landed at Montauk, Long Island, whose inhabitants were widely known to be not above trading with pirates. There Bradish stashed his share of jewels for safekeeping while he hired a coastal pilot and headed for Block Island. The
Adventure
was much too large and conspicuous a ship to go unnoticed for long. When the first party he sent to Newport to buy a smaller sloop was imprisoned by suspicious authorities there, Bradish managed to bribe a passing coastal trader for use of his vessel, and the
Adventure
's crew scuttled it and scattered with their share of the cargo to various southern New England ports.

Most of the pirates were eventually captured and the cargo recovered. Bradish himself was apprehended in Deerfield, Massachusetts, perhaps hoping that if he headed inland and made for the frontier he could escape his notoriety. On April 8, 1699, he and one of his companions were thrown into the jail at Boston, waiting for the local authorities to consult with the royal government back in London about what should be done with them.

Some accounts state that the Boston jailer, Caleb Ray, was a kinsman of Bradish, others that he was merely incompetent. In any event, on Midsummer's Night, June 24, Ray's maid, Kate Price, assisted Bradish and his one-eyed compatriot, Tee Witherly, in escaping, and the three headed north. A Kennebec Indian sachem, Essacambuit, who had come to Boston to negotiate a treaty with the colonial government sought to ingratiate himself with the authorities by letting them know where Bradish, Witherly and Price could be found. The three were captured at Saco, Maine, and returned to the Boston jail on October 26, 1699. By this time Caleb Ray had been relieved of his duties, and the prisoners were clapped in irons to prevent their making another run for it.

By chance, the three pirates shared the jail with Captain William Kidd of New York, who had been imprisoned several months earlier. While Bradish was unambiguously a pirate, Kidd's case was somewhat more complicated, as he had crossed the muddy line between privateer and pirate. Nonetheless, the two were both sent back to England, departing Boston on February 3, 1700, aboard the man-of-war
Advice
, which had been dispatched by the British admiralty expressly for that purpose. They also shared the same fate at the end of a hangman's noose.

T
HE
L
EGEND OF
L
EARNED
'
S
P
OND

The long-held tradition in many New England towns that “Washington slept here” is rivaled only by claims of pirate gold buried by the notorious Captain Kidd. Although they were unknown to each other before their imprisonment, Bradish and Kidd's names became linked in the public consciousness as the two most infamous pirates of their era. Both first landed at Long Island before proceeding to New England, both brought treasures of jewels and coins ashore with them and both were transported back to England on the same ship to be hanged. So it should not be surprising that Bradish's local roots may have inspired Framingham's own legend of pirate gold buried on the shores of Learned's Pond in the south part of town.

The earliest written reference to the legend of Kidd's gold is in Reverend William Barry's 1847 history of the town. Barry tells of a trunk of money submerged in Farm Pond that would occasionally rise to the surface, only to disappear when approached by any would-be treasure hunter. The Barry account predates a remarkably similar legend of Walden Pond recalled by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic
Walden
. Reverend Josiah H. Temple expanded the tale in his 1887 history of Framingham, changing the setting to Learned's Pond, attributing ownership of the trunk to Captain Kidd and describing in great detail the midnight ritual that would break the spell cast on the chest and release its treasures. A third version of the tale based on Temple's account was written as a poem in 1897 by Clara Augusta Trask, a prolific writer of poetry, dime novels and newspaper columns who lived on Main Street not far from the pond. Trask's flowery Victorian verse names Nathaniel Pratt as the last treasure seeker to attempt to recover the trunk, only to have it disappear into the dark waters when he lost his courage, leaving it for future generations to consider.

Early twentieth-century postcard of Learned's Pond.

“K
IDD
'
S
C
HEST OF
G
OLD
—A L
EGEND OF
L
EARNED
'
S
P
OND
”

T
HE
W
ITCHES OF
S
ALEM
E
ND

Even after peace returned to New England with the end of King Philip's War in 1677, the growth of Framingham was limited mostly to the natural population increase of the families that had already taken up residence there. It took another epochal event, again with Thomas Danforth playing a leading role, to spur the next influx of new settlers.

One of the most infamous episodes in the early history of New England was the Salem witchcraft delusion. It began in January 1692 in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, now the town of Danvers but then still a part of the town of Salem. Parris's daughter and niece were tormented by unusually severe fits and apparitions. After an examining doctor determined witchcraft to be the probable cause, adult relatives and neighbors began championing the girls' case. By the end of February, they lodged complaints that they were tormented by the Parris's Indian slave, Tituba, and neighbors Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.