Notes & Notions from the Salem Witch Museum

THE LECTURE

The premier of the Old Town Hall Lecture Series on Thursday evening was a huge success!  The talk by Richard Francis, author of Judge Sewall’s Apology, gave an overview of a flesh-and-blood Samuel Sewall, the only one of nine judges presiding over the Salem witch trials to apologize for his part in the tragedy.   Read more »

Professor Benjamin Ray of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia lectured to a sold out room at the House of Seven Gables this week.  Professor Ray is the project director of Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project where everyone “from teachers to fourth graders” can now readily access 8,000 searchable pages from source documents online. Read more »

On November 18, the Gordon College Institute for Public History In Historic Salem inaugurates a series of lectures, Old Town Hall Lectures, in Salem’s historic Old Town Hall.

The inaugural lecture is being given by Richard Francis, on his book,
Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of a Conscience (London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2005) [Buy a copy on our online store]

Here’s a description from the website:

The Salem witch hunt has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of  injustice. Judge Samuel Sewall presided at these trials, passing harsh judgment on the condemned. But five years later, he publicly recanted his guilty verdicts and begged for forgiveness. This extraordinary act was a turning point not only for Sewall but also for America’s nascent values and mores.

We were curious to find out more about Judge Sewall. As it turns out, Google books has scanned in his published diaries and you can read them online. Search for “witchcraft” and this is the entry from August 19, 1692:

Clicking on the diary image above will send you to the Google Books site where you can read more.

We were honored last month to host distinguished Salem witch trials scholar Marilynne Roach who has written, among other things, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege.  After the crowds of summer visitors had left the museum for the evening, our staff gathered in the main auditorium for her lecture.  She described her years of extensive research in various document archives, writing several books, and answered our many questions. 

Ms. Roach first visited the Salem Witch Museum in 1973 and was inspired to launch her own investigation into the subject.  Combing over documents written in an antique dialect, she ascertained new details relevant to this well-studied period of Colonial New England history.  One of the more exciting moments of the research came , she told us, when she realized she’d discovered jailers invoices that had never before been acknowledged.  It’s now widely known that imprisoned accused-witches were billed for their stay! Read more »