Rev. Samuel Parris
Samuel was born in London, England, in 1653 to the cloth merchant Thomas Parris. In 1673, while he was studying at Harvard, in his father passed away and he was named the heir to their sugar plantation in Barbados. Shortly after graduating, Samuel moved to Barbados and leased out the family plantation and established himself as a credit agent for other sugar planters.
Rev. Samuel Parris
After a hurricane destroyed his property in 1680, Samuel and two of his slaves, Tituba and John Indian, leave Barbados and settle in Boston. Once in Boston, he purchased a wharf and warehouse and establishes himself as a merchant. He met and married Eliazbeth Eldridge at Boston’s First Chruch and the two go on to have three children: Thomas, Elizabeth, and Susannah. In 1686, he grew dissatisfied with the life of a merchant and began substituting for absent ministers and speaking at informal church gatherings.
Salem Villagers were known to be contentious and quarrelsome, which led to three of the previous ministers resigning after having issues with the congregation. Samuel was aware of the conflicts but believed that each person was responsible for monitoring his neighbor’s piety and understood that conflict was inevitable.
At a town meeting on June 18, 1689, the villagers agreed to hire Samuel with an annual salary of £66, a house, and firewood for the church and his home. It was later agreed that the villagers would also provide Samuel with a barn and two acres of land. Samuel immediately moved his wife Elizabeth, his 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth, his 11-year-old niece, Abigail Williams and his slaves Tituba and John Indian into the home.
The home that the church provided
The Salem Village church charter was signed on November 19, 1689, and Samuel became the Village’s first ordained minister. While the Salem Towne Church and local churches were relaxing their standards for church membership, Samuel held to strict traditional standards, that required members be baptized and make a public declaration of experiencing God’s free grace to become full members. The majority of church members felt that Samuel’s traditionalism elevated their status by sharply distinguishing them from non-church members. While the disapproving minority found allies among Salem Village’s most influential non-church members.
By the fall of 1691, Samuel and church council members were having contract disputes; the council alleged that the contract was never formalized and only provided Samuel with the house and lands so long as he remained the minister, whereas Samuel alleged the contract granted him outright ownership of the house and lands. Durning the disputes, to the dissatisfaction of many church members, Samuel planned to refurbish the meeting house commensurate to become a more intrusive and expensive full church. The contract disputes and Samuel’s overbearing disposition caused the village and church to once again break into factions. Church attendance dropped and village officials refused to provide firewood to warm the church or Samuel’s house. But things escalated when the new Committee of Five announced its refusal to relinquish the ministry house and land to Samuel or to collect taxes for his salary and left the villagers to pay by “voluntary contributions.” Samuel called upon church members to make a formal complaint to the County Court against the committee’s neglect of the church and factional fighting began in his weekly sermons as a battle between God and Satan.
Samuel’s daughter Elizabeth, 9 and her cousin Abigail, 11 were curious about their future husbands and in the winter of 1691, they played a fortune telling game to tell their futures. They shared the game with other young girls in the area but by January 1692 Elizabeth was consumed with the game that she had trouble concentrating and neglected her chores. When her father would rebuke her, she would bark like a dog; when she heard the Lord’s Prayer, she’d scream and go so far as to throw a bible across the room. After the episodes subsided, she’d cry and say she was damned for playing the fortune telling game.
Reverend Parris turned to prayer to cure her odd behavior, but the episodes became more extreme when she started to give senseless speeches publicly, contorting her body into odd positions, and having seizure like fits. Samuel consulted with other ministers and local doctors and Dr. William Griggs suggested that her malady was a result of witchcraft. The reverend held prayer meetings with scheduled fasting, but things got worse when Elizabeth’s cousin, Abigail Williams, Anne Putnam, Jr. and Mary Walcott all began having fits as well. The community believed that the girls were suffering due to being victims of witchcraft and on February 29, 1692, under intense adult questioning, Elizabeth and Abigail Williams accused Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba of being their tormentors.
The Reverend created division between those who supported him and those who didn’t when he declared the church was under siege and the Devil was being assisted by “wicked & reprobate men. The accusations started in Salem Village against the opposing factions, but quickly spread to nearby towns, including Andover, Beverly, Topsfield, and Wenham. At the beginning of the trials, the Reverend submitted complaints, served as a witness, testified against the accused, and recorded the events.
The town remained divided even after the trails and in 1695 the Reverend still held a majority of town support, however families of the accused brought charges against him for his part in the trials. In 1697, the Reverend Joseph Green replaced Samuel after he accepted a position in Stow, Massachusetts.
His wife Elizabeth died in 1696, and he later married Dorothy Noyes, the couple would have four children. He began preaching in Dunstable in 1708, which he continued until 1712. From there, he moved to Sudbury, where he worked as a farmer and as a schoolteacher. He died in Sudbury on February 27, 1720.
