Fate played some strange tricks on Rebecca and her final days were filled with irony. Rebecca was born in 1621 at Great Yarmouth, England, to William and Joanna (Blessing) Towne, who crossed the Atlantic to settle in Salem Village in 1640. She had three sisters and four brothers.
Rebecca married Francis Nurse ca.1645. He, too, had been born in England. He was an artisan who fashioned household objects, such as trays, from wood. Between 1645 and 1664, they had four daughters and three sons. Rebecca was admired as a pious woman and her respected husband served as constable in 1672.
Rebecca Nurse a Witch?
Rebecca Nurse’s reputation was so good that the magistrates hesitated in delivering the warrant for her arrest after she was fingered as a witch by the Putnam children. It was finally delivered on March 23, 1792. After she was accused, more than two dozen prominent community members signed a petition on her behalf.
Rebecca’s response when she heard of the charges against her was: "I am innocent as the child unborn, but surely, what sin hath God found out in me unrepented of, that He should lay such an affliction on me in my old age."
The case went to trial and Rebecca was found not guilty, whereupon her accusers fell into great fits which, today, would probably be classified as convulsions (be they real or pretended). Just as Rebecca faced freedom, the judge had doubts and instructed the jury to reconsider.
The jury foreman questioned Rebecca, but got no response. At age 71, it is possible she did not even hear him, especially considering that the wild noise of the accusers, demonstrating the fits they say were caused by the witch, was still ongoing. Her silence may have been taken as a sign of guilt. The jury returned with a guilty verdict.
Rebecca Nurse Hanged as Witch on Gallows Hill
Rebecca was hung on Salem’s Gallows Hill on July 19, 1692. Others hung that day were Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How and Sarah Wild. The bodies were thrown into a nearby crevice.
That night, Rebecca’s son Samuel came for her body. He took her home by boat while other family members prepared a place for decent burial on the family’s land. This was done at great risk and in defiance of the law. The witches were considered unfit for Christian burial. Years later a monument to Rebecca was placed on the family graveyard.
Aftermath of Rebecca Nurse Hanging
The Rebecca Nurse hanging had immediate impact. It led to her contemporaries having doubts about the morality and substance of the convictions of all these witches, including that of her sister, Mary (Towne) Easty, who was hanged Sept. 22, 1692. (A third sister, Sarah, was accused, but not sentenced to death.) After all, Rebecca was the model of a good Christian. Some of her last words at the trial were: "I have got nobody to look to but God.”
In 1885, her descendants erected a tall granite memorial over her grave in what is now called the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Cemetery in Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. The inscription on the monument reads: "Rebecca Nurse, Yarmouth, England, 1621. Salem, Mass., 1692." That is followed by these words from Christian Martyr, a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier:
“O Christian Martyr who for Truth could die
When all about thee owned the hideous lie!
The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway
Is breathing freer for thy sake today.”
In 1892 another monument was erected. It names all those neighbors who signed the 1692 petition in support of Rebecca.
And the Putnams? Some of them repented many years later, offering apologies to Rebecca’s descendants. Now we realize that the Putnams had been involved, in the period leading up to the 1692 events, in land disputes with the Towne family.
A companion article gives six lines of descent from Rebecca (Towne) Nurse.
Sources: Lineage charts in the possession of the writer; Brown, David C., A Guide to the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692 (Washington Crossing, PA: 1984); The Second Boat (Vol. 13, No. 4, Oct., 1992).
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