Town Crossings

Georgetown

Seniors hear tale of 1692 massacre

Will Broadhus
Published: June 12, 2007

If you've ever seen the plaque beside North Street announcing that the Goodrich family massacre took place "10 rods from this spot" on Oct. 23, 1692, and wanted to know the full story, you were not alone. If you attended the Georgetown Council on Aging's monthly breakfast on Trestle Way last week to hear Byfield Parish Church Pastor William Boylan's talk on the massacre, you were one member of an overflow crowd.

"There are usually about 15 people attending the men's breakfast, but there was so much interest in this topic, we made it co-ed" said Council on Aging Director Colleen Ranshaw-Fiorello. Around 40 people registered for the breakfast, and perhaps 10 more than that showed up to eat eggs and bacon. These were cooked by Georgetown Housing Authority Director Diane Joidin, and served by Ranshaw-Fiorello. The food didn't run out, but a second urn of coffee was required.

Not only the food, and the fascination of the topic, but the reputation of the speaker was part of the draw. Boylan, who has been pastor at Byfield Parish for 39 years, has recorded nearly 200 vignettes on local history for Newburyport radio station WNBP-AM. These were first broadcast in 1992.

"It's a mystery," Boylan said of the massacre, in which both parents and two of four children were murdered by Indians nearly 315 years ago, while the other two children were kidnapped. He said the story that has been told assumes a raiding party of Indians in league with the French would have come deep into settled territory, seeking profitable scalps. Boylan also said it makes no sense that the local Agawams were responsible, in spite of what some believe. Boylan cited recent statements that Agawams might have acted out of a sense of revenge, however randomly triggered, for the decimation of their numbers by white men, both through disease and armed conflict. Depicting a general context that provides a more plausible and specific explanation for the attack made up the bulk of Boylan's talk.

Disease arrived with white fisherman in 1616, and eventually wiped out nine out of every 10 Indians then in New England, Boylan acknowledged. But when the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with which the Goodriches were associated, came to Massachusetts, the Agawam had more immediate threats to their health. When Masconomet, the chief, or sagamore of the Agawam, first saw John Winthrop's ship from a hilltop in Ipswich in 1630, he paddled out and "pleaded" with Winthrop "to have his people settle among them." The Agawam were "helpless to fight against the Indians in Maine" who had been attacking them, Boylan explained, and sought protection.

Winthrop agreed, and paid Masconomet for the land he settled. Boylan can attest first-hand that Indian land rights were respected because he presided over the sale of Byfield Parish land that entailed clearing an "Indian deed" from 1702. Boylan also cites the Purtians' genuine commitment to religious principles they came here to save and revive, and which would not have allowed them "to treat these people as if they weren't human beings." Toward the end of his life, Masconomet petitioned the court to allow him to convert to Christianity, a sign to Boylan he did not blame whites for everything that befell his people. By the time of the Goodrich massacre, there was an accord between local Indians and settlers, and it was the tensions between French and English that dominated the New World.

Boylan explains the Goodrich massacre in terms of two claims in Jewett's History of Rowley, which states that it was St. Francis Indians, confederates of the French from much farther north, who had killed Benjamin Goodrich, his wife, and two of his four children. "Why would they come all the way down here?" Boylan asks, when the frontier at that time extended three miles north of the Merrimack River, where raids on outposts would have been easier. He explains this through another story in Jewett, usually questioned as legend, in which an Agawam living peaceably in an encampment at Byfield Falls, had fallen in love with an older Goodrich daughter. It makes more sense to Boylan that the St. Francis Indians, rather than acting independently, were with that Agawam on his visit, when they were overcome by temptation and took the Goodrich scalps.

Two of the daughters survived, one to be ransomed a year later by the state. The other, legend has it, came back 50 years later. The son who accompanied the returning Goodrich daughter is recorded as having heard the woman say "Everything has changed" as they walked around Byfield. It is also recorded that, two days after she arrived in Byfield, she was found dead, a suicide, at the spot of the old Goodrich house.

Photos