The Power of Words. At Large: It's a new world, but it isn't brave

3/15/98
Researcher rewrites history behind 'oldest' gravestone
Craig Anthony discovers, among other things, that Sara Tefft died 30 years later than originally believed.
By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal Staff Writer

      WARWICK -- For more than a century, Sara Tefft's sole distinction was to be buried under the oldest marked gravestone in New England. As befits such an artifact, the 250-pound fieldstone was pried from her burial plot off Occupessatuxet Cove and stored with other things of rare vintage in what was once a wine cellar under the John Brown House in Providence.
       As far as historians were concerned, Sara Tefft was no more than that - a rough chunk of stone, crudely inscribed:
HERE LIETH
THE BoDYE of SARA
TEfft IN thE MARCH 16
1642
       She was cast as a spinster, childless. Her presence in Warwick seven months before the first settlers purchased land there was a mystery.
       But Craig Anthony, an 11th-generation Rhode Islander with a fierce pride in his state's heritage, thought Sara Tefft's life was worth examining. After six years of trawling a sluggish sea of Colonial-era documents, Anthony has had the rare privilege of rewriting history.
       Sara Tefft actually died in 1672, and Rhode Island can no longer claim the oldest marked gravestone, Anthony has discovered. Far from being a barren, single woman, Tefft bore two children and was twice married to murderers who were executed for their crimes, Anthony maintains.
       "This is like detective work," said Anthony. "And it's a great story. It has everything in it: sex, murder, war and racial conflict."
       His conclusions have persuaded the steward of Sara Tefft's memorial, the Rhode Island Historical Society, to amend its documentation surrounding the stone, which is occasionally displayed, said Linda Eppich, head curator.
       More importantly, said Anthony, the fate of Sara and second husband Joshua's only son, Peter, is also the key to rethinking history's take on Joshua Tefft, one of the most notorious colonists of his time and the only Rhode Islander to be drawn and quartered for treason.
       "The recorded histories done by (the Puritan chroniclers) exhibited immense bias," Anthony said. "I wanted to write history from the point of view of a Rhode Islander and stir debate."

       SHE WAS BORN Sara Greene, most likely an illegitimate daughter of John Greene Jr., a Warwick man who was eventually elected deputy governor of the colony in 1690. Anthony first found a reference to her in court records -- she was called to answer for the crime of fornication. Sara Greene avoided four sessions before the Colonial magistrates; her father eventually paid the 40-shilling fine.
       Greene next appeared as the wife of Thomas Flounders, Anthony's research shows. In 1670, two years after they were wed, Flounders had a land dispute with a man named Walter House. One day they came to blows over it in Flounders's Narragansett shop. Flounders beat House to death and fled.
       Rhode Island and Connecticut, which had been squabbling for decades over the boundary between their infant colonies, fought for jurisdiction over the case. But the Rhode Island constables found Flounders first. The court convicted him of felonious manslaughter and he was executed that November.
       Young widow Sara Flounders next married Joshua Tefft, who eventually became a prominent villain in the Puritan accounts of Colonial Rhode Island. But she did not live to see this ignominy. Sara died March 16, 1672, two days after giving birth to a son, Peter. There is no record of how old she was.

       IN 1675, WAR broke out between the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Indian nation of Southeastern Massachusetts. The United Colonies of New England, a confederation formed by the Plymouth, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, decided to make a preemptive strike against the Narragansetts, to prevent them from joining forces with the Wampanoags.
       Rhode Island sought to join the United Colonies, but was denied because of its policy of religious liberty. Most of the colony's inhabitants retreated to Aquidneck Island for safety.
       Joshua Tefft remained to defend his South Kingstown farm, where he was dragooned into the United Colonies troops. He escaped and went back to his home -- only to be captured by the Narragansetts who enslaved him.
       Anthony maintains that Tefft was forced to fight alongside the tribe during the Great Swamp Fight of December 1675, when several hundred Narragansetts -- mostly women and children -- were slaughtered at their winter refuge inside the West Kingston swamp. Tefft wounded Capt. Nathaniel Seeley, of Connecticut, who later died.
       Tefft was wounded while raiding the outlying farms around Providence and was captured by English troops. In January 1676, Tefft was taken to Richard Smith's garrison (now called Smith's Castle in North Kingstown). Various Colonial accounts laid out Tefft's crimes -- scalping a miller, firing at Colonial soldiers and wounding Seeley.
       The United Colonies tried him for high treason. The 1647 law dictated that the condemned person would be drawn and quartered and forfeit all of his land and possessions. The penalty stuffed as many bodily humiliations into one execution as possible. The traitor was hanged, then cut down while still alive. His or her private parts and entrails were cut from the body and burned in the traitor's sight. Finally, the convicted was decapitated and cut into quarters.
       Nonetheless, the Rhode Island government, in its guardianship order, saw to it that Joshua's son, Peter, inherited his father's land -- in defiance of the legal penalty.
       As Anthony sees it, Peter's inheritance and a handful of legal maneuvers to protect Tefft land proves that Rhode Island did not regard Tefft as the traitor that the United Colonies did. In his tidy Wakefield apartment, Anthony turns to a decaying set of history books atop his refrigerator. He plucks a volume from an 1864 edition of The Rhode Island Colonial Records, inherited from his great-grandfather, state Sen. Henry Clay Anthony, of Portsmouth.
       "Joshua Tefft's not in there," he said as he ruffled the pages. "There weren't that many people in Colonial Rhode Island and if things went wrong, it wouldn't have gone unrecognized. The more I became convinced he was unjustly executed, the more I wanted to exonerate him."

       THE MISINTERPRETATION of Sara Tefft's stone began in one cemetery and ended in another.
       Her bones lie in a grave on the Greene family homestead in Warwick, once a Colonial outpost. In the mid-1800s, Dr. Usher Parsons, a physician and an amateur historian, read the downward slant of the seven's top line as a four. In 1868, the historical society removed the stone for safekeeping. A descendant put up a slate copy that repeated Parson's transcription and tacked on the phrase "in the 67th year of her age."
       Three-and-a-half centuries transformed the 17th-century wilderness to the crowded bayside suburb of Conimicut. The "new" stone toppled from its foundation and lies in fragments in an overgrown tangle off Cole Farm Road. But subsequent scholars never changed the way they read that inscription.
       Craig Anthony began his journey to a new perspective on Sara Tefft -- and her place in Colonial Rhode Island history - at the Tefft family plot in South Kingstown.
       Anthony was exploring an abandoned rail bed that slices through the backwoods of South Kingstown when he stumbled on a field of stones, breaking the earth at regular intervals like teeth.
       Anthony, who had been working on a project to record all of the state's historic cemeteries, recognized it as a graveyard hosting people too insignificant to rate carved stones or settlers who predated such civilized pretensions.
       He reported this find to John Sterling, an authority on historical cemeteries and the head of the state transcription project. Sterling turned over everything he had on the cemetery plot, including an unpublished 1880 manuscript.

       ONE SENTENCE in the manuscript caught Anthony's eye: "It was in this sequestered place that the celebrated Joshua Tefft was captured and afterwards taken to Wickford where he was drawn and quartered, the only execution of the kind in Rhode Island so far as we know."
       Driven to know more about Joshua Tefft, Anthony, with some assistance from Sterling, relentlessly mined archives from Hartford to Portsmouth. One afternoon, Anthony became so engrossed in his research he was briefly locked in the Warwick City Hall vault when he failed to leave his work after the clerk turned off the upstairs lights.
       Hidden in court documents, marriage records, birth and death registers, wills and deeds were splinters of the plot Anthony has written. Yet, slivers are not enough to build a platform of historical truth.
       Sterling maintains that Anthony's contention that Joshua Tefft was a patriot is a series of "speculations" and "leaps."
       "You could interpret it that way, I wouldn't. When you add up all the facts, it's hard to see him as a poor victim."
       As for Sara Tefft, one of the unluckiest brides of the New World, Sterling said, "it's a terrific story and I'd like it to be true."
       There's no doubt that Anthony has shattered the myths surrounding Sara Tefft's stone, Sterling said. He has included this historical correction in his 1997 book on Warwick's historic cemeteries. The oldest gravestone record will go out of state -- most likely to one in either Dorchester, Mass., or Connecticut, both dated 1644, he said.
       It doesn't seem like a record worth fighting over. But Robert P. Emlen, the Brown University curator who has written about the Tefft stone and teaches a course on gravestone studies, said that every monument is another piece of a faded mosaic that informs the present.
       "They are carved in a certain way and use language that is useful to us," Emlen said. "Gravestones provide a window into a historical past. They are the material evidence of lots of people for whom no other written record exists."

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