Ada Shepard Badger

Ann Adeline "Ada" Shepard/Shephard (1835-1874) daughter of Otis Shepard/Shephard (1797-1858) and Ann Pope (1803-1886) born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She married Henry Clay Badger and had four children: Theodore Badger (1862-1910), Frederick Badger (1865-1944), Ernest Badger (1869-1888), and Katharine Badger (1872-18920. Ada is a direct line to Ralph Shephard, who came to Massachusetts in 1635 on the ship "Abigail." Photo from Special Collections Concord Library

The "Banner of Light" published an account of Ada was governess and translator to the children of author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Sophia Peabody (1809–1871): Below is a photo of the Hawthorne children: Una Hawthorne (1844-1877) Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) Rose Hawthorne (1851-1926) taken 1862 by Silsbee and Case courtesy of Hawthorne in Salem
Ada was recommend by Horace Mann, husband of Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, sister of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Horace was president of the co-ed Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio where Ada was a student.
Read my article on GenealogyBank blog "Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Real-Life ‘Ghost Story’"

Ada traveled with the Hawthorne family for two years visiting major cities in France, England, Italy and Switzerland. 

Susan D Abele (1904-1999), granddaughter of Ada notes in her essay, "Ada Shepard and her Pocket Sketchbooks, Florence 1858,"
that "scholars have pigeonholed Ada as the governess, using her correspondence to illuminate her famous employer's European experiences. But Ada was more than a governess. Her education was unusual for the time and her later work as an educator gained the respect of her peers." Susan Abele's assertion is quite accurate. Ada attended speeches and lectures given by women's right advocate Lucy Stone and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison

In Memories of Hawthorne, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851-1926)  "Last evening Miss Ada Shepard and I went to a neighboring villa to see some table-turning, which I have never seen, nor anything appertaining to spirits,"  Miss Shepard then took a pencil and paper for the spirits to write Photo from Sundry Thoughts

Aunt Ingersoll Julian Hawthorne wrote to regarding Mary Rondel.

Among the artist circles present during these 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1860), Robert Browning (1812-1889) and their son, Robert "Pen" Wiedeman Barrett Browning (1849-1912), Margret Fuller  
William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), his wife Emelyn Story (1820-1895). 

William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) son of Joseph Story (1779-1845) and Sarah Waldo Wetmore (1779-1855) married Emelyn Eldredge (1820-1895) daughter of Oliver Eldredge (1789–1857) and Hannah Smalley (1793–1867) His sculpture Cleopatra Photo from The New York Times 1916

 
Ada married Henry Clay Badger (1832-1894) son of Joseph Badger (1792-1852) and Eliza Mehitable Sterling (1799-184) .

Henry Clay Badger (1833-1894) graduated from Antioch College in 1857, and from 1859 to 1861, he was its Professor of Modern Languages. He was ordained on Nov. 13, 1862, and served congregations in Cambridge, Dorchester (Christ Church), Staten Island, and Ithaca, New York. He was curator of the Harvard Map collection from 1889 to 1892 Photo from Unitarian Universalist Association. Minister files, bMS 1446. Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School

The couple met a professor at Antioch Ada established a  School known as the Newbury Street School in Boston.
One account of Ada's death was published by Henry's brother, William Whittlesey Badger (1835-1898) who it an "over-sensitive constitution resulting in nervous prostration and loss of reason."

Henry Clay Badger Photo from Andover-Harvard Theological Library Special collections Unitarian Ministers bms 1446

The Newbury Street School. [A Circular.] 1874 The school year announcement to reopen after Ada passed

Lucretia Peabody Hale (1820-1900) daughter of Nathan Hale and Sarah Preston Everett

 William Wetmore Story--Cleopatra (1858) was described and admired in Nathaniel Hawthorne's romance, The Marble Faun, or The Romance of Monte Beni. The replica in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Bateman (78.3) see William Story and Cleopatra by Albert T Gardner 

• Giles Badger and his Descendants, First Four Generations by a Descendant John Cogswell Badger, Manchester, N.H. 
• A History of the Dorchester Pope Family. 1634-1888: With Sketches of Other Popes in England and America, and Notes Upon Several Intermarrying Families
• Ralph Shepard, Puritan published in Massachusetts 1893 Ralph Hamilton Shepard
• Ada Shepard and Her Pocket Sketchbooks, Florence 1858 Susan D, Abele  http://www.999info.net/Family/Susan/Ada.pdf
• Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Volume II Julian Hawthorne, 1884
• A Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, Volume 36
• Letter http://enews.antiochcollege.org/2013/05/songs-stacks/ada-shepard-mary-richardson 
• The Brownings Correspondence https://www.browningscorrespondence.com/ 
• The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne 2001 Margaret B. Moore 
• Hawthorne and his circles Julian Hawthorne 
• Mary Peabody and Horace Mann  http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2016/02/mary-peabody-mann.html 
• Julian Hawthorne's Contributions to the "Pasadena Star-News", 1923–1935 
• Tea, Strawberries, and Spirits: A History of Spiritualism and the Occult in Salem: The Rise of Witch City Maggi Smith-Dalton (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012)
• Hawthorne's mad scientists: pseudoscience and social science in nineteenth-century life and letters

Joseph Badger the first missionary of the Western Reserve published by Ohio Archeological and Historical publication Byron R Long

Jonathan PHELPS, father of Rachel Phelps Hawthorne from "The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 104"

Hinkley Family of Plymouth Colony Origin

1910 Article

History of Witchcraft Haunts Old Saw Mill

From Peabody-Lynnfield Weekly News, October 26, 1995, p. 1   by S.M. Smoller and I added some court documents on a case with John Proctor vs Giles Corey, Thomas Maul page, and some sources.

PEABODY – Was it witchcraft that stopped the steady rhythm of the waterwheel at Pope’s saw mill on Norris Brook in West Peabody? That’s what the miller told the court during the Salem witch hunt of 1692, when the area around Crystal Lake was owned by two families intimately involved in the witch hysteria – one, an accuser, and the other, the accused.
“The miller here in 1692 was afflicted by the prevailing witchcraft,” wrote John Wells in The Peabody Story. The miller testified that his mill wheel was “unaccountably stopped and would not go, and no reason could be assigned except the demonical malice and power of some witch.”
The haunted mill may have been owned by the family of one of the persons who claimed to have been afflicted by witchcraft, 42-year old Bathshua Pope. She married Joseph Pope, Jr. in 1649 and was living with her widowed mother-in-law, Gertrude Pope, within the immediate vicinity of the farm of victims and martyrs, Martha and Giles Corey.
Bathshua Pope, a member of the Folger family from Nantucket, was the aunt of American patriot Benjamin Franklin. She and Joseph had eight children. According to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, when Joseph died in1712, he named all his children in his will, except for the first two, “and notes that the eldest daughter was inferior mind, as probably had been her mother; at least, she was much afflicted in the witchcraft days.”
The localized witchcraft outbreak took on hysterical proportions by the fall of 1692, with more than 150 people examined and sent to prison. Nearly 50 people falsely confessed to being witches who had made a covenant with the devil to assist in assaulting people in the area. Nineteen persons who maintained their innocence, including the three accused by Bathshua Pope, were tried, found guilty and hanged.
“Mrs. Pope” accused Martha Corey, as well as Rebecca Nurse and John Proctor, of inflicting pain upon her body through witchcraft. At the trial of Martha Corey in March 2693, she joined with other afflicted women in calling Martha “a gospel witch”.
Marion Starkey, author of The Devil in Massachusetts,wrote, “Even while Martha proclaimed her innocence her devils had not been able to resist devising new tortures for the girls. What Martha did, now they all did. If she bit her lips, they yelled that she had bitten theirs, and came running up to the magistrates to show how they bled.”
The following month Rebecca Nurse was arrested and tried. During the examination, several afflicted persons reported seeing “a black man” whispering in Nurse’s ear. The judge stated, “What a sad thing it is that a church member here and now…should be thus accused and charged.” At which point, “Mrs. Pope fell into a grievous fit and cryed out a sad thing sure enough; And then many more fell into lamentable fits.”
Also in April, Elizabeth Proctor, the pregnant wife of John was accused. At her trial, John Proctor’s specter attacking Mrs. Pope. Chadwick Hansen in Witchcraft in Salem reported that “immediately Goodwife Pope fell into a fit.”
Earlier in this century, two postcards depciting the “haunted mill” were published. A color postcard prepared by D.F. Bresnahan of Peabody shows two wood-frame structures, 2 1/2 stories each, located on either side of a 10- to 12-foot-wide stream with a catwalk bridge connecting the two buildings.
One card also includes the following statement, “Site of Giles Coveys [sic] Mill who was pressed to death for refusing to plead in his trial for Witchcraft in1692.” Today at Crystal Lake, a conservation area, there are two stones which were placed in remembrance of Martha and Giles Corey during the witchcraft hysteria tercentenary in 1992.
City planner Judy Otto researched the history of Crystal Lake. She does not think the Pope sawmill was the haunted mill. She wrote, “At the head of Crystal Lake, at Goodale Street, on the west side, lived Captain Thomas Flint. The house was contained on the farm of Giles Corey, according to boundaries shown on the map. Giles himself lived further away on the other side of the property, on what is now Johnson Street, near Oak Grove cemetery. These two (Flint and Pope) were the only dwellings shown in the vicinity of Crystal Lake. Flint’s mill was built after the Pope mill by Thomas Flint on the opposite side of Lowell Street and closer to the pond. This mill, which existed until the 20^th century, is the mill Otto believes is the haunted mill pictured in the black-and-white post card that was printed by the Peabody Historical Society in 1905. It is titled “Haunted Mill near Phelps Station, Lowell Street, West Peabody, Mass.” Interestingly, Joseph Pope Jr.’s sister Gertrude married Eben Flint, a son of Thomas Flint. Phelps Station Peabody MA & Sidney Perley History of Salem MA Volume 3




In Salem History Volume III the Phelps saved John Proctor’s house from completely burning. Proctor brought charges against Giles Corey.



Court Documents from Records and Files of Quarterly Courts of Essex County Volume VII on the Fire John Proctor vs Giles Corey 




“A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience” which sets the Salem Witch Trials in the broader context of American history from the seventeenth century to the present, and will also describe the recent confirmation of the site of the executions in 1692.

• Emerson Baker A Storm of Witchcraft
• Nutfield Genealogy
• Peabody Essex Museum The Salem Witch Trials, 1692
• Sarah Phelps of Andover 
• The Quakers among us: 17th and 18th centuries
• Hannah (Baskel) Phelps Phelps Hill – A Quaker Woman and Her Offspring
• The Peabody story: events in Peabody’s history, 1626-1972