Located about 15 miles northwest of Salem Village, Andover began as a plantation. In 1641, John Woodbridge purchased the land from a Native American chief for "six pounds and a coat." He then brought 23 people to settle there, listed at left in order of arrival. John Russ was number 20; Andrew Allen number 21.

The first recorded town meeting was held in 1656 in the home of John Osgood, the settler listed second on Faulkner's list. John Russ's son married Osgood's daughter, Deborah. Still with me?

These English settlers of Massachusetts lived on the edge of wilderness, under constant threat of wild animals, crop failure, and attacks by the native peoples their colony displaced. They were outrageously litigious. Their trial transcripts provide numerous insights from which countless American families may derive their histories. These histories are not for the faint of heart, nor the constrained of time.

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A few early Andover homes still stand today, framing wisps of centuries-old stories that yearn for rediscovery. The Chandler-Bigsby house, pictured at right in 1991, is one of them. Three hundred years before this picture was taken, a 23-year-old woman's relatively prominent father and two brothers had just died of smallpox. As a result, she was forced into servitude. The Chandlers, in benevolence, employed her as their housekeeper. 

Elizabeth Sessions was still grieving the deaths of most of her family when she was assaulted. Unmarried and now pregnant, she faced humiliating public scrutiny. She was charged with fornication, whipped 10 lashes, and fined. In her bastardy case, she did not want to discredit her employers, but was compelled to name the father. Not so he might also be whipped for sexual assault, but so that the court could absolve itself of the child's financial support.

She named Joseph Chandler of the home. Joseph's parents defended him according to the legal norms that defined the Puritan colony: they implicated a neighbor. That neighbor happened to be John Russ's grandson, John Russ III.

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It was a long and embarrassing trial, but John III was exonerated. In those days, all litigants, whether guilty or innocent, shared the high court costs, but the Russes were oddly spared. The scandal would pale in comparison to the events brewing in the neighboring colony of Salem, however. The following year, the first Andover resident was accused of witchcraft.

Her name was Martha Carrier. She was the daughter of two of the town's original founders, Andrew and Faith Allen. The Allens are listed just below John Russ on the original settler list, as shown at left. The transcript of her trial is stunning, as are all the others, as you can read by clicking on The Carrier Execution on this page. 

That's right. Martha Allen Carrier was the first Andover settler to be hanged for witchcraft. Two years later, Elizabeth Sessions married Martha's son, Richard.

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John Russ I, the original immigrant from England, passed away on March 4, 1692 at about eighty years old. The Salem Witch Trials began just days before.

The Russ name would soon disappear from the constant litigations, one genealogist stating that they migrated south with their congregation. Did Martha's Allen's cousins migrate with the Russes and Singletary's, who were also settlers in the colony? Context clues indicate that their bandwagon settled in Charleston, South Carolina. The families, intermarried, left breadcrumbs together as they slowly migrated inland along the Pee Dee River, their children and grandchildren on to Bladen County.

Somewhere along that trajectory, Huldah Russ was born.

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Next tab: Le Moule 

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