52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Halloween Edition- Mercy Lena Brown

   

Note: I published this post, 11 Oct 2022, not realizing that today is the 175th birthday of Mary Eliza (Arnold) Brown, the mother of Mercy Lena Brown.

  Welcome to another installment of the 52 in 52- Halloween edition! In this post I had to borrow another spooky ancestor, and I will have do the same for the next two installments (my own ancestors were mostly nice, solid, immigrant farmers whose lives were nice, solid, and not particularly spooky!). I figure the person in this week's post was someone's relative, so she counts! In today's tale, we're going to meet Mercy Brown of Rhode Island, an unassuming and, by all accounts, quiet girl, whose death fed into superstition so deep that it gripped parts of New England in fear. So buckle up, and let's go!

(As I was writing this post, I discovered that Lena Brown is a distant relative of one of my clients, through her mother's family! Another ancestor of his will be next week's post! So she is in a client's tree!)

    Mercy Lena Brown, called Lena by her family, was born 2 Aug 1872 in Exeter, Washington County, Rhode Island. Her parents were George Thomas Brown and his wife Mary Eliza Arnold. 

                                                    

Lena Brown, just before her death

    The Arnold family were one of the most important political and military families in Rhode Island, including Governor Benedict Arnold I of Rhode Island, and his great-grandson and namesake, General Benedict Arnold, the traitor of the American Revolution. The first immigrants on the Arnold family line to come to Colonial America were William Arnold and his wife Christian (Peake) Arnold, and their children, their 19 year-old son Benedict Arnold I among them. They initially landed in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635, but William Arnold and his family quickly joined Roger Williams in establishing the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, as it was initially called. Benedict Arnold I rose to become the first governor of the colony. He seems to have been an acutely intelligent man; he was one of two white people in the colony to learn the local Native languages, Naragansett and Wampanoag, the other person being Roger Williams, and as such he was frequently asked to serve as a translator for them. Benedict married Damaris Westcott on the 17th of December 1640 in Rhode Island. They had nine children together.

    Benedict and Damaris's second son Caleb, born in 1644, and his wife Abigail (Wilbur) Arnold became the progenitors of a large family, ten children in all, nine who survived infancy. Their descendants would include Commodores Oliver Hazard Perry and his brother Matthew Perry, and Illinois Senator Stephen Arnold Douglas, the presidential candidate that lost to Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. Douglas was in fact an Arnold on both his mother's and father's side, as both of his grandmothers were Arnolds: Martha Arnold Douglass and Sarah Arnold Fiske. 

Stephen Arnold Douglas

    Lena's mother, Mary Eliza, also descended from Caleb and Abigail Arnold, through their son Samuel Arnold. Lena's 2nd great-grandfather, Josiah Lyndon Arnold was a well-educated man, having graduated from Yale University in 1778, and worked as a tutor at Brown University, a position only second to a professor at the time. 

The fact that Mary Eliza's family was so well-educated and well-connected makes what happened later all the more confusing. This was not a backward, ignorant family. Although the Brown family did not have the pedigree that the Arnold family did (although there is a slight chance that George T. may have also been related to the Arnolds), they were certainly respectable farmers and yeomen of the town. 

    We're not sure when George and Mary Eliza married, but their first child Mary Olive Brown was born in 1864, so it must have been some time around then. Mary Olive was quickly followed by Edwin A. in 1867, Anna Laura in 1870, Mercy Lena, in 1872, Harriet May in 1875, Jennie A. in 1877, and Myra Frances in 1881. The family were farmers, living in Exeter, Rhode Island. Exeter was a small, widely spread, farming community, with rocky soil, and most farms were only subsistence level, providing a scarce living for their inhabitants. The farms of Exeter bled young people after the Civil War; many of the young men and their families saw no appeal or sense in scraping a poor living out of the exhausted and rocky soil, and accordingly moved west, toward better farmland and more opportunities. According to the 1870 Census, the Brown family was only mildly successful. Unfortunately, the agricultural schedules from Rhode Island have not been added to the Ancestry or FamilySearch databases, so we don't know exactly how they were doing, but compared to their neighbors, the impression is not well.

    The troubles of the family truly began in 1883, when Mary Eliza died of "consumption," otherwise known as tuberculosis. She was quickly followed the next year by her eldest daughter, Mary Olive, from the same disease. There was a period of respite, but in 1891, Lena and Edwin also contracted the dread disease, and Mercy Lena Brown died on the 17th of January 1892, aged 19. Superstitious tongues began to wag when Mercy died, and the cause was quickly proclaimed to be a "vampire," stealing the life energies of the Brown family.

    Although it seems completely absurd to us, the "Great New England Vampire Panic" was a real thing, and the Browns were not the only family to fall prey to superstition of their neighbors. People believed that consumption was the end result of someone trying to sap the life energy of family members and neighbors. Anyone could be a vampire. When the consumption victim died, they continued to try and steal the life force of family and friends from beyond the grave, causing others to fall victim to the disease. This belief is first recorded in Vermont in 1793, when Isaac Burton had his first wife, Rachel, exhumed in an effort to save his second wife, Hulda, from dying of the disease; needless to say, it did not work. However, the superstition persisted throughout the years in New England. Even Henry David Thoreau wrote about the exhumation of a Vermont man, probably Fredrick Ransom in 1817, and his heart, liver and lungs being burned in a blacksmith's forge in an attempt to halt the disease.

    George Brown fell victim to the superstition when neighbors persuaded him to dig up the graves of Mary Eliza and Mary Olive in order to determine who in the family was the "vampire" in an effort to save Edwin. It is important to note, George did not believe in the superstition, and only caved to the demands of the neighbors after they had visited him with strong entreaties; after all, he had to live in the community afterwards, so maybe it was self-preservation on his part. So on the 10th of March 1892, a local doctor and a newspaper reporter had George's wife and oldest daughter exhumed and their coffins opened. Seeing that the two were exhibiting the normal amounts of decomposition (they were skeletons by this point), the suspicions quickly turned to the recently deceased Lena. Indeed, when Lena's coffin was opened, she was not decomposing, and blood was still present in her heart, and thus they "had" the "vampire" afflicting Edwin.

    In reality, when Lena died in January, the ground had been too frozen to dig a grave for her, so the body was stored in an above ground stone crypt, where, due to the freezing temperatures, it had frozen solid, delaying the decomposition of the body. Lena had spent almost two months above ground before she could be properly buried in the still icy ground. This logic seems to have escaped the community, so it was quickly proclaimed that she was the cause of Edwin's illness. The appalling after events proved how far sunk the community was in the delusion; Lena's heart and liver were removed, burned, and the ashes were mixed with a "tonic" which Edwin then drank. The mangled corpse was returned to the grave.

Contemporary newspaper report

    

Edwin, who had previously sought treatment in Colorado Springs for his disease, died a mere two months later.     

    Lena's grave still remains in the cemetery at Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, flanked by the graves of her brother Edwin and her father George. Her headstone is currently strapped down by iron bands after it was stolen several times. Plastic vampire teeth and other Halloween regalia litter the grave at Halloween, on which no grass is growing. Local superstition states that the lack of grass is because of her vampire status, but it's far more likely that it is because of visitors trampling what little grass can grow. In the end, Lena and her family were victimized twice; once by the superstitious nature of the vampire panics that typically followed along with tuberculosis epidemics in New England, and again when they were exhumed. A Smithsonian Magazine article about the New England Vampire Panics notes, "If superstition likely fanned the vampire panics, perhaps the most powerful forces at play were communal and social. By 1893, there were just 17 people per square mile in Exeter. A fifth of the farms were fully abandoned, the fields turning slowly back into forest." Now, Exeter is a prosperous bedroom community for Providence, Rhode Island, and the fields and forests have given way to houses and businesses, but the legend of "the last American Vampire" lingers on there.