At Worship- Rev Thomas Clark (1652-1704)

So far I haven’t spent too much time on my far-back New England ancestors, excepting my mother’s direct line, because there are just so many of them. But this week I’m going to write about Rev Thomas Clark and his role in the Salem Witch trials. Thomas Clark was the son of a well-known elder in the Cambridge Puritian congregation, Jonas Clark. Thomas Graduated from Harvard in 1670 and received a call to pastor the church in Chelmsford. He was that church’s second pastor and was to remain there until his death over thirty years later.

Rev Thomas Clark's grave stone

               In 1692 the hysteria of the Salem witch trials was sweeping through Massachusetts. Thomas faced accusations of witch-craft in his own congregation. An account runs as follows “There was at Chelmsford an afflicted person that in her fits cried out against a woman a neighbor, which Mr. Clark the minister of the gospel there could not believe to be guilty of such a crime. And it happened while that woman milked her cow, the cow struck her with on horn upon the forehead and fetched blood. And while she was bleeding, a specter of her likeness appeared to the party afflicted who pointing at the spectre, one struck at the place, and the afflicted said, You have made her forehead bleed; Here-upon some went to that woman and asked her, How her forehead became bloody? And she answered, By a blow of the cow’s horn, as above said; whereby he was satisfied that it was a design of Satan to render an innocent person suspected.” Thomas Clarke’s refusal to believe the accusations of witch-craft probably kept the madness of the witch trials out of Chelmsford.

Elizabeth Clark Hancock

               Thomas died in 1704 of a sudden fever and was buried in the Chelmsford burial ground his tombstone reads in Latin: “Here to the dust are committed the remains of the Rev. Master Thomas Clark the distinguished pastor of the flock of Christ in Chelmsford, who in the faith, and in hope of eternal resurrection, breathed forth his soul into the bosom of Jesus, the 7th of Dec. the year of our Lord 1704 in the 52 q d year of his age.” Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth (my ancestor) married Rev John Hanncock and she would be the grandmother of the Patriot and Massachusetts governor, John Hanncock III.