The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey

Postscript

POSTSCRIPT Charles Torrey’s wife, Mary, continued to live in West Medway, Massachusetts , after her husband’s death. Her house, just west of her parents’ house on Main Street, was built for her in  by the Massachusetts Abolitionist Society, and it still stands. She lived through the Civil War, in which her son fought, and saw the liberation of slaves and fulfillment of her husband’s dream. She died on November , , age fifty-two. Charles Henry Torrey, their son, was discharged from the Union forces on September , , and thereafter lived and worked in Manhattan. In , on his forty-fifth birthday, he married Emma Deebach. Five years later, he married Mary Ardella Persinger. No record has been found of any children. He died in Manhattan on January , , age fifty-nine. Mary Emmons Torrey, their daughter, married Albert Bryant in  at age twenty-five. Bryant was an  graduate of Amherst College and had attended Princeton and Andover Theological seminaries . Like her mother, Mary married her husband within one week of his ordination. Bryant served as a missionary in Turkey for three years, held pastorates in several Massachusetts towns and in Lead City, South Dakota, and died in Scituate, Massachusetts, in . Mary died on April , , age fifty-seven. Mary and Albert Bryant had three sons and a daughter, who were Charles Torrey’s grandchildren. Seelye Bryant, the eldest son, graduated from Amherst College and Princeton Theological Seminary, then held pastorates in several Massachusetts towns. He had one child by his first wife and two by his second. In  he attended the th anniversary celebration of the Congregational Church in West Medway and discussed the life of his grandfather. He died in . Emmons Bryant, the second son, graduated from Amherst College, 195 196 | the martyrdom of abolitionist charles torrey taught at private schools in New York and Newark, then worked for various businesses in New York State. He married, had two children, and died in . The daughter, Ethel Charlotte Bryant, was born in , but no information was found on her. The youngest son, Arthur Alexis Bryant, graduated from Harvard and later received a PhD in classics. He taught Latin in private schools in New York, Boston, and Baltimore and was an active member of the Socialist Party. He married twice but apparently had no children. No information was found on his date of death. If Charles Torrey returned today, he would find Scituate still surrounded by “wide marshes, covered with short salt grass” and its southern boundary defined by “the winding banks of a little river, famed for its excellent fisheries.” The house in which he was born stands but is now adjacent to the train station, from which town residents commute to Boston. However, his grandparents’ “dear old mansion” in Norwell, where Torrey went to live after his parents’ deaths, has long since been replaced by a modern house, and many of the childhood fields in which Torrey played have reverted to woodlands . If Torrey traveled to Annapolis, Baltimore, or Washington, he would recognize very little. The Annapolis and Baltimore jails and Maryland penitentiary have been replaced, as have the boarding houses in which he lived and the slave pens he knew so well. In Baltimore , Greenmount Cemetery, behind which Torrey collected slaves for trips north, is larger but otherwise unchanged. In Washington, Torrey would of course recognize the Capitol, where he worked as a congressional reporter. Four blocks behind the Capitol, at the corner of Fourth and D Streets SE, he would find the Ebenezer United Methodist Church, the contemporary version of the black church he regularly attended and where he issued many tickets for passage on the Underground Railroad. The original building was replaced in  and again in , but the church’s mission has not changed, and the church has been designated a historical landmark. Traveling north from Baltimore on the route he used most commonly , Torrey would initially be perplexed by the McDonalds and postscript | 197 Mattress Discounters on the Bel Air Road, which is now U.S. Route , but he would immediately recognize the terrain when he got to the Gunpowder River. Farther north, he would have to turn off the present road at Kalima to find the old road down the steep and wooded gorge to Deer Creek. Except for a modern bridge, the crossing appears unchanged from the June morning in  when Robert Rigdon stood on the old bridge watching Torrey watering his horses and...