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chapter 2  The Unlikely Prosecutions of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn The story of John Farrell begins in the hardscrabble farming town of Leverett , located about 105 miles west of Boston in the eastern hills of Hampshire County, the countryside that had so recently supplied foot soldiers for Daniel Shays’s army of insurgents. First settled around 1750 and incorporated in 1774, the town of Leverett erected a meetinghouse by 1776. But the parish, which could never provide a handsome livelihood, did not secure a regular pastor for almost a decade, until 1784, when the Reverend Henry Williams settled there. Williams was ordained, but he was not a college graduate. Over the course of his twenty-seven-year career he published just a single evangelical sermon, one he preached in neighboring Shutesbury in 1809, two years before his death. Among Leverett’s hallmarks of advancing cultivation , the town set a bounty on wolves’ heads in 1783, constructed a pound to hold domestic animals in 1788, and—seven years before John Farrell’s arrival—erected stocks to display wrongdoers in 1789.1 Evidence on the particular character and history of the Leverett community is scarce. During the town’s early decades the clerks’ records—there were five clerks between 1774 when the town was set off from the southern part of Sunderland and 1796—display only the barest literacy skills. They illustrate the characteristic sketchiness of record keeping in recently settled towns where farming, grazing, and harvesting timber occupied most families ; and where merchants, traders, and lawyers were scarce. Through the 1780s and 1790s Leverett was among the minority of towns that possessed no resident justice of the peace: indeed there is no evidence that anyone possessing a college degree resided in the town during its first two generations. 42 Chapter 2 Leverett’s localism and the frugality of its householders are reflected by the fact that, though the town was entitled to send a delegate to the Massachusetts General Court annually, only once during the entire decade from 1787 to 1797 did Leverett elect a representative, militia captain Stephen Ashley. That was in 1787 during the tumultuous aftermath of the Shays uprising, when the number of towns choosing to send delegates jumped suddenly by forty percent from the preceding year. And early in 1788, when Massachusetts held a convention to ratify or reject the proposed U.S. Constitution , Leverett sent John Hubbard to represent his neighbors. Suspicious of central authority, Hubbard, together with sixty-three percent of Hampshire County delegates, voted against ratification of the Constitution. Hubbard was a backbencher, part of the majority who neither spoke on the floor of the Convention nor served on any of its committees. Like most delegates who came from small farming communities, he was more comfortable with the provincial insularity of Leverett and its neighboring towns than the worldly cosmopolitanism of Boston and the learned gentlemen whose rhetoric dominated the convention.2 When Ashley and Hubbard returned to Leverett they resumed their local stations in a town consisting of roughly twenty-six square miles of uneven land, watered by several streams and where, as of 1790, there were eighty-six houses—mostly scattered farmsteads—in which dwelled 155 white males over the age of sixteen years, and 524 people overall. Only a single household was headed by a man of color, Adam Freeman, whose wife was white. By the time John Farrell was accused six years later, the community had grown to perhaps 640 people living in one hundred or so families, with a village center beginning to form in the southern quarter of the town, by road at least ten miles east of the Connecticut River and separate from the principal east-west and north-south travel routes. At that time Farrell, an eighty-five-year-old Irish-born physician, was a newcomer to Leverett. According to the advertisement Farrell placed in the Greenfield Gazette, he had opened for business close to the emerging village center in the house of Dr. Silas Ball on May 2, 1796. According to Farrell, he ‘‘had great success in curing many of the long standing’’ cancers.3 Whether Farrell’s medical claims were accurate or inflated, some of his former patients testified to his success. Cancer doctors during this period practiced in the hazy borderland between trained allopathic physicians and self-taught quacks. Using surgery to cut out cancerous growths and also applying chemical salves and plasters, physicians like Farrell could...

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