Watch Salem Witch Trials Daily
Show Notes
Why was Salem Village minister Samuel Parris embroiled in controversy throughout his time there? In today’s episode of Salem Witch Trials Daily, we look into the reasons many people were angry at their pastor. We give his biography leading up to his time in Salem and discuss his tenure up to the start of the witch hunt. Why did he struggle to get villagers to join his church? Why did the villagers decide not to pay him?
Links
- The Thing About Salem
- The Thing About Witch Hunts
- People Accused of Witchcraft in 1692
- Salem Village Record Book
- Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub
- Week 1 Course Work
Select Salem Witch Trials Books:
- Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
- Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
- Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
- Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Transcript
January 6, 2026 - Salem Village People
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] What if your minister demanded not just a salary but ownership of church property and got it through a vote that might have been rigged? That's how Samuel Parris began his ministry in Salem Village in 1689, claiming the parsonage and two acres in what may have been in illegal meeting. That land grab would become a lasting bone of contention, and the resentment it created never went away.
Sarah Jack: For more than three years, between March 30th, 1690 and July 23rd, 1693, not a single man in Salem Village joined Samuel Parris' Church, not one. In a Puritan community where church membership was supposed to be at central to life, the men of the village were sending their minister a crystal clear message: we don't want you here.
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Parris [00:01:00] was the minister of the Salem Village Church from 1689 to 1696. His tenure in the village was marked by controversy, which we'll highlight in today's episode of Salem Witch Trials Daily. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. First of all, who was Samuel Parris? Well, he was born in London in 1653. His father, Thomas, moved the family to Barbados in the late 1650s. Thomas Parris was a merchant and owned a sugar plantation.
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Parris's uncle, Thomas Oxenbridge, left Barbados in 1670 to minister to Boston's first church. Samuel entered Harvard at about the same time at age 17.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1673 though, Samuel's father died, and Samuel was forced to abandon his schooling. As great consolation to him, he inherited an estate worth about 7,000 [00:02:00] pounds, which would've made him very rich in Massachusetts, but he chose to go back to Barbados and take over his father's holdings.
Sarah Jack: Samuel did not end up having his father's level of success in Barbados. He moved back to Boston in 1680 or 1681 after selling the Barbados properties. In 1682, he had to take out a loan to set up a shop as a merchant and stock up on goods to sell. His warehouse happened to be next to that of William Phips, who would be the governor in 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: As in Barbados, Parris proved to be unsuccessful as a merchant in Boston, and soon considered a career in the ministry. In 1685, he preached in Stow, a frontier town in central Massachusetts.
Sarah Jack: Then on November 15th, 1688, he entered discussions to minister to Salem [00:03:00] Village. He preached in Salem Village on November 25th, after which the village voted to pursue him as their next minister. There were months of negotiations after that.
Josh Hutchinson: The village made its first offer on December 10th, 1688. The offer was 60 pounds a year plus lodging in the parsonage. However, Parris did not respond to this offer until the villagers invited him to come personally to Salem to discuss it.
Sarah Jack: At that meeting, Parris tentatively agreed to the salary of 60 pounds per year but submitted an additional list of conditions: A. A third of the pay in cold, hard cash, the rest in goods to be assessed at the current prices,so the inflation plaguing the colony would not reduce the amount of goods he received. B. Control of the nature of provisions he was paid. C. Possibility of a raise if the village prospered, reduction if [00:04:00] it struggled. And D. Free firewood. The villagers did not agree to the free firewood, instead increasing Parris' salary by six pounds per year so that he could buy his own wood, which they would sell to him at four shillings a cord.
Josh Hutchinson: Parris began preaching in the village in July 1689. His salary started on the first of that month. On October 10th that year, at a meeting he had requested, possibly led by Putnams, some villagers voted to overturn a 1682 vote that had banned giving the parsonage to the minister. They then voted to give the parsonage and two acres of land to Parris. This would be the lasting bone of contention in the village.
Josh Hutchinson: The vote was possibly illegal, as the fact that there was only one objection to the property transfer indicates that perhaps not all villagers were [00:05:00] informed of the meeting.
Sarah Jack: Rev. Parris was ordained on November 16th, 1689. On the same occasion, the first members of the Salem Village Church signed the covenant. There were 17 men and 10 women who joined, including Parris and his wife. 12 of the new members were Putnams. Four were their allies, the Wilkinses.
Josh Hutchinson: Parris was unpopular with many in the village from the start. As of December 17th, a month after he was ordained, 38 of the village's families still had not paid their portions of the minister's salary, and Constable Edward Bishop was ordered to collect the late taxes. He was unsuccessful.
Sarah Jack: Parris made it difficult to join the Salem Village Church, whereas the Salem Town Church had eased membership requirements. Parris rejected the Halfway Covenant, which churches in neighboring towns had adopted to make it possible for the [00:06:00] grandchildren of members to be baptized, even if their parents were not full church members.
Josh Hutchinson: So with these stringent requirements and his unpopularity, in Parris's second year as minister, only seven villagers joined his church, and by 1692, 2 1/2 years after he started preaching in the village, there were still only 61 members, total, 35 of them women, because no man had joined the church in two years.
Sarah Jack: Every year, the village committee struggled to wrest Parris' pay from the villagers, and in April 1691, the committee found that only about 70% of Parris's salary had been collected for the year. The residents at the April 1691 village meeting decided to ask the Massachusetts General Court to force the withholders to pay Parris.
Josh Hutchinson: Then on October 16th, 1691, a new [00:07:00] village committee was elected, made up of Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Daniel Andrew, Joseph Putnam, and Francis Nurse, five men who opposed Parris. At the same time, the villagers at the meeting voted not to gather taxes to pay Parris.
Josh Hutchinson: By November 1st, Parris was nearly out of firewood. 17 men met with him at the parsonage and created a three man delegation to beseech the village committee for help. After an unsuccessful plea at the November 10th village meeting, the men of the church voted to sue the village committee to force them to collect Parris's pay. Then the Village Committee announced a village meeting for December 1st, at which it planned to air its grievances against Parris. His contract was not legal, according to the village committee, he should not have been given the parsonage, and he should perhaps be paid voluntarily and not by taxes.[00:08:00]
Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, the Village record book contains no entries from October 17th until January 8th, so it's not clear the December 1st meeting took place. Nevertheless, a contentious meeting was held around this time, and Parris was compelled to answer about his original contract.
Josh Hutchinson: Throughout Parris's tenure, the number of church members remained low for a community of about 500 to 550 people. According to Professor Emerson Baker, some 400 villagers were neither baptized nor members of the church.
Sarah Jack: Controversy would continue to swirl around Samuel Parris until he resigned from the Salem Village Church at the end of June, 1696. But first, a lot transpires.
Josh Hutchinson: A lot that we'll be covering in the coming days, weeks, months. So stay tuned, and you learn all about this dramatic saga of Samuel Parris in Salem [00:09:00] Village.
