The Curse of Clawson (A Tale of Early Providence)

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

A tale from my family background that savors of the Hawthornesque.

It concerns my 8th great grandfather Benjamin Harrington, from whom my mother was directly descended, a somewhat wayward individual, who’s been nicknamed the Rogue of Rhode Island by some wag on the web. Harrington was not a man of peace. He was arrested more than once for beating his wife and for getting into donnybrooks with his father-in-law, who lived next door. He was picked up on one occasion for firing his gun at one of the local Narragansetts. The Founder of the Colony Roger Williams (also an ancestor), believed in treating the Natives humanely, and had such written into law. This would be a better nation if most of its citizen had followed in Roger Williams buckled bootsteps. Instead, more of them have tended be like Harrington.

In 1661, Harrington tricked a local native, a man named Waumanio into fatally attacking one of Williams’ servants, John Clawson, behind a thicket of barberry bushes. According to the story, Waumanio did a neat job on Clawson’s head with a broad ax, splitting his chin in twain. Clawson’s last words as he lay dying were a curse upon Harrington, “That he and his posterity be forever marked with split chin and be haunted with [barberry] bushes.”

So went the mild and perplexing Curse of Clawson. And yet it is said that as much as a century later, Benjamin Harrington’s descendants were still being born with this same cleft or furrowed chin as their peculiar mark of Cain, this Curse of Clawson. And many a quarrel was excited at huskings and frolics by the mere mention of a…Barberry Bush.

As for earthly justice, Waumanio confessed to the killing of Clawson and was hanged. Harrington, who had been charged as an accessory for instigating the whole thing, was cleared by the jury and the court. This, by the way, was Providence’s first murder case, so early that there wasn’t yet a courthouse, the trial was held at Roger Mowry’s Tavern, which was still standing in the year 1900.

In addition to being the state’s first murder trial, it was also the State’s first rigged trial, apparently, where the judge’s drinking buddy gets off scot free, and the outsider gets pilloried. That would come to be a familiar pattern unfortunately over the next few centuries.