The Red Tree

Though the first deed issued by the West Quanaug Company, to John Potter of Warwick, dates from 1714, family tradition has it that Mr. Potter, in fact, took up residence in a small cave along the east bank of the Moosup River as early as 1704, where he then lived until the construction of a house. Though this story may be purely anecdotal, appealing to a romantic ideal of the pioneering spirit, a much later entry in John Potter’s journal (Special Collections, Providence Athenaeum), dated May 15, 1715, makes reference to “the red indyen dread of an olde trees’d haunted by the divel Hobbamock, an enimy to all good, who appeareth there by night.” Potter then relates a story of the Narragansett’s offerings of freshly killed game left at the base of the tree, as Hobbamock was “s’d by the heathens to be appeas’d above al else by the shadding of blood.” In this entry, indulging his imagination, Potter even supposes that occasional human sacrifices may have been made to “the daemon, so great ware theire fear of this malevolent thinge.”

In Part 1 ofThe Origin and Development of Religious Belief(1878), the prolific English scholar and folklorist Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould writes, “New Englanders supposed Hobbamock to be the arch-fiend of the Indians, because the myths told of him represented him as malevolent; but, in fact, he was their Supreme Oki, or God.” So, regardless of Hobbamock’s proper place in the pantheon of the Narragansett people (a redundancy, as “Narragansett” translates, literally, as “The People”), it is consistent with the contemporaneous impression of Native American mythology that John Potter would have regarded (and probably distorted) this being to conform to the popular impression of the time, that Hobbamock was an Indian devil. This same being was also known as Cheepie (chippe, meaning alone, separate, secluded, or apart).

It is also worth mentioning here that “Hobbamock” was a title bestowed upon high-ranking tribal members, such as the case of a Pokanoket sachem called Hobbamock who was sent, in the spring of 1621, to Plymouth Colony by Massasoit, chief of all the Wam panoag. Hobbamock and his family lived alongside the colonists until he died in 1641.

As we shall see, John Potter’s life would, eventually, become inextricably and fatally linked with the Red Tree, which he first set eyes on, it appears, from a journal entry dated only as August 1716, little more than a year after his first mention of the Hobbamock story. At this time, he notes the presence of an enormous stone believed to have been placed at the base of the accursed oak by the Narragansett and used as an altar. He describes the rectilinear slab as marked by a shallow groove carved into its upper surface, forming a rough circle within which the offerings were placed. This groove, Potter writes, led to a “spout” or opening on the southern edge of the altar stone (which he believed served to drain blood from sacrifices that had collected in the groove). However, though mentioning that the stone was covered with lichen, he fails to make any mention of bloodstains, which one assumes would have been inevitable, unless the Narragansett regularly scrubbed the stone (or Hobbamock’s nocturnal feedings were sufficient to have wiped it clean).

Such “altar” stones are known from other sites in New England, including one from the Mystery Hill megalith site (“America’s Stonehenge”) near Salem, New Hampshire, and another displayed at the Hadley Farm Museum in western Massachusetts. The latter, which is almost identical to that located at the base of the tree, has been identified as a cider press. The Mystery Hill “altar” is suspected of having been carved in either the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Century by local farmers for use in the manufacture of lye soap. Other notable examples of stones quite closely matching that on the Blanchard property may be seen today at Groton, CT, and Leominster and Westport, MA. In each case, the stones are believed by archaeologists to be of relatively recent, non-Native American origin, and to have been used for production of lye, pine tar, or potash, and even the pressing of grapes. Nevertheless, these artifacts have long fired the popular imagination, and appear in such canonical works of pulp fiction as Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” (1974).

In this same entry (see Appendix B for the relevant excerpts from John Potter’s diary in full [A shame Harvey didn’t live long enough to actually write the appendices!—S.C.]) the tree described, along with the “altar stone” perfectly match the tree now identified by locals as “the Red Tree,” and I have little doubt that the two are one and the same. He states that “it has an evil feel about it” and that he has begun to consider cutting it down and having the stone broken up. Obviously, this never happened, and as we shall soon see, John Potter would live to regret not following through with his plan to destroy the tree. Despite his apparent loathing of the tree and his belief that the Narragansetts gathered at the spot to summon evil spirits, Potter built his home, in 1707, well within sight of the oak. Indeed, at the time, one can assume that, the land having been recently cleared by Potter for agriculture, the tree would have been more visible from the house than it is now. Records in the Tyler Free Library, the Foster Preservation Society, and the Providence Athenaeum indicate that Potter’s original house burned in 1710, and that Potter rebuilt directly on the foundation stones he’d lain three years earlier. So, given this chance to relocate his house farther from the oak, he once again acted in a way that, at first glance, seems contrary to his notions and misgivings about the tree. However, I believe that, by studying Potter’s diary, we can arrive at satisfactory explanations for these actions, and that in the beginning they amounted to little more than stubbornness and an unwillingness on his part to be perceived as having been in any way intimidated by native superstitions.